1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2062
2063
2064
2065
2066
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 31afcd3 | when people are expecting to see nothing that is usually what they see. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 68706a3 | I shall start at the beginning. Though of course, the beginning is never where you think it is. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| c7e43bf | There are stories that may be told aloud, and stories that must be told in whispers, and there are stories that are never told at all. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 51ac194 | Catholics get on well with tyranny. It's in the culture. | humor religion tyranny | Richard K. Morgan | |
| 74a70fc | Face the facts. Then act on them. It's the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it's harder than you'd think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don't pray, don't wish, don't buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don't give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of . . . whatever. Face the facts. Then act. QUELLCRIST | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 093edcd | The one who has not seen Paris in the morning does not know how beautiful it is. | Irving Stone | ||
| e22e3c2 | There are neither good nor evil, only the existence and action. | Irving Stone | ||
| 3f6f803 | When I compare myself to the other fellows there is something stiff and awkward about me; I look as if I had been in prison for ten years. | Irving Stone | ||
| d48b457 | Being mad is even pleasant. But only a madman understands that. | Irving Stone | ||
| c471035 | Strange that only a little problem of your own will take your mind far from a tragedy belonging to others. | preoccupation selfishness | Richard Llewellyn | |
| bb89bb6 | How can there be fury felt for things that are gone to dust. | Richard Llewellyn | ||
| 5fec9f3 | Maybe, generations ago, young people rebelled out of some clear motive, but now, we know we're rebelling. Between teen movies and sex-ed textbooks we're so ready for our rebellious phase we can't help but feel it's safe, contained. It will turn out all right, despite the risk, snug in the shell of rebellion narrative. Rebellion narrative, does that make sense? It was appropriate to do, so we did it. | teenagers | Daniel Handler | |
| 296fdf2 | Exceptional men do not hold their experiences to be out of the ordinary or of interest to anyone else. Unlike the trodden fungus-men, they are not so ignorantly and presumptuously self-absorbed. They are nobody and they know it. They shun notice. They are exceedingly rare. | humility men | Nick Tosches | |
| 391592a | The older you get, the more you live with ghosts. | Nick Tosches | ||
| e344b71 | Man's inability to understand and appreciate the thought and viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 06e8cc2 | true story of quantum mechanics, a truth far stranger than any fiction. | John Gribbin | ||
| f616e52 | Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain? | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 666ca8c | The necropolis has never seemed a city of death to me; I know its purple roses (which other people think so hideous) shelter hundreds of small animals and birds. The executions I have seen performed and have performed myself so often are no more than a trade, a butchery of human beings who are for the most part less innocent and less valuable than cattle. When I think of my own death, or the death of someone who has been kind to me, or even.. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 5568be5 | How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought... | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| 61ac700 | We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting. | neon screen-savers street-lighting | Edward St. Aubyn | |
| 85f93eb | Now she had taken off her goodness and left it behind her like a heap of rain-sodden clothes, and she only felt joy. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| ecaf729 | How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again - not important on platforms, not important as an asset in an organisation, but privately important, just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice. It didn't seem much to ask in a world so crowded with people, just to have one of them, only one out of all the millions to oneself. Somebody who needed one, who thought of one, who was eager to come to one .. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| 2b7f2f5 | She would go off in the morning with the punt full of books, and spend long glorious days away in the forest lying on the green springy carpet of whortleberries, reading. She would most diligently work at furnishing her empty mind. She would sternly endeavour to train it not to jump. | literature mind reading words | Elizabeth von Arnim | |
| 13cdfed | Love is not a thing you can pick up and throw into the gutter and pick up again as the fancy takes you. I am a person, very unfortunately for you, with a quite peculiar dread of thrusting myself or my affections on any one, of in any way outstaying my welcome. The man I would love would be the man I could trust to love me for ever. I do not trust you. I did outstay my welcome once. I did get thrown into the gutter, and came near drowning in.. | love trust | Elizabeth von Arnim | |
| d0de308 | You've got a bold tongue, little man. One day, someone is like to cut it out and make you eat it. | George R.R. Martin | ||
| 76f4e32 | You must understand that knowledge is not all your heritage. I includes also courage and belief, like hers that we commemorate herein...and romance. Always, always romance. | Alan Moore | ||
| 82c4534 | It was Kovacs who said "Mother" then, muffled under latex. It was Kovacs who closed his eyes. It was Rorschach who opened them again." | Alan Moore | ||
| caeb0d2 | Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate. | murder whitechapel | Alan Moore | |
| fa77841 | Rorschach: Used to come here often, back when we were partners. Dreiberg: Oh. Uh, yeah... yeah, those were great times, Rorschach. Great times. Whatever happened to them? Rorschach: [exiting] You quit. | Alan Moore | ||
| 3cee5e7 | As I see it, a successful story of any kind should be almost like hypnosis: You fascinate the reader with your first sentence, draw them in further with your second sentence and have them in a mild trance by the third. Then, being careful not to wake them, you carry them away up the back alley of your narrative and when they are hopelessly lost within the story, having surrendered themselves to it, you do them terrible violence with a softb.. | Alan Moore | ||
| 15f76a6 | Tis Dante I prefer. In his Inferno he suggests the one true path from Hell lies at its very heart... ...and that in order to escape, we must instead go further IN. | Alan Moore | ||
| e00ce13 | I am watching the stars, admiring their complex trajectories through space and time. I am trying to give a name to the force that set them in motion. | Alan Moore | ||
| fbed647 | You are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. | Alan Moore | ||
| 838cda2 | This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos. | Alan Moore | ||
| d1e2945 | The lies we tell for love, he thought. May the gods forgive me. | George R.R. Martin | ||
| 7964300 | Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore su.. | life memory parents-and-children past | Julian Barnes | |
| 4ad2761 | Rather, what happened to human illusions was that they crumbled, they withered away. It was a long and wearisome process, like a toothache reaching far into the soul. But you can pull out a tooth and it will be gone. Illusions, however, even when dead, continue to rot and stink within us. We cannot escape their taste and smell. We carry them around with us all the time. | time | Julian Barnes | |
| 54aad7c | Being a hero was much easier than being a coward. To be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment - when you took out the gun, threw the bomb, pressed the detonator, did away with the tyrant, and away with yourself as well. But to be a coward was to embark on a career that lasted a lifetime. You couldn't ever relax. You had to anticipate the next occasion when you would have to make excuses for yourself, dither, cringe, reacquaint yours.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| f677324 | Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn't open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you've looked. That's the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don't, but between those who want to know everything and those who don't. This search is a sign of love I maintain. | Julian Barnes | ||
| ea46161 | And that's a life, isn't it? Some achievements and some disappointments. It's been interesting to me, though I wouldn't complain or be amazed if others found it less so. Maybe, in a way, Adrian knew what he was doing. Not that I would have missed my own life for anything, you understand. [pp.60-61] | Julian Barnes | ||
| 81a8241 | And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not. | life | Julian Barnes | |
| 75dc5da | If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself. | memory the-past | Julian Barnes | |
| bc497cc | Religion decays, the icon remains; a narrative is forgotten, yet its representation still magnetizes. | decay religion | Julian Barnes | |
| 007f0fc | I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened--when these new memories suddenly came upon me--it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream. | Julian Barnes |