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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c67ff89 | From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense imaginable. But what is betrayal?...Betrayal means breaking ranks and breaking off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown. | Milan Kundera | ||
| bdb38c5 | Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, .. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 17c2cb5 | Seeing is limited by two borders: Strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 4b894b4 | No one can get reall drunk on a novle or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven's night, Bartok's Sonata for two Pianos and percussion or the Beatles' White Album? He loved mozart as much as rock. He considered music a liberating force, it liberated him from lonliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of hi body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends, He loved to dance an r.. | Kundera Milan | ||
| 3f05af9 | Tomas came to this conclusion: Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman). | Milan Kundera | ||
| 791e5f0 | Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces. At meetings I was earnest, enthusiastic, and committed; among friends, unconstrained and given to teasing; with Marketa, cynical and fitfully witty; and alone (and thinking of Marketa), unsure of myself and as agitated as a schoolboy. Was the last face the real one? No. They were all real: I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces .. | czech identity man-of-many-faces masks novel self youth | Milan Kundera | |
| b288ae7 | He took her in his arms and lifted her up. She looked at him and he noticed only now that her eyes were full of tears. He pressed her to him. She understood that he loved her and this suddenly filled her with sadness. She felt sad that he loved her so much, and she felt like crying. | milan-kundera | Milan Kundera | |
| 6a08267 | And it isn't enough for us to identify with our selves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death. Because only in this way can we regard ourselves not merely as a variant of a human prototype but as a being with its own irreplaceable essence. | Milan Kundera | ||
| c4840a5 | The eye: the window to the soul; the center of the face's beauty; the point where a person's identity is concentrated; but at the same time an optical instrument that requires constant washing, wetting, maintenance by a special liquid dosed with salt. So the gaze, the greatest marvel man possesses, is regularly interrupted by a mechanical washing action. | Milan Kundera | ||
| c33b1c2 | I spent hours putting that cassette together. To me, making a tape is like writing a letter - there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one. . . A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention, and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch. . . oh, there are loads of rules. (pg. 88-9) | Nick Hornby | ||
| 606ad6e | You know the worst thing about being rejected? The lack of control. If I could only control the when and how of being dumped by somebody, then it wouldn't seem as bad. But then, of course, it wouldn't be rejection, would it? It would be by mutual consent. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 4e27c8d | The difference between these people and me is that they finished college and I didn't; as a consequence, they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self confident and I am incontinent... they have opinions and I have lists. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 19a21ba | Marcus couldn't believe it. Dead. A dead duck. OK, he'd been trying to hit it on the head with a piece of sandwich, but he tried to do all sorts of things, and none of them had ever happened before. He'd tried to get te highest score on the Stargazer machine in the kebab shop on Hornsey Road--nothing. He's tried to read Nicky's thoughts by staring at the back of his head every maths lesson for a week--nothing. It really annoyed him that the.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 05a3dd2 | Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn't hear a squeak out of it. | life people | Nick Hornby | |
| aa27e1a | It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans(and it is real grief) is private - we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else - we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own. | fever-pitch football football-fan nick-hornby | Nick Hornby | |
| a553591 | It did not do to give your heart to a man so entirely, she thought. Men did not value what they came by easily. Once you loved, you laid yourself open to pain. | Alison Weir | ||
| 4fb4ce7 | In this martial world dominated by men, women had little place. The Church's teachings might underpin feudal morality, yet when it came to the practicalities of life, a ruthless pragmatism often came into play. Kings and noblemen married for political advantage, and women rarely had any say in how they or their wealth were to be disposed in marriage. Kings would sell off heiresses and rich widows to the highest bidder, for political or terr.. | eleanor-of-aquitaine feminism history life marriage medieval medieval-history oppression politics royalty serfdom slavery | Alison Weir | |
| 42f8449 | What does that mean, 'real'? Amn't I real, you? If you cut me, do I not bleed? If you piss me off, will I not kick you up the arse? | Tad Williams | ||
| c22ed68 | Confident. Cocky. Lazy. Dead. | guiding-words | Tad Williams | |
| 0ca3e50 | I'm tired of being lost and I'm tired of dying, so I'm going to try something different this time. | Tad Williams | ||
| 0af2c7b | Even the king's Erkynguard might have wished to be elsewhere, rather than here on this killing ground where duty brought them and loyalty prisoned them. Only the mercenaries were here by choice. To Simon, the minds of men who would come to this of their own will were suddenly as incomprehensible as the thoughts of spiders or lizards--less so, even, for the small creatures of the earth almost always fled from danger. These were madmen, Simon.. | Tad Williams | ||
| 86a611b | Lying in bed, half-covered by the blankets, I would drowsily ask why he had come to my door that night long ago. It had become a ritual for us, as it does for all lovers: where, when, why? remember...I understand even old people rehearse their private religion of how they first loved, most guarded of secrets. And he would answer, sleep blurring his words, "Because I had to." The question and the answer were always the same. Why? Because I h.. | lovers-love-story secrets | Margaret George | |
| 3c4b5f5 | A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance. To write in a new language, to penetrate its heart, no technology helps. You can't accelerate the process, you can't abbreviate it. The | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| bae59a7 | My grandfather always says that's what books are for. To travel without moving an inch. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| b2ef241 | This uneasiness comes over me from time to time, and I feel as if I've somehow been pieced together from two different puzzles. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 624bdcd | In a book I am reading the author talks about word people versus fist people. As if words could not also be fists. Aren't often fists. | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| 5332457 | What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for--and to do it so unconsciously. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| e3aa3f4 | If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away. | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| f859775 | Sure I worried that writing about it might be a mistake. You write a thing down because you're hoping to get a hold on it. You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly not to lose them to time. To oblivion. But there's always the danger of the opposite happening. Losing the memory of the experience itself to the memory of writing about it. Like people whose memories of places they've traveled to are in fact only m.. | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| d173442 | Never trust a man who carries a handkerchief, I always say. One of many prejudicial rules of thumb. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| f36adc5 | Only the dead stay 17 forever. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| fd9d143 | She gave me this look - she might have been watching from a lifeboat as the ship went down. Or maybe it was the other way around. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| c3df916 | When he woke up the next day, the world was still there, and things were already moving forward, like the great karmic wheel of Indian mythology that kills every living thing in its path. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| f20dccd | Her partially open lips now opened wide, and her soft, fragrant tongue entered his mouth, where it began a relentless search for unformed words, for a secret code engraved there. Tengo's own tongue responded unconsciously to this movement and soon their tongues were like two young snakes in a spring meadow, newly wakened from their hibernation and hungrily intertwining, each led on by the other's scent. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 9ee581a | But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abyss of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 7ccba2a | They put up with such strenuous training, and where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish? | Haruki Murakami | ||
| d3b8355 | Most of the psychological differences between men and women seem to come from differences in their reproductive system | psychology reproduction | Haruki Murakami | |
| 8eef185 | It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. | imagination responsibilities | Haruki Murakami | |
| 40e709d | It was as if - this something I thought of only later, of course - she was gently peeling back one layer after another that covered a person's heart, a very sensual feeling. | japan | Haruki Murakami | |
| cc51126 | To deal with something unhealthy, a person needs to be as healthy as possible. That's my motto. In other words, an unhealthy soul requires a healthy body. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| df8a8d0 | A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| bc24c40 | It's a waste of time to think about things you can't know, and things you can't confirm even if you know them. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| d6de6d2 | People are by and large a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel's always linked to the lie of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 9d5b558 | And, well, mine are kind of on the heavy side anyway. The first day or two, I don't want to do ANYTHING. Make sure you keep away from me then.' I'd like to, but how can I tell?' I asked. O.K., I'll wear a hat for a couple of days after my period starts. A red one. That should work,' she said with a laugh. 'If you see me on the street and I'm wearing a red hat, don't talk to me, just run away. | japanese | Haruki Murakami |