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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f7fd070 | Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live. | silence | Annie Dillard | |
| 29403d4 | Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again. | reading | Annie Dillard | |
| 1ac0174 | In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said "It is the trade entering his body." | writing work craft trade | Annie Dillard | |
| 52c3984 | The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 68f0e65 | We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it. | nature life watching | Annie Dillard | |
| a4270f0 | the act of vomiting deserves your respect. It's an orchestral event of the gut. | Mary Roach | ||
| aafe95b | I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me. | science humor | Mary Roach | |
| 2e57792 | Liz," said Mr. Cootes, lost in admiration, "when it comes to doping out a scheme, you're the snake's eyebrows!" | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| b227bfe | The proprietor of the grocery store on the corner was bidding a silent farewell to a tomato which even he, though a dauntless optimist, had been compelled to recognize as having outlived its utility. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| b6a3b58 | The funny thing was that he wasn't altogether a fool in other ways. Deep down in him there was a kind of stratum of sense. I had known him, once or twice, show an almost human intelligence. But to reach that stratum, mind you, you needed dynamite. | humor | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 38bd7e6 | To persons of spirit like ourselves the only happy marriage is that which is based on a firm foundation of almost incessant quarrelling. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 50e3bbb | Suiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?' 'Oh, rather!' 'What do you do about it?' 'I generally take a couple of cocktails. | depression sorrow humor desolation emptiness alcoholic soul | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 4bc7fb0 | Jeeves, Mr Little is in love with that female." "So I gathered, sir. She was slapping him in the passage." I clutched my brow. "Slapping him?" "Yes, sir. Roguishly." | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| a1d88ad | She was, in short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex. Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with the one who said, "Oh, woman in our hours of ease tum tumty tiddly something please, when something something something brow, a something something something thou." | women | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 4b55261 | Lord Marshmoreton: I wish I could get you see my point of view. George Bevan: I do see your point of view. But dimly. You see, my own takes up such a lot of the foreground | P G Wodehouse | ||
| d1c215d | All objects exist in a moment of time. | time object | Amy Tan | |
| 34eb1c0 | And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind. | Amy Tan | ||
| faff069 | Dementia. Ruth puzzled over the diagnosis: How could such a beautiful-sounding word apply to such a destructive disease? It was a name befitting a goddess: Dementia, who caused her sister Demeter to forget to turn winter into spring. | Amy Tan | ||
| 1359797 | I still don't know which way I would teach you. I was once so free and innocent. I too laughed for no reason. But later I threw away my foolish innocence to protect myself. And then I taught my daughter, your mother, to shed her innocence so she would not be hurt as well. Hwai dungsyi, was this kind of thinking wrong? If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too? If I see someone has a suspicious nose, h.. | Amy Tan | ||
| 2fa8e21 | With the rain falling surgically against the roof, I ate a dish of ice cream that looked like Kafka's hat. It was a dish of ice cream tasting like an operating table with the patient staring up at the ceiling. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| 18a1d70 | Je reste des heures entieres debout au meme endroit, presque sans bouger (j'ai meme vu le vent s'arreter dans ma main) | Richard Brautigan | ||
| e5189bb | He looked as if he had been beaten to death with a wine bottle, but by doing it with the contents of the bottle. | wine-bottle description wine | Richard Brautigan | |
| 3a092a6 | I'm a great reader that never has time to read. | time reading free-time readers | Eudora Welty | |
| b3eb0d1 | When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading. He did not stir. They placed a straw hat on his head. No response. Only when they took away the wooden chair on which he was sitting did he, as he puts it, 'wake out of the book'. | Anne Fadiman | ||
| 307e894 | Plainly, such an approach does not exclude other ways of trying to comprehend the world. Someone committed to it (as I am) can consistently believe (as I do) that we learn much more of human interest about how people think and feel and act by reading novels or studying history than from all of naturalistic psychology, and perhaps always will; similarly, the arts may offer appreciation of the heavens to which astrophysics cannot aspire. | Noam Chomsky | ||
| 3c08132 | Globalization is the result of powerful governments, especially that of the United States, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world's people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations. | Noam Chomsky | ||
| a0981df | It's not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures- it's inevitable. But unless the process that is taking place here and elsewhere in the country and around the world, unless that continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high. | Noam Chomsky | ||
| da50ae5 | Guys are control freaks and hate when other people know what's best for them | Simone Elkeles | ||
| 2e57637 | Unfortunately, real life can't be wrapped up with a nice little bow. | Simone Elkeles | ||
| 517e77a | Sylvia grabs my sleeve. "He's a looker." "I know. The problem is, he knows it, too." | humour romance young-adult-romance young-adult-fiction | Simone Elkeles | |
| d082e2e | I have to protect you," he says softly." | young-adult-romance young-adult-fiction | Simone Elkeles | |
| 09bdf55 | Sometimes I think Ben is right, that the fantasy world is better because reality sucks...but then I look at Nikki and I believe that we can beat the odds. | Simone Elkeles | ||
| dcd6476 | Love isn't about honesty. It's about protecting the people you love from things that will hurt them. That's love | Simone Elkeles | ||
| ff21a98 | Listen, I don't know what the hell happened between you and Marco. To be honest I don't really want to know, 'cause if I did I'd probably want to kick the shit outta him." "I don't need you to protect me." "What if I want to?" -- | young-adult-romance young-adult-fiction | Simone Elkeles | |
| f332414 | I'll always love you, no matter what happens, okay? | young-adult-romance young-adult-fiction | Simone Elkeles | |
| 7211d13 | Whoa, who was that?" "Madison Stone," Kiara mutters. "Introduce me to her." "Why?" Because I know it'll annoy the shit out of you." | humour romance young-adult-romance young-adult-fiction | Simone Elkeles | |
| ea2a248 | I look ridiculous and stupid. As I check myself in the bathroom mirror, I want to back out. I'm wearing a skintight leotard/body suit obviously designed by women who have no clue about men's plumbing, because the outline of my dick is obscene. Don't dudes who do this ridiculous sport wear a cup or something? I've been on a trampoline, but I've never done synchronized trampolining. Looking at myself in the mirror, I can see why. | Simone Elkeles | ||
| 4baeee0 | human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions | writers memory | Salman Rushdie | |
| e8eb76c | A son who will never be older than his motherland - neither older nor younger. There shall be two heads - but you will only see one - there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees. Newspaper praises him, two mothers raise him! Bicycles love him - but crowds will shove him! Sisters will weep, cobras will creep... Washing will hide him - voices will guide him! Friends will mutilate him - blood will betray him! Spittoons will brain him - do.. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| a4ff9b4 | Khattam-Shud,' he Said slowly 'is the arch-enemy of all stories, even of language itself. He is the prince of silence and the foe of speech. And because everything ends, because dreams ens, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. 'It is finished,' we tell one another, 'it's over, Khattam-Shud; the end. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| b2b9303 | He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 4bd5a40 | And your students," Sato demanded, "don't find it unnerving that Masons meditate with skulls and scythes?" "No more unnerving than Christians praying at the feet of a man nailed to a cross, or Hindus chanting in front of a four-armed elephant named Ganesh. Misunderstanding a culture's symbols is a common root of prejudice" | Dan Brown | ||
| 80995d0 | I have daughters and I have sons. When one of them lays a hand | Robert Bly | ||
| 663f184 | THE FACE IN THE TOYOTA Suppose you see a face in a Toyota One day, and you fall in love with that face, And it is Her, and the world rushes by Like dust blown down a Montana street. And you fall upward into some deep hole, And you can't tell God from a grain of sand. And your life is changed, except that now you Overlook even more than you did before; And these ignored things come to bury you, And you are crushed, and your parents Can't hel.. | Robert Bly |