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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| cb78a8f | A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares? | religion mass service church | John Irving | |
| 4b755c5 | You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them. | learning life love lesson | John Irving | |
| 221a9dc | When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don''t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time. | John Irving | ||
| 37a2a96 | He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson | John Irving | ||
| a1178f4 | A rainy day can actually be a very important day. And a small hope isn't really small if it makes a lost hope less sad. | Rachel Simon | ||
| b0b1518 | If there is anything else you desire, Your--" "I desire"--the king interrupted in a level voice--"never again to see your living face." | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| 82510c2 | Power. What men like best for themselves and least in their women. | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| c939ba9 | Ridiculous to think what indignities I would suffer in silence, if I knew that I was to be rewarded with an oversize bucket of hot water," the magus said as he settled into the bath the servants had filled for him." | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| eb1d4af | Oh, Lady," said the woodcutter, "my hurt is overwhelming because it is someone else's pain that makes me cry." | sadness | Megan Whalen Turner | |
| 4e312b9 | We might someday attain a relationship of mutual respect," he said softly. First, I thought, I will see gods walking the earth. He went on. "For now I will have your obedience." His ability to convey a world of threat in so few words was remarkable." | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| e9e3e18 | Sunlight is bad,' he wheezes. 'It's the exact same stuff as breeds maggots in wounded soldiers' legs. And when there's no war on, it fades wallpaper. | Michel Faber | ||
| 11b53ca | But now she could not bear the way she sounded. She was not a person anyone could love. ... And thus fled to her room. There she wept, bitterly, an ugly sound punctuated by great gulps. She could not stop herself. She could hear his footsteps in the passage outside. He walked up and down, up and down. 'Come in,' she prayed. 'Oh dearest, do come in.' But he did not come in. He would not come in. This was the man she had practically contracte.. | fiction | Peter Carey | |
| 3cc80cf | not stories, but histories. For this too I learned, that a storyteller's tale may end, but history goes on always. | storytelling stories | Jacqueline Carey | |
| 451c314 | I seek words of such surpassing beauty that they might melt the hardest heart of stone. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 1b7f97e | There would be love, and while it was mine, I could cling to it. I could rejoice -- in life, in the existence of love. In the existence of people like Phedre and Joscelin. Although the standards they set were impossibly high, still, I could rejoice that such courage and compassion existed in the world. I could hope and aspire. | hope life love | Jacqueline Carey | |
| 764fc3b | Soon never comes soon enough to a young child. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 94a3263 | Again and again, I pushed my memories away. There were days when it was easy and days when it was hard. My love ... was a boulder in my heart. I sought to let go of it and let it sink. Let it sink below the surface, carrying my heart with it. Let it come to rest on the stream's bottom, a vast hidden bulwark, dividing the current. Let it stay there, hidden and unseen. Forgotten. Betimes it worked. Betimes it didn't. It was the best I could d.. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| a89ae43 | The self," Blackmore writes, "is just a fleeting impression that arises with each experience and fades away again. . . . There is no inner self," she argues, "only multiple parallel processes that give rise to a benign inner delusion--a useful fiction." She argues that consciousness itself is a fiction." | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 0911e7f | One does not really feel much grief at other people's sorrows; one tries, and puts on a melancholy face, thinking oneself brutal for not caring more; but one cannot and it is better, for if one grieved too deeply at other people's tears, life would be unendurable; and every man has sufficient sorrows of his own without taking to heart his neighbour's. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 8b4352e | As we grow older we become more conscious of the complexity, incoherence, and unreasonableness of human beings; this indeed is the only excuse that offers for the middle-aged or elderly writer, whose thoughts should more properly be turned to graver matters, occupying himself with the trivial concerns of imaginary people. For if the proper study of mankind is man it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantia.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 7790212 | I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| a52012a | Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words on the other hand, were a lifeline. They left their hushed rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline's breathing. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 025b0d4 | Kovacs to a female believer in New Revelation: "..I'm calling you a gutless betrayer of your sex. I can see your husband's angle, he's a man, he's got everything to gain from this crapshit. But you? You've thrown away centuries of political struggle and scientific advance so you can sit in the dark and mutter your superstitions of unworth to yourself. You'll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour an.. | religion new-revelation fundamentalism | Richard K. Morgan | |
| 5d61d20 | like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 1e64985 | It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| d629e26 | The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine. Reality doesn't offer this assurance, so it's very easy to develop the mistaken impression that you're in control. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 4370004 | the tongues of men are not much leashed by concerns for accuracy or truth. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| e47217c | The fields that push up the corn, and the water that rushes down the ravine, the juice of the grape, and the life of a man as it flows past him, are all one and the same thing. The sole unity in life is the unity of rhythm. A rhythm to which we all dance; men, apples, ravines, ploughed fields, carts among the corn, houses, horses, and the sun. The stuff that is in you, Gauguin, will pound through a grape tomorrow, because you and the grape .. | Irving Stone | ||
| c39f26c | What we know of others is our personal secret. | Irving Stone | ||
| b322dbe | So all in all there wasn't anything really wrong with my life. Except that, like most everyone else's I knew about, it had a big gaping hole in it, an enormous emptiness, and I didn't know how to fill it or even know what belonged there. | Jack Finney | ||
| b00283f | Who owns a man, Durnik?" the blond young man asked sadly. "The one who rules him, or the one who pays him?" | David Eddings | ||
| 893f7ba | I am not Cugel the Clever for nothing! | fantasy vance dying-earth | Jack Vance | |
| 1eba1c3 | The need of one human being for the approval of his fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship - a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one's thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family. Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed.. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 51e0869 | Jenkins tried to say goodbye, but he could not say goodbye. If he could only weep, he thought, but robots could not weep. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 7887fa8 | I felt that pressure of time that is perhaps the surest indication we have left childhood behind. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| a81de9b | We are told that "the meek shall inherit the earth." It follows that the meek are chosen of God. I shall try to be meek, not because I want the earth - you can keep it, after the way you've fucked it around it's not worth having - but because I too should like to be chosen of God. QED. Besides, I like animals better than you bastards." | pollution | John Brunner | |
| 8ec749e | Everything is connected. | Alan Moore | ||
| 2916937 | Unlike T.V., we cannot have too much of science, despite its nuclear quirks. With science, ideas can germinate within a bed of theory, form, and practice that assists their growth ... but we, as gardeners, must beware, for some seeds are the seeds of ruin, and the most iridescent blooms are often the most dangerous. | Alan Moore | ||
| db8ed89 | It's early days. A few skeletons are bound to keep jumping out of the closet. | Alan Moore | ||
| 13e56f2 | In 1965, worked with Nite Owl bringing street gangs under control. Tackled the Big Figure together. Brought down Underboss together. Good team. Until he got soft, like rest. Until he quit. No staying power. None of them. Except Comedian. Met him in 1966. Forceful personality. Didn't care if people liked him. Uncompromising. Admired that. Of us all, he understood most. About world. About people. About society and what's happening to it. Thin.. | Alan Moore | ||
| 7378bb7 | This is an IMAGINARY STORY...aren't they all? | Alan Moore | ||
| 3942be7 | Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asleep more grudgingly, thrashing at the waves, either reluctant to let a good day depart or still bitching about a bad one. Different currents run through our spells of unconsciousness. | sleep | Julian Barnes | |
| 54345d4 | 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. It's similar with books. Not quite the same, of course (it never is); but similar. If you quite enjoy a writer's work, if you turn the page approvingly yet don't mind being interrupted, then you tend to like that author unthinkingly. .. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 2086c90 | Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of. | Julian Barnes |