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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 93977f2 | I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. | Douglas Adams | ||
| 2c440df | Some fish were jumping up the beach and into the tree, which struck me as an odd thing for a fish to do, but I tried not to be judgmental about it. I was feeling pretty raw about my own species, and not much inclined to raise a quizzical eyebrow at others. The fish could play about in trees as much as they liked if it gave them pleasure, so long as they didn't try and justify themselves or tell each other it was a malign god who made them p.. | Douglas Adams | ||
| 57c8ce5 | We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own. | Douglas Adams | ||
| c57d488 | He had extracted himself from the Cambridge one-way system by the usual method, which involved going round and round it faster and faster until he achieved a sort of escape velocity and flew off at a tangent in a random direction, which he was now trying to identify and correct for. | Douglas Adams | ||
| 8f6b291 | Fenchurch had red mullet and said it was delicious. Arthur had a swordfish steak and said it made him angry. He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her. "Why's this fish so bloody good?" he demanded, angrily." | fish funny humor | Douglas Adams | |
| 2ed1dfe | I have terrible periods of lack of confidence. I just don't believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view. | self-esteem | Douglas Adams | |
| 8d7211e | I asked him if he'd come to clean the windows and he said no he'd come to demolish the house. He didn't tell me straight away of course. Oh no. First he wiped a couple of windows and charged me a fiver. Then he told me. | Douglas Adams | ||
| caa0be9 | Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one - more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway? In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of .. | Douglas Adams | ||
| f173bc9 | On the delivery plate of the Nutri-Matic Drink Synthesizer was a small tray, on which say three bone china cups and saucers, a bone china jug of milk, a silver teapot full of the best tea Arthur had ever tasted and a small printed note saying "Wait." | Douglas Adams | ||
| aa8580f | Obviously somebody had been appallingly incompetent and he hoped to God it wasn't him. | incompetence mr-prosser | Douglas Adams | |
| 9cb477c | I have detected," he said, "disturbances in the wash." ... Arthur asked him to repeat what he had just said because he hadn't quite understood his meaning. Ford repeated it. "The wash?" said Arthur. "The space time wash," said Ford. Arthur nodded, and then cleared his throat. "Are we talking about," he asked cautiously, "some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?" "Eddies," said Ford, "in the space-time continuum." "Ah," n.. | Douglas Adams | ||
| cef113e | It's easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo, we are now sadder and wiser, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed. | extinction life-lessons | Douglas Adams | |
| c3b8f84 | Will you stop counting!' snarled Zaphod. 'Yes,' said Ford Prefect, 'in three minutes and thirty-five seconds. | Douglas Adams | ||
| 3d3303e | There was one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole. | Douglas Adams | ||
| 29919b0 | There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine. Now concentrate! | Douglas Adams | ||
| f2a4460 | I'm very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term `holistic' refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are.. | dirk-gently fundamental interconnectedness relationship | Douglas Adams | |
| 7691919 | the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. | Douglas Adams | ||
| c12c0b9 | Indeed you did your best...I hope that it may be long before you find yourself in such a tight corner again between two such terrible old men. ~ Gandalf to Pippin | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 809c8f2 | In that hour of trial it was the love of his master that helped most to hold him firm; but also deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit-sense: he knew in the core of his heart that he was not large enough to bear such a burden, even if such visions were not a mere cheat to betray him. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 2da2036 | I cannot,' said Merry. 'I have never seen them. I have never been outside of my own land before. And if I had known what the world outside was like, I don't think I should have had the heart to leave it. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 7713d06 | It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men and he did not like it much. He was glad he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies and threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would no rather have stayed there in peace - | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 106478d | To him that is pitiless the deeds of pity are ever strange and beyond reckoning. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| c2f53d5 | The morning came, pale and clammy. Frodo woke up first, and found that a tree-root had made a hole in his back, and that his neck was stiff. "Walking for pleasure! Why didn't I drive?" he thought, as he usually did at the beginning of an expedition. "And all my beautiful feather beds are sold to the Sackville-Bagginses! These tree-roots would do them good." He stretched. "Wake up, hobbits!" he cried. "It's a beautiful morning." "What's beau.. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 9c52bcf | There was a lot more to that song,' said Sam, 'all about Mordor. I didn't learn that part, it gave me the shivers. I never thought I should be going that was myself!' 'Going to Mordor!" Cried Pippin. 'I hope it won't come to that!' 'Do not speak that name so loudly!' said Strider" | mordor peregrin peregrin-took pippin pippin-took sam-gamgee samwise samwise-gamgee strider | J.R.R. Tolkien | |
| b628d54 | So most men teach, and few men learn. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 50a214c | Have you thought of an ending?' 'Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant, | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 8de2c6c | And in that very moment, away behind in some far corner of the city, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed reckoning nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn. | dawn inspirational shadow-of-death tolkien | J.R.R. Tolkien | |
| a3d0828 | But do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| b64e820 | They sat beside the stone, and did not speak again; and when the sun went down Morwen sighed and clasped his hand, and was still; and Hurin knew that she died.He looked down at her in the twilight and it seemed to him that the lines of grief and cruel hardship were smoothed away. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| c6c3c78 | No hay nada como mirar, si quereis encontrar algo. Cierto que casi siempre, se encuentra algo, si se mira, pero no siempre es lo que uno busca. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 511d318 | Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 6d2a50d | I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure. Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold. | fantasy fantasy-fiction worldbuilding | J.R.R. Tolkien | |
| 9f7667e | And if Sam considered himself lucky, Frodo knew he was more lucky himself; for there was not a hobbit in the Shire that was looked after with such care. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 3e5a84d | The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story. | fiction tolkien tom-shippey writing | Tom Shippey | |
| b9cddac | Frodo gave a cry, and there was, fallen upon his knees at the chasm's edge. But Gollum, dancing like a mad thing, held aloft the ring, a finger still thrust within its circle. "Precious, precious, precious!" Gollum cried. "My Precious! O my Precious!" And with that, even as his eyes were lifted up to gloat on his prize, he stepped too far, toppled, wavered for a moment on the brink, and then with a shriek he fell. Out of the depths came hi.. | cry danc finger frodo-baggins gollum mad mount-doom ring samwise-gamgee the-lord-of-the-rings the-one-ring-j-r-r-tolkien the-return-of-the-king tolkien | J.R.R. Tolkien | |
| 1f9d166 | I wish to cup knowledge in my hand and drink it as one drinks water by the side of the stream. | Bryce Courtenay | ||
| 49ced22 | I knew then that the person on the outside was only a shell, a presence to be seen and provoked. Inside was the real me, where my tears joined the tears of all the sad people to form the three waterfalls in the night country. | Bryce Courtenay | ||
| ea646fa | But it isn't true," Orville responded emphatically, "to say we had no special advantages . . . the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity." | David McCullough | ||
| a1449e5 | The evil of technology was not technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical igenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, or sense of personal accountability. | morality technology | David McCullough | |
| e736560 | It was a day and age that saw no reason why one could not learn whatever was required - learn vitally anything - by the close study of books. | pg-23 reading | David McCullough | |
| 92780ed | Government is nothing more than the combined force of society or the united power of the multitude for the peace, order, safety, good, and happiness of the people... There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all the others by size or figure or beauty and variety of colors in the human hive. No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favor, any divine communication to govern his fellow men. Nature throws us all into the.. | government liberty slavery | David McCullough | |
| 238760a | and yet a child's utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes. | herman-melville innocence intelligence sailor | Herman Melville | |
| ed44850 | I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content. | Herman Melville | ||
| 125acd8 | I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. | Herman Melville |