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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c99f04b | Often when God does not readily give us what we want, it is because He knows what our desire would cost us. Faith sometimes means forgoing our desires because we trust Christ to have a better plan for our lives. | Beth Moore | ||
| 7ff7933 | I assure you that some of the most awesome things God has ever done for me have come out of the most awful things I'd done to myself. | Beth Moore | ||
| 110e97d | Rule number one of crime scene work: If it's wet and sticky and it ain't yours, don't touch it. -Terry Cooper, crime scene specialist, Georgia Bureau of Investigation | Beverly Connor | ||
| ed6f207 | The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is. | poverty leprosy heresy | Umberto Eco | |
| 36d2e14 | The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause. | time | Umberto Eco | |
| a9a7e9c | stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus | Umberto Eco | ||
| 96c067a | We'll have to see," Belbo said. He rummaged in his drawer and took out some sheets of paper. "Potio-section..." He looked at me, saw my bewilderment. "Potio-section, as everybody knows, of course, is the art of slicing soup. No, no," he said to Diotallevi. "It's not the department, it's a subject, like Mechanical Avunculogratulation or Pylocatabasis. They all under the same heading of Tetrapyloctomy." "What's tetra...?" I asked. "The art of.. | Umberto Eco | ||
| f73e111 | You cannot change the world with ideas. People with few ideas are less likely to make mistakes; they follow what everyone else does and are no trouble to anyone; they're successful, make money, find good jobs, enter politics, receive honours; they become famous writers, academics, journalists. Can anyone who is so good at looking after their own interests really be stupid? I'm the stupid one, the one who wanted to go tilting at windmills. | the-prague-cemetery umberto-eco | Umberto Eco | |
| 360d9d7 | Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media. Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on. | mass-media superficiality culture | Umberto Eco | |
| a2f31be | But is the unicorn a falsehood? It's the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters' snares." "So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it's a fable, an invention of the pagans." "What a disappointment," I said. .. | religion fables mythology unicorns symbolism | Umberto Eco | |
| bbd99ac | When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike. | loneliness | Russell Banks | |
| 25c24e2 | Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, thought I admit some people don't seem to suspect it. | Nella Larsen | ||
| 9919d81 | I was wondering if my life, the life in which I had a son and a beautiful, young girlfriend, could exist outside of the hospital. Or was the hospital its container? Was I like honey thinking it's a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle? | Miranda July | ||
| 95e0fe0 | The word God asks a question and then answers it before there is any chance to wonder. | Miranda July | ||
| 551608a | But as the sun rose I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway. What did it really matter if I spent it like this--caring for this boy--as opposed to some other way? I would always be earthbound; he hadn't robbed me of my ability to fly or to live forever. I appreciated nuns now, not the conscripted kind, but modern women who chose it. If you were wise enough to know that t.. | Miranda July | ||
| 65b4c0a | Man is an animal whose dreams come true and kill him. | James Tiptree Jr. | ||
| 53c8cc7 | A shaft of sunlight fell on me, making my dress look like fire and my skin glow like pearls. The shadows around me darkened, as if my glowing skin were leeching the light from everything around me. I was a lantern on the longest, darkest moonless night. | Alyxandra Harvey | ||
| baefda6 | We were so close to home now, I would have tripped an old woman with a cane if she'd stood in the way of the first available chair. | Alyxandra Harvey | ||
| dc21503 | And though Xavier was handsome and well-to-do, he had one major flaw. He wasn't Colin. | Alyxandra Harvey | ||
| 0e994a1 | I'd seen elevated social mamas do far worse in the name of securing a husband for their daughters. An eldery, gray-curled grandmother once tripped an eligible bachelor on his way to the gaming table so he would fall at her granddaughter's satin-slippered feet. Instead he'd landed on a footman and broken his arm. | Alyxandra Harvey | ||
| 9e43c39 | I could think of a hundred things I'd rather do than follow a possible murderess and the ghost of her victim. | Alyxandra Harvey | ||
| 7bfccbb | I kissed him lightly and used the moment to slip the package out of the inside of his pocket. I was a white handkerchief folded into a square. "What's this?" He pretended to look put out. "Did you just pick my pocket?" "Yes." "Good thing it's for you then." "It is? Really?" I'd only been teasing him when I went through his pockets. I unwrapped it, touched. It was a small brooch made of tin, in the shape of a rose. "Oh, Colin, it's lovely. T.. | Alyxandra Harvey | ||
| 71267ff | And yet the world we live in--its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence--is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history. | Adam Hochschild | ||
