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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f90a6db | Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert. | fremen-saying | Frank Herbert | |
| f4553e5 | Ambitions tend to Remain undisturbed by Realities. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 683d8db | Among my father's most important messages were that governments lie to protect themselves and they make incredibly stupid decisions. Years after the publication of Dune, Richard M. Nixon provided ample proof. Dad said that Nixon did the American people an immense favor in his attempt to cover up the Watergate misdeeds. By amplified example, albeit unwittingly, the thirty-seventh president of the United States taught people to question their.. | Frank Herbert | ||
| ba24405 | We came from Caladan--a paradise world for our form of life. There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind--we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life--we went soft, we lost our edge. | Frank Herbert | ||
| cd5b13b | There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow vertical opening where a single board had been removed from a tall wooden fence. Each day a wild ass of the desert passed outside the fence and across the narrow opening--first the nose, then the head, the forelegs, the long brown back, the hindlegs, and lastly the tail. One day, the man leaped to his feet with the light of discovery in his eyes and he shouted for all who could h.. | Frank Herbert | ||
| fbcd5ac | A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. This every sister of the Bene Gesserit knows. To begin your study of the life of Maud'Dib, then, take care that you first place him in his time: born in the 57th year of the Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV. And take the most special care that you locate Maud'Dib in his place: the planet Arrakis. Do not be deceived by the fact that he was born on Caladan an.. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 19db57b | You have to appreciate life before you want to preserve it," she said. "And it's the survivors who maintain the most light and poignant hold upon the beauties of living. Women know this more often than men because birth is the reflection of death." | death life preservation survivor | Frank Herbert | |
| 4ba682d | Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner. Ahhh, well, if patterns teach me anything it's that patterns are repeated. | Frank Herbert | ||
| f0ff437 | Why is it that foolishness repeats itself with such monotonous precision? | Frank Herbert | ||
| 453b4bc | A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 2277c03 | The past is no farther away than your pillow. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 502b7e0 | She asked me to tell her what it is to rule," Paul said. "And I said that one commands. And she said I had some unlearning to do." She hit a mark there right enough, Hawat thought. He nodded for Paul to continue. "She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men." | Frank Herbert | ||
| a73eff8 | Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 65fb8f5 | What are letters?" "Kinda like mediaglyphics except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read. But you can use 'em to make short words for long words." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a0f9955 | you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake' ... | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 87dc702 | So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us? | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9181b87 | The problem of the librarian is that books are multi-dimensional in their subject matter but must be ordered on one-dimensional shelves. | librarian | Neal Stephenson | |
| f2e4ef0 | In a manner familiar to anyone who had ever packed a car for a family trip, genial confusion gave way to impatience, then furious ultimatums, then ill-advised snap decisions. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 10653c9 | The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9c88fe2 | My men think you are dead now, and won't waste balls on you," Jack said. "In fact I have let you live, but for one purpose only: so that you can make your way back to Paris and tell them the following: that the deed you are about to witness was done for a woman, whose name I will not say, for she knows who she is; and that it was done by 'Half-Cocked' Jack Shaftoe, L'Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak: Quicksilver!" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5e6bfef | Maybe I can quit drinking one of these days. They all say that, don't they?" "It takes about three years." "Three years?" He looked shocked. "Usually it does. It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses. All the people you used to know well will get to be just a little strange. You won't even like most of them, and they won't like you too well." | Raymond Chandler | ||
| f03522e | He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| c3b7bcb | Life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, it's our own expectations that crush us." -- from Skippy Dies" | quotes | Paul Murray | |
| 7afd089 | Maybe it's not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too--some sort of virtues--but we don't care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they're good. We care about them because they're not admirable, because they're us, and because g.. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| a5b15c6 | One often feels exalted, expanded, in his presence. He is not one of those egotists who miniaturize others. He is the opposite kind of egotist, driven by grandiosity rather than greed, and if he insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and profound than you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in.. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 72c7eb0 | Do you know what hope and fear have in common?... They both hold great power. But that power is dependent on both fear and hope together. Think about it. Without the fear of something terrible, you cannot have the hope that it won't happen, you see? Without having hope for something wonderful, you can't have any fear of losing it. They work together, the two most powerful forces we possess. | Ted Dekker | ||
| 386acee | Though being freed from sin, most remain slaves, blinded and gagged by their own deception. | Ted Dekker | ||
| f636d51 | I once thought I defeated the evil in my heart. I learned something: We can face our demons, burn them up, stomp them into the ground. I turned mine to ashes. But even if you destroy the evidence of evil, you can't heal your heart. Not by yourself. | Ted Dekker | ||
| 1e29fd1 | Have you eaten?' I asked Diesel. When?' Recently.' No. | Janet Evanovich | ||
| a4fe435 | And since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled. | Truman Capote | ||
| 5c6babf | Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| e33f122 | Lux's frequent forged excuses from phys. ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid 's and 's of her mother's signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching 's reaching out for each other over the ditch of the and barbed-wire . | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| fcc0f68 | Two things mania did were to keep you up all night and to enable nonstop sex: pretty much the definition of college. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 3addba9 | The worst part was that, as the years passed, these memories became, in the way you kept them in a secret box in your head, taking them out every so often to turn them over and over, something like dear possessions. They were the key to your unhappiness. They were the evidence that life wasn't fair. If you weren't a lucky child, you didn't know you weren't lucky until you got older. And then it was all you ever thought about. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 909da79 | Simple people with less education, sophistication, social ties, and professional obligations seem in general to have somewhat less difficulty in facing this final crisis than people of affluence who lose a great deal more in terms of material luxuries, comfort, and number of interpersonal relationships. It appears that people who have gone through a life of suffering, hard work, and labor, who have raised their children and been gratified i.. | Elisabeth Kübler-Ross | ||
| d3dff6b | When all you want is a person's body and you don't really want their mind, heart or spirit, you have reduced a person to a thing. | Stephen R. Covey | ||
| de3440e | You have to water the flowers you want to grow. | Stephen R. Covey | ||
| c142463 | We cannot always do great things in life, but we can do small things with great love. | Dan Millman | ||
| 5897eaf | focus all your energy not on struggling with the old, but on building the new. | Dan Millman | ||
| f8a718d | embody what you teach, and teach only what you have embodied. | Dan Millman | ||
| 39dc468 | We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed - begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I've never mastered it - I only know how true it is; that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life. | Truman Capote | ||
| c6b41a6 | Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany's, but almost. | Truman Capote | ||
| f5d4393 | the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 445996d | It was before him again in its completeness--the choice in which she was content to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dulness of the talk, in the freedom of speech which never arrived at wit and the freedom of act which never made for romance. | Edith Wharton |