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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 01093bd | She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all. | John Irving | ||
| 2984cf7 | Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick-of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love. | John Irving | ||
| 59df88c | What she might have told him was that taxidermy, like sex, is a very personal subject; the manner in which we impose it on others should be discreet. | John Irving | ||
| dd42d5e | Did people ever stop changing? They surprised you with fresh pain. Sometimes they surprised you with happiness, but the pain was the sharper surprise. There was no way to protect yourself from it. People could always change and always hurt you. Of course it went in the other direction too, you could hurt them when you didn't intend it and that too was out of your control. | Susan Minot | ||
| 47cb422 | It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: it has been complicated, and therefore perfected, by what time had done to it | Julie Orringer | ||
| a584bd0 | she and they were all the same under the skin, weren't they? | Michel Faber | ||
| f1300a3 | She holds her head as high as if she were beautiful, and holds her body as if she were strong. | Michel Faber | ||
| 0335e81 | The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention. | past | Michel Faber | |
| 2ffad37 | Society tempts me to its service by honours and riches and the good opinion of my fellows; but I am indifferent to their good opinion, I despise honours and I can do very well without riches. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 2ee1549 | They don't want clever men; clever men have ideas, and ideas cause trouble; they want men who have charm and tact and who can be counted on never to make a blunder. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 9bc6303 | What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you? | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| ccf46ea | Philip got up and knelt down to say his prayers. It was a cold morning, and he shivered a little; but he had been taught by his uncle that his prayers were more acceptable to God if he said them in his nightshirt than if he waited till he was dressed. This did not surprise him, for he was beginning to realize that he was a creature of a God who appreciated the discomfort of his worshippers. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 9a3e0bc | I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing. | soul | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 9db0604 | You've been brought up like a gentleman and a Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation.' Well, I know I'm not a Christian and I'm beginning to doubt whether I'm a gentleman,' said Philip. | temptation religion | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 1a62c93 | You cannot write unless you write much. | writing writers | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 2b046a8 | The advantage of living abroad is that, coming in contact with the manners and customs of the people among whom you live, you observe them from the outside and see that they have not the necessity which those who practice them believe. You cannot fail to discover that the beliefs which to you are self-evident to the foreigner are absurd. | W Somerset Maugham | ||
| ff0ff5a | It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 633ffe7 | He might have known that she would do this; she had never cared for him, she had made a fool of him from the beginning; she had no pity, she had no kindness, she had no charity. The only thing was to accept the inevitable. The pain he was suffering was horrible, he would sooner be dead than endure it; and the thought came to him that it would be better to finish with the whole thing: he might throw himself in the river or put his neck on a .. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 8ecb993 | Poor slut, I think she loves me,' said Gray, his eyes closed. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| abf2c15 | Larry sat with his arm stretched out along the top of the front seat. His shirt cuff was pulled back by his position and displayed his slim, strong wrist and the lower part of his brown arm lightly covered with fine hairs. The sun shone goldly upon them. Something in Isabel's immobility attracted my attention, and I glanced at her. She was so still that you might have thought her hypnotized. Her breath was hurried. Her eyes were fixed on th.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 1d895b7 | Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| b90f8f3 | As one tends to the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I d.. | reading | Diane Setterfield | |
| ce7613a | Peasants and princes, bailiffs and bakers' boys, merchants and mermaids, the figures were all immediately familiar. I had read these stories a hundred, a thousand, times before. They were stories everyone knew. But gradually, as I read, their familiarity fell away from them. They became strange. They became new. These characters were not the colored manikins I remembered from my childhood picture books, mechanically acting out the story one.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 2e9794f | Well, fuck them. Make it personal. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 3e70324 | Oil they would buy from anyone. From Satan. | satan oil | Christopher Buckley | |
| 30ada37 | Sometimes men are generous and forgiving, sometimes angry and blind. | Irving Stone | ||
| 43f3c1f | Our secret thoughts - do they ever show up? The small flame of our soul can be burning hot, but no one comes to its warmth. Passersby see only a small whiff going through the chimney. Don't we need to take care of that flame, cherish it and patiently wait until someone will come and sit at it, do we? | Irving Stone | ||
| 1dea639 | Nature always resists the artist at the beginning. | Irving Stone | ||
| 9d372c1 | Bleed me of art, and there won't be enough liquid left in me to spit! [Michelangelo Buonorotti] | michelangelo artist | Irving Stone | |
| 15d29a7 | Work in me more profound and abiding repentance; Give me the fullness of godly grief, that trembles and fears, yet ever trust and loves, which is ever powerful, and ever confident; Grant through the tears of repentance I may see more clearly the brightness and glories of the saving cross. | the-glories-of-the-cross repentance | Arthur Bennett | |
| 35ce7c5 | Never mind what you feel. Think. Watch. Think again. And then one step at a time to put things right. As a mason puts one block at a time. To build solid and good. So with thought. Think. Build one thought at a time. Think solid. Then act. Is it? | Richard Llewellyn | ||
| f6090e4 | More than half described Christians as literalistic, anti-intellectual, judgmental, self-righteous, and bigoted. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 495e406 | Salvation Is More About This Life than an Afterlife | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| e9f1e86 | They convinced our mothers that if a food item came in a bottle -- or a can or a box or a cellophane bag -- then it was somehow better for you than when it came to you free of charge via Mother Nature....An entire generation of us were introduced in our very first week to the concept that phony was better than real, that something manufactured was better than something that was right there in the room. (Later in life, this explained the pop.. | breastfeeding fast-food neocons | Michael Francis Moore | |
| e323807 | The Universal Laws of Health Care Systems: 1. "No matter how good the health care in a particular country, people will complain about it" 2. "No matter how much money is spent on health care, the doctors and hospitas will argue that it is not enough" 3. "The last reform always failed" -- | T.R. Reid | ||
| eb070c3 | The first school shooting that attracted the attention of a horrified nation occurred on March 24, 1998, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Two boys opened fire on a schoolyard full of girls, killing four and one female teacher. In the wake of what came to be called the Jonesboro massacre, violence experts in media and academia sought to explain what others called "inexplicable." For example, in a front-page Boston Globe story three days after the tra.. | Jackson Katz | ||
| b5ba18f | You still could go to some industry or some university or the government and if you could persuade them you had something on the ball--why, then, they might put up the cash after cutting themselves in on just about all of the profits. And, naturally, they'd run the show because it was their money and all had done was the sweating and the bleeding. | corporate-greed government-financing grants value-of-work rights finance | Clifford D. Simak | |
| 09e42db | Nothing is real unless it is observed | John Gribbin | ||
| b4fa075 | It isn't just that Bohr's atom with its electron "orbits" is a false picture; all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else." | John Gribbin | ||
| c977a77 | We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| feb3044 | Year followed struggling year for me, and all that time I read--I suppose few have ever read so. I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure... | Gene Wolfe | ||
| b7b198e | I have said that I cannot explain my desire for her, and it is true. I loved her with a love thirsty and desperate. I felt that we two might commit some act so atrocious that the world, seeing us, would find it irresistible. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 8ed04ec | words are tricky little bastards, and very rarely say what you want them to say [...] | Jonathan Coe | ||
| f2a4507 | Nothing so stubborn could change until it became more painful to avoid than to confront. | Edward St. Aubyn |