| 3bf9972 | We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt. | Esther Perel | ||
| fdbfa04 | It's hard to experience desire when you're weighted down by concern. | relationships desire | Esther Perel | |
| 1013d1b | At breakfast!' said Louise in an awed voice. 'A man who can read poetry at breakfast would be capable of anything. | Mary Stewart | ||
| 7fe57e4 | Year after year of dirty snow and bitter winds... houses and whole districts of people who aren't really unhappy, but worse, who are neither happy nor unhappy; people who are ugly because they're neither ugly nor beautiful; creatures that are dismally neutral, who long without longings as though they're unconscious, unconsciously suffering from being alive. | living happiness longing | Eugène Ionesco | |
| 8dfbf30 | One of the reasons that millionaires are economically successful is that they think differently. | Thomas J. Stanley | ||
| 6b313ab | If you're not yet wealthy but want to be someday, never purchase a home that requires a mortgage that is more than twice your household's total annual realized income. | Thomas J. Stanley | ||
| a99323b | The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| b2f4feb | In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds. | ice flight home iceland | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 9693e4d | Maybe the word forgive points in the wrong direction, since it's something you mostly give yourself, not anyone else: you put down the ugly weight of old suffering, untie yourself from the awful, and walk away from it. | forgiveness | Rebecca Solnit | |
| c8b5427 | I talked about places, about the ways that we often talk about love of place, by which we mean our love for places, but seldom of how the places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our lives to remain connected and coherent... And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren't so deeply entrenched and we can imag.. | familiarity places | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 8534624 | To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 2c8617b | In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life. | page-176 urban-planning walking | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 37853bd | Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keep.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| a988caf | Many heterosexual marriages are childless; many with children break up: they are no guarantee that children will be raised in a house with two parents of two genders. The courts have scoffed at the reproduction and child-raising argument against marriage equality. And the conservatives have not mounted what seems to be their real objection; that they wish to preserve traditional marriage and more than that, traditional gender roles. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 2ba7c81 | Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance--nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. "But to lose oneself in a city--as one loses oneself in a forest--that calls for quite a different schooling." To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjam.. | travel self-awareness | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 55d9021 | I wonder now about Demeter and Persephone. Maybe Persephone was glad to run off with the king of death to his underground realm, maybe it was the only way she could break away from her mother, maybe Demeter was a bad parent the way Lear was a bad parent, denying nature, including the nature of children to leave their parents. Maybe Persephone thought Hades was the infinitely cool older man who held the knowledge she sought, maybe she loved .. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 69abb40 | Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| e499de1 | One's desire to be alone, biologists have found, is partially genetic and to some degree measurable. If you have low levels of the pituitary peptide oxytocin--sometimes called the master chemical of sociability-- and high quantities of the hormone vasopressin, which may suppress your need for affection, you tend to require fewer interpersonal relationships. | Michael Finkel | ||
| 5ddcba5 | Not for a moment did he consider keeping a journal. He would never allow anyone to read his private thoughts; therefore, he did not risk writing them down. "I'd rather take it to my grave," he said. And anyway, when was a journal ever honest? "It either tells a lot of truths to cover a single lie, " he said, "or a lot of lies to cover a single truth." | lies truth private-thoughts | Michael Finkel | |
| 3009542 | He'd grown unused to woods like this. He'd become accustomed to the Northwest, evergreen and shaded dark. Here he was surrounded by soft leaves, not needles; leaves that carried their deaths secretly inside them, that already heard the whispers of Autumn. Roots and branches that knew things. | pretty-prose swooning-over-sentences leaves woods trees autumn | Michael Montoure | |
| d0a1e74 | The real struggle is in your own mind. You must know you are going to win before you start the fight. You have to see it, smell it, and believe it utterly. It is a form of confidence, but you must guard against overconfidence. You have to be flexible--able to adapt in an instant and never allow yourself to give up. Without this, nothing else is possible. | Michael J. Sullivan |