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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6e5021e | His weakness in this game, and in life, is that he's never prepared for how others will act. They are predetermined but too complex to solve or predict, and there are rules that he is just no good at applying. | turing | Janna Levin | |
| b7348b0 | Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance. | south-carolina spring small-town nostalgia | Pat Conroy | |
| bb19dde | The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life. | passion skills hobby | Pat Conroy | |
| e3eb0ad | I blaze with a deep sullen magic, smell lust like a heron on fire; all words I form into castles then storm them with soldiers of air. What I seek is not there for asking. My armies are fit and well trained. This poet will trust her battalions to fashion her words into blades. At dawn I shall ask them for beauty, for proof that their training went well. At night I shall beg their forgiveness as I cut their throats by the hill. My navies adv.. | Pat Conroy | ||
| 057799a | Her secret, we would discover, was that once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers, that the mind can never break off from the journey. | Pat Conroy | ||
| 8a30c55 | Perfect doesn't just mean happy. Perfect can have lots of different parts. - Niles. | south-of-broad | Pat Conroy | |
| ef295d5 | Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real. | Pat Conroy | ||
| c93318f | You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves. | writer novelist write | Pat Conroy | |
| a2712d1 | Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else. | mentoring teaching | Pat Conroy | |
| 6966a6d | I certainly should have,' he agrees, smiling and thinking what an absurd and universally-accepted bit of nonsense it is, that your best friends must necessarily be the ones who best understand you. As if there weren't far too much understanding in the world already; above all, that understanding between lovers, celebrated in song and story, which is actually such torture that no two of them can bear it without frequent separations or fights.. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| ebc5913 | His life has been lived, so far, within narrow limits and he is quite naive about most kinds of experience; he fears it and yet is wildly eager for it. To reassure himself, he converts it into epic myth as fast as it happens. He is forever play-acting. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| ba72218 | Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 88bccbc | The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 516a969 | What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can old man, -- you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind,- I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| b3291af | It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 88eb834 | Yet, for my part, I was never usually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater's heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a m.. | music prophetic vices | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 22735ab | Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel the cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 100895f | There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters. | materialism | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 38025b8 | How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. | words literature reading | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 8f4a828 | If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 95f30b6 | The fate of the country... does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning. | vote | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 538ec3c | The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is mo.. | money work occupations labor working | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 829639a | Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand...Simplify, simplify! | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 681ade6 | I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a m.. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 1731a28 | Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another. | Terry Eagleton | ||
| 6b21ece | It's completely logical," explained the Dodecahedron. "The more you want, the less you get, and the less you get, the more you have. Simple arithmetic, that's all. Suppose you had something and added something to it. What would that make?" "More," said Milo quickly. "Quite correct," he nodded. "Now suppose you had something and added nothing to it. What would you have?" "The same," he answered again, without much conviction. "Splendid," cr.. | logic | Norton Juster | |
| 94c570f | Why, did you know that if a beaver two feet long with a tail a foot and a half long can build a dam twelve feet high and six feet wide in two days, all you would need to build Boulder Dam is a beaver sixty-eight feet long with a fifty-one-foot tail?" "Where would you find a beaver that big?" grumbled the Humbug as his pencil point snapped. "I'm sure I don't know," he replied, "but if you did, you'd certainly know what to do with him." | Norton Juster | ||
| 4a3d4b7 | Being lost is not a matter of knowing where you are. It's a matter of knowing where you aren't. | Norton Juster | ||
| d374084 | Dictionopolis is the place where all the words in the world come from. They're grown right here in our orchards." "I didn't know that words grew on trees," said Milo timidly. "Where did you think they grew?" shouted the earl irritably. A small crowd began to gather to see the little boy who didn't know that letters grew on trees. "I didn't know they grew at all," admitted Milo even more timidly. Several people shook their heads sadly. "Well.. | Norton Juster | ||
| d4be2d9 | Did I just kill someone?" "You can't kill a dead person," Callum said. "Makes no sense." | Maureen Johnson | ||
| 7fa988c | I dumped out the bag and found what had been inside was a bunched-up police uniform, complete with the vest. "Where did you get this?" Boo asked. "It's Callum's," he said. "What's he wearing?" "At the moment, not much of anything. Put it on." I noticed Book perk up a bit at this piece of information." | Maureen Johnson | ||
| 3ea14d5 | but somehow when it's real, when it's your life... that person can feel even farther off and more unobtainable than an actual celebrity. Proximity doesn't breed familiarity | life maureen-johnson proximity | Maureen Johnson | |
| c619999 | What did you do?" she hissed. "Me?" "Don't be a dick," she said. "That ship has sailed. Hang on. We can't fight yet. Where's my hug?" | Maureen Johnson | ||
| 11ef7a5 | You'd been petting a stuffed dog?' she said 'A dead one?' 'It was a really well stuffed dog' I clarified. 'I have seen some bad taxidermy. This was top-notch work. It would have fooled anyone. | Maureen Johnson | ||
| e5d7ff6 | People were freaked out, but they showed it in weird ways. Back home, people would have been weeping and doing a lot of very public group hugs. At Wexford people just aggressively pretended nothing had happened. | grief | Maureen Johnson | |
| a259714 | Albert Ellingham said knowledge was his religion and libraries were his church, so he built a church. | Maureen Johnson | ||
| fcaee3d | Dr. Everest, got up and gave us a little pep talk. Mostly it boiled down to the fact that it was autumn, and everyone was back, and while that was a great thing, people better not get cocky or misbehave or he'd personally kill us all. He didn't actually say those words, but that was the subtext. | Maureen Johnson | ||
| 9fadeb3 | I could pretend, at least, and if I pretended long enough, maybe I could make it into a reality. | Maureen Johnson | ||
| 3f284c7 | I still have a whopping bad case of what you call scag magnetism. I thought i had gotten rid of it there, but it looks like scary guys still materialize from thin air in my presence. They are drawn to me. I am the North Pole, and they are the explorers of love. | Maureen Johnson | ||
| aa383da | Which is both gross and breathtakingly romantic. He could always have just gone upstairs and brushed his teeth, but he stayed and lurked by the fish for me. | Maureen Johnson | ||
| 6c735dd | Life is ridiculous. It's not our fault. | Blake Nelson | ||
| dbd7b92 | he began to speak to me, not in the jocular way of visitors to the menagerie but rather as one speaks to the wind or to the waves crashing on a beach, uttering that which must be said but which must not be heard by anyone. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| a0f407e | The sign stopped me-- or rather, this text stopped me. Words are my profession; I seized these and demanded that they explain themselves, that they cease to be ambiguous. | words | Daniel Quinn | |
| feb7586 | You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. | Daniel Quinn |