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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d67f62b | There's nothing special in the world. Nothing magic. Just physics. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 7471752 | You have a class of young men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| cfb0fbf | Peter used to say, "The only thing an artist can do is describe his own face." You're doomed to being you. This, he says, leaves su free to draw anything, since we're only drawing ourselves. Your handwriting. The way you walking. Which China pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a Diary." | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| f9c10fb | They're just words is all. Powerless. Vocabulary. Dialogue. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 134b70f | Your dad was in a street gang?" My adopted dad was an accountant for a big Fortune 500 corporation. Him, me, and my adopted mom lived in the suburbs in an English Tudor house with a gigantic basement where he fiddled with model trains. The other dads were lawyers and research chemists, but they all ran model trains. Every weekend they could, they'd load into a family van and cruise into the city for research. Snapping pictures of gang membe.. | palahniuk snuff | chuck palahniuk | |
| 7f04c96 | MY BOSS SENDS me home because of all the dried blood on my pants, and I am overjoyed. The hole punched through my cheek doesn't ever heal. I'm going to work, and my punched-out eye sockets are two swollen-up black bagels around the little piss holes I have left to see through. Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little H.. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| b111a9b | Just because it's anal intercourse doesn't mean it's not love. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 571baa1 | You wake up, and that's enough. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| f9fe4a1 | It doesn't matter for crap that you've got three years of sobriety or that you finally look good in a two-piece bathing suit or you've met that perfect someone and you've fallen deeply, wildly, passionately in love. Today, as you pick up your dry cleaning, fax those reports, fold your laundry, or wash the dinner dishes, something you'd never expect is already stalking you. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 0b7f5ba | Nevertheless, if you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane. A child allows us to revisit the excitement we once felt about, well... everything. A generation later, our grandkids bump up our enthusiasm yet again. Reproducing is a kind of booster shot to keep us loving life. | reproduction | Chuck Palahniuk | |
| b3361d4 | Three weeks and I hadn't slept. Three weeks without sleep, and everything becomes an out-of-body-experience. My doctor said, "Insomnia is just the symptom of something larger. Find out what's actually wrong. Listen to your body." I just wanted to sleep. I wanted little blue Amytal Sodium capsules, 200-milligram-sized. I wanted red-and-blue Tuinal bullet capsules, lipstick-red Seconal." | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| e65ebe1 | Committing suicide just seemed to be another aggressive plan to fix her life. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| fe6934a | Just for the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 82157a5 | Brandy is so attractive you could chop her head off and put it on blue velvet in the window at Tiffany's and somebody would buy it for a million dollars. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 5c077ec | Prepare to evacuate soul in five, in four, three, two, one. | soul | Chuck Palahniuk | |
| 87bbec9 | Artificial over stimulations seemed like the perfect way to stifle a generation of young people who wanted more and more from a world where less and less was available. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 8b8250d | Give me release. I'm tired of this world of appearances. Pigs that only look fat. Families that look happy. Give me deliverance. From what only looks like generosity. What only looks like love. Flash. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 5846ddf | Quit trying to fix your life. Deal with your one big issue. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| b7734f7 | A lot of young people try to impress the world and buy too many things," the doorman said." | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| a4e4930 | When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep, and you're never really awake. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| be59602 | Anymore, no one's mind is their own. You can't concentrate. You can't think. There's always some noise worming in. Singers shouting. Dead people laughing. Actors crying. All those little doses of emotion. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| f319dfe | Cat's friends seemed like very sweet girls," Dad says. "They were the bomb," I say fervently, and he looks back at me with raised eyebrows. "'The bomb' is a good thing? Like 'sick'? "Duh," I reply, and Dad lets out a sigh. "Thirteen-year-olds should come with subtitles," he says, turning onto our street." | language oldies sick subtitles youngsters | Maya Gold | |
| 01440ad | When the odds are hopeless, when all seems to be lost, then is the time to be calm, to make a show of authority - at least of indifference | calm calmness defeat | Ian Fleming | |
| 4f632a8 | Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored. | Ian Fleming | ||
| 0f75173 | Just as, at least in one religion, accidia is the first of the cardinal sins, so bordom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned. | bond boredom | Ian Fleming | |
| 4329b9c | In his mind he fingered the necklace of the days to come. | poignant | Ian Fleming | |
| 32bae08 | Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity. | naked nakedness | P.D. James | |
| bc7e77a | There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| 99c9350 | Alone in my room, wrapped in a blanket, I whimpered and talked aloud to myself, recalling the lost glory of my youth when I considered myself, and was considered by others, a bright and capable person. It seemed that was all gone now. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| 7ba5591 | He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| a794ded | I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in. I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back...And to be honest: I wasn't really angry. Not anymore. I had left my anger somewhere long ago. Put it down on a park.. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| 63b3576 | 19. THE WALL OF DICTIONARIES BETWEEN MY MOTHER AND THE WORLD GETS TALLER EVERY YEAR Sometimes pages of the dictionaries come loose and gather at her feet, shallon, shalop, shallot, shallow, shalom, sham, shaman, shamble, like the petals of an immense flower. When I was little, I thought that the pages on the floor were words she would never be able to use again, and I tried to tape them back in where they belonged, out of fear that one day .. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| ccbf62d | So I decided to do it [hike the Appalachian Trail]. More rashly, I announced my intention - told friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those who knew me. Then I bought some books... It required only a little light reading in adventure books and almost no imagination to envision circumstances in which I would find myself caught in a tightening circle of hunger-emboldened wolves, staggering a.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| bd795f2 | Dogs don't like me. It is a simple law of the universe, like gravity. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have never passed a dog that didn't act as if it thought I was about to take its Alpo. Dogs that have not moved from the sofa in years will, at the sniff of me passing outside, rise in fