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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d86cd4f | They think they know the book by its cover, but the knows what it is. Now he knew better; if the book never opens up and comes out, it can be warped to fit the image others see. . . .No, a book wasn't invulnerable to the appearance of its cover, not by any means. | Ken Kesey | ||
| 443d33a | lonely, very lonely to have a past no one else can share. | Susan Howatch | ||
| 57e7928 | Sophy, strongly practical, could not feel that Mr. Fawnhope would make a satisfactory husband, for he lacked visible means of support, and was apt, when under the influence of his Muse, to forget such mundane considerations as dinner-engagements, or the delivery of important messages. | marriage | Georgette Heyer | |
| 5085658 | Don't you dare call me arrogant!If ever I had any at all-which I deny!- how much could I possibly have left after having been ridden over rough-shod by you and Thomas, do you imagine? | Georgette Heyer | ||
| e02b432 | What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him. Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never re.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| b060c6c | But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 82b430d | Someone once said that his favourite times in history were when things were collapsing, because that meant something new was being born. Does this make any sense if we apply it to our individual lives? To die when something new is being born - even if that something new is our very own self? Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappointments, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of .. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 5762981 | The narrower their lives, the wider their hips. | Toni Morrison | ||
| ff7705d | they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling; they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly | Toni Morrison | ||
| f856dca | Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed," she said, "and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks." | racism blacks whites race-relations luck | Toni Morrison | |
| f1ab175 | Much handled things are always soft(27). | Toni Morrison | ||
| fdf562a | Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. To have something as wonderful as that would take a long, long time. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 6b71dd5 | They will blow it, she thought. Each will cling to a sad little story of hurt and sorrow--some long-ago trouble and pain life dumped on their pure and innocent selves. And each one will rewrite that story forever, knowing the plot, guessing the theme, inventing its meaning and dismissing its origin. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 54b5eb8 | A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath. So they believe. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 3dd8501 | So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 8b6aba2 | I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that. | women | Toni Morrison | |
| 28b7029 | In a way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art f.. | boredom-to-brilliance recklessness idleness curiosity | Toni Morrison | |
| 50b8180 | No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| ef7a4a0 | It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others. | Sinclair Lewis | ||
| 09cb444 | The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It's the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups, who have let the demogogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest." 14" | Sinclair Lewis | ||
| fa94579 | Too much of anything isn't good for anyone. | Ray Bradbury | ||
| 12c8672 | If you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the sieve. | sieve sand read | Ray Bradbury | |
| 77ca31b | A beautiful face can mask great evil... | face mask evil | Francine Rivers | |
| 3cc10a4 | For we are God's masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago" (Ephesians 2:10)." | Francine Rivers | ||
| d83c7be | But I guess even the knights were vessels to someone. Isn't that the way it worked? But then everyone is always a vessel to someone. | Raymond Carver | ||
| d4220fb | There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men. | George Eliot | ||
| 728527d | One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going--we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything. | Alice Walker | ||
| 325b9ea | Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 3fe1273 | Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was "broken." | Saul Bellow | ||
| 03e25cb | External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can't get justice and he can't give justice, but he can live. And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each .. | Saul Bellow | ||
| d52654f | And I said to myself that unless you conceive Death to be a violent guerrilla and kidnaper who snatches those you love, and if you are not cowardly and cannot submit to such terrorism as civilized people now do in every department of life, you must pursue and inquire and explore every possibility and seek everywhere and try everything. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 5d7fe39 | Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way. | special talent uniqueness creativity | Chaim Potok | |
| 725b0d1 | My name is Asher Lev... I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years. | Chaim Potok | ||
| 64bd239 | The same river can never be crossed twice. The flowing water has no memory of footprints. | Robert R. McCammon | ||
| bfb57c6 | My heartbeat boomed like a dull motor in my ears. I am I am I am. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 628afa7 | brave love, dream | passion poetry | Sylvia Plath | |
| 5ef59af | I felt myself shrink to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| b7bf44d | We all like to think that we are important enough to need psychiatrists. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 5df60fd | I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and say, 'Ah!' in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn't, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 55b934a | I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up. | solitude magnificence mystery new-york | Sylvia Plath | |
| b7ead06 | God, I scream for time to let go, to write, to think. But no. I have to exercise my memory in little feats just so I can stay in this damn wonderful place which I love and hate with all my heart. And so the snow slows and swirls, and melts along the edges. The first snow isn't good for much. It makes a few people write poetry, a few wonder if the Christmas shopping is done, a few make reservations at the skiing lodge. It's a sentimental pre.. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 35203b3 | The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. [...] The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| ae60bba | So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon... I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 9e0e65c | I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web. | Sylvia Plath |