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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d20db49 | Most inexperienced cooks believe, mistakenly, that a fine cake is less challenging to produce than a fine souffle or mousse. I know, however, that a good cake is like a good marriage: from the outside, it looks ordinary, sometimes unremarkable, yet cut into it, taste it, and you know that it is nothing of the sort. It is the sublime result oflong and patient experience, a confection whose success relies on a profound understanding of compat.. | Julia Glass | ||
| 8d7674b | I suppose my mother could have been a witch if she had chosen to. But she met my father, who was a rather saintly clergyman, and he cancelled her out. | Mary Stewart | ||
| 980bf58 | Life does just go on, and you change, and you can't go back. You have to live it the way it comes. | Mary Stewart | ||
| 7fdcde6 | I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is. | imagination reality | Eugène Ionesco | |
| 02784bd | Psihoza colectiva, domnule Dudard, psihoza colectiva! Ca si religia, care-i opiumul popoarelor! | Eugène Ionesco | ||
| cc0a2df | If your goal is to become financially secure, you'll likely attain it.... But if your motive is to make money to spend money on the good life,... you're never gonna make it. | Thomas J. Stanley | ||
| 5949e50 | The foundation stone of wealth accumulation is defense, and this defense should be anchored by budgeting and planning. | Thomas J. Stanley | ||
| 8c0d26e | Money should never change one's values.... Making money is only a report card. It's a way to tell how you're doing. | Thomas J. Stanley | ||
| f3dc319 | Great offense and poor defense translate into under accumulation of wealth. | Thomas J. Stanley | ||
| 9cca028 | In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you. | beath burden childhood decision dying future imagination present suicide teenager young-adult youth | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 54e3c7f | Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase 'same-sex marriage' for the term 'marriage equality'. This phrase is ordinarily implied to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That's not what traditional marriage was. Throughout much of history in the west, the laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife .. | feminism heterosexuality homosexuality marriage marriage-equality same-sex-marriage the-west | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 8028987 | All those summer drives, no matter where I was going, to a person, a project, an adventure, or home, alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the .. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 7233fe3 | Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 47405c8 | I told the students that they were at the age when they might begin to choose places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked them where they felt at home. | home landscape place sense-of-place | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 2da5f58 | An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative [career]. But what decided the matter for [Teddy Cruz] was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. 'I don't know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me. | architecture teddy-cruz university | Rebecca Solnit | |
| dc3c50f | Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the US military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused .. | feminism gender human-rights rebecca-solnit | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 6b457d7 | How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. | control unforeseen | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 47cb06d | Nearly every book has the same architecture--cover, spine, pages--but you open them onto worlds and gifts far beyond what paper and ink are, and on the inside they are every shape and power. Some books are toolkits you take up to fix things, from the most practical to the mostmysterious, from your house to your heart, or to make things, from cakes to ships. Some books are wings. Some are horses that run away with you. Some are parties to wh.. | reading | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 08cfd37 | If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in other ways. Still, that sense of th.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 0f4fb1d | Very slowly Royce pushed the door inward, peering through the gap. He looked left and right, then closed it once more and replaced the bolts. "What is it?" Hadrian asked. "He's right," Royce said dismally. "No one is getting through." Thranic smiled and nodded until he was beset by another series of coughs that bent him over in pain. "What is it?" Hadrian repeated. "You're not going to believe it." "What?" "There's a -- a thingy." "A .. | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| 854c9b8 | Any chance he's turned a new leaf and taken up sailing for real?" "About as likely as me doing it." Hadrian eyed Royce for a heartbeat. "I put him at the top of the list." | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| f7578ef | Love is the degree to which you are willing to sacrifice your own interests for those of another. It doesn't matter what sex you are. It doesn't matter who you are, or were. It only matters that you care more for someone else than you do for yourself. It's when you eat minlatta with tarragon oil even when you hate pasta because someone with you enjoys it. It's when you value being alone more than anything but agree to move in with someone b.. | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| 2be6c36 | What's the advantage of fear or the benefit of regret or the bonus of granting misery a foothold even if death is embracing you? My old abbot used to say, "Life is only precious if you wish it to be." I look at it like the last bite of a wonderful meal. Do you enjoy it, or does the knowledge that there is no more to follow make it so bitter that you would ruin the experience? - Myron on facing death" | dying | Michael J. Sullivan | |
| bf77444 | Sana di mente in un mondo di pazzi. | Susanna Kaysen | ||
| 099fa81 | Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom. | Susanna Kaysen | ||
| f93d2fd | I always thought the name of Utah's major newspaper was some sort of weird misspelling of the word "desert." But no, Deseret is the "land of the honeybee," according to the Book of Mormon. I guess I should have figured they would have caught a typo in the masthead after 154 years." | A.J. Jacobs | ||
| caa07dd | It's a different way of looking at the world. Your life isn't about rights. It's about responsibilities."--Mr Bill Berkowitz" -- | A.J. Jacobs | ||
| b3b04e2 | It's bad enough sitting in a car, never mind driving it. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 2169844 | Girl. Woman. So much more vulnerable. Strong and yet weak. A heart that knew no armor. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 14c942f | Bucher liebten jeden, der sie aufschlug, schenkten Geborgenheit und Freundschaft und verlangten nichts dafur, gingen nie fort, niemals, selbst dann nicht, wenn man sie schlecht behandelte. | freundschaft geborgenheit liebe | Cornelia Funke | |
| ea5ad17 | I'm sorry, Silvertongue, but the fact is I don't believe anyone. You ought to know that by now. We're all liars when it serves our purpose. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 91b13af | So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match s.. | Nicholson Baker | ||
| 7966d9e | There is no good word for ; just as there is no good word for . is to as is to , and as is to , and as is to . | french organs sex | Nicholson Baker | |
| ec31cee | I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty. | Nicholson Baker | ||
| 4054efa | But: all journeys were return journeys. The farther one traveled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be animated by any scene, one was most oneself, a man in a bed surrounded by empty bottles. The man who says, "I've got a wife and kids" is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan. But he does not know - how could he? - that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing comp.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 93498b5 | Achati chuckled. "You may be surprised. Some might come in the hopes of being snatched away to a secret place ruled by exotic women." | Trudi Canavan | ||
| 8674dd9 | The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. | economics | Marshall Sahlins | |
| 752e9fc | Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for noth.. | capitalism labor work | Bob Black | |
| e7614c5 | I've matured. I have a much higher tolerance for boredom. | matured tolerance | Tom Perrotta | |
| f5a101d | Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything. | nobody-had-time world | Tom Perrotta | |
| 1379795 | The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy -- the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops. | writers writing | William Saroyan | |
| 2e8252f | He was under the impression that he belonged wherever there was something interesting to see. | William Saroyan | ||
| 4444fe6 | a fool forgetting all the ideals and joys I knew before, in my recent years of drinking and disappointment, what does he care if he hasn't got any money: he doesn't need any money, all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 4a33ba7 | I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. | Jack Kerouac |