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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6f3739a | And then he pressed into her. First his thighs, then his middle, his chest, and finally his mouth. She made a whimpering sound, but its definition was unclear even to her, until she realized that her arms had gone around him instinctually, and that she was clutching his back, his shoulders, her hands restless and greedy for the feel of him. He kissed her openmouthed, using his tongue, and when she kissed back, she felt the hum that vibrated.. | Sandra Brown | ||
| c87ea28 | We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don't. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning when everyone's sleeping, I hear trees rustling when no one's around. | Nick Flynn | ||
| 3610317 | I am, after all, an adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I lost the career that made me all these things. I won't make that mistake again. | careers employment failure getting-fired human-nature job-losses learning-from-mistakes life life-lessons losing-hope losing-self loss mistake mistakes self-worth | Gillian Flynn | |
| 21d435d | What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do? | Gillian Flynn | ||
| ba9346b | All of a sudden you see reading in bed and waffles on Sunday and laughing at nothing and his mouth on yours. And it's so far beyond fine that you know you can never go back to fine. | gone-girl love | Gillian Flynn | |
| 3673e92 | Time is the school in which we learn. | Joan Didion | ||
| e37929a | We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings." | children happiness health love luck | Joan Didion | |
| d748616 | After that he would leave for a while, breaking things as he went, slamming doors to kick them open, picking up decanters to hurl at mirrors, detouring by way of chairs to smash them against the floor. Always when he came back he would sleep in their room, shutting the door against her. Rigid with self-pity she would lie in another room, wishing for the will to leave. Each believed the other a murderer of time, a destroyer of life itself. | Joan Didion | ||
| e9e3bb2 | Why do we like these stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something u.. | howard-hughes joan-didion | Joan Didion | |
| 191b487 | When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children. | mortality | Joan Didion | |
| 342a841 | Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested - ask any doctor - that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known. | alcoholism anxiety depression | Joan Didion | |
| 132f4f6 | It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody? | eccentric southern | Joan Didion | |
| 6b85892 | The death of a parent, he wrote, 'despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago... | death memories parents preparation | Joan Didion | |
| 34e6e71 | I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future. | future hope new-life opportunity | Joan Didion | |
| 7c272ae | Ht~ lwqy'` qd l tqwl lHqyq@ dy'man. | Paul Auster | ||
| c743b2d | He is twenty-eight years old, and to the best of his knowledge he has no ambitions. No burning ambitions, in any case, no clear idea of what building a plausible future might entail for him. | Paul Auster | ||
| 368b048 | Yo habia saltado desde el borde del acantilado y justo cuando estaba a punto de dar contra el fondo, ocurrio un hecho extraordinario: me entere que habia gente que me queria. Que le quieran a uno de ese modo lo cambia todo. No disminuye el terror de la caida, pero te da una nueva perspectiva de lo que significa ese terror. Yo habia saltado desde el borde y entonces, en el ultimo instante, algo me cogio en el aire. Ese algo es lo que defino .. | Paul Auster | ||
| 2733d15 | We all know that the way to get something done is to give it to a busy person. | Robert D. Putnam | ||
| 37a1105 | He tunneled into stories where weak men changed into strong half-animals or used eye beams or magic hammers to power through steel or climb up the sides of skyscrapers. He was the Hulk when angry and Spidey the rest of the time. When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to stone, heart to stone. As I watched I thought of what Grandma Lynn liked t.. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 5e74494 | Hold still," my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me." | father-daughter mast ship ship-building | Alice Sebold | |
| 089b41e | Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn't calculate my steps. I didn't have time for contemplation. In violence it is the getting out that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from the shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping to land away from where you are. | Alice Sebold | ||
| c0dbeb2 | In the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway | Alice Sebold | ||
| 27dafa6 | This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything. | name-calling technology | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 57a6402 | The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That's impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barrier of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is - not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both. When this transcendence occurs in such events as .. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 047af26 | To arrive in the Rocky Mountains by plane would be to see them in one kind of context,as pretty scenery. But to arrive after days of hard travel across the prairies would be to see them in another way, as a goal, a promised land. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 9264d63 | Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: "I'll do as I please at everybody else's expense." An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man--his own and those of others." -- | Ayn Rand | ||
| 1c28b0b | And I wish I had the power to tell tem that the despair of their hearts was not to be final, and their night was not without hope. For the battle they lost can never be lost. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 50e2041 | For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind. | Ayn Rand | ||
| ca1b752 | But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories--all that they take away with them. | Anne Tyler | ||
| aa46831 | She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek. | Ayn Rand | ||
| d1fd502 | The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought--while his hand moved rapidly--what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have not discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words. | power-of-words words writing-process | Ayn Rand | |
| e4e922c | Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: | Ayn Rand | ||
| 5ff2d64 | Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. | racism | Ayn Rand | |
| 6ebf6b7 | You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you'd want to be broken, trampled, dominated, because that's the impossible, the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you'd want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn't be easy for you. | Ayn Rand | ||
| f00a2f4 | I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries. | doubt minority-opinion oppression subversion truth | Ayn Rand | |
| baaf609 | I am neither foe nor friend to my brothers, but such as each of them shall deserve of me. And to earn my love, my brothers must do more than to have been born. I do not grant my love without reason, nor to any chance passer-by who may wish to claim it. I honor men with my love. But honor is a thing to be earned. I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love.. | individual love pride | Ayn Rand | |
| 6236e23 | Did it ever occur to you," asked Kira, "that I may be here for the very unusual, unnatural reason of wanting to learn a work I like only because I like it?" | Ayn Rand | ||
| 23cba42 | I like to receive money for my work. But I can pass that up this time. I like to have people know my work is done by me. But I can pass that up. I like to have tenants made happy by my work. But that doesn't matter too much. The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is the work itself. My work done my way. Peter, there's nothing in the world that you can offer me, except this. Offer me this and you can have anyth.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| fd2adb3 | but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 958735c | The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to "protect the family name"(as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another) -the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third cousin gave a concert at carnegie hall (as if the achievement of one man.. | samples | Ayn Rand | |
| 001572e | It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 6feb579 | He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand .... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject .... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind. | reading | Ayn Rand | |
| e6486e2 | I covet no man's soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet. | Ayn Rand | ||
| e254b6f | I love you. As the same value, as the same expression, with the same pride and the same meaning as I love my work, my mills, my Metal, my hours at a desk, at a furnace, in a laboratory, in an ore mine, as I love my ability to work, as I love the act of sight and knowledge, as I love the action of my mind when it solves a chemical equation or grasps a sunrise, as I love the things I've made and the things I've felt, as *my* product, as *my* .. | Ayn Rand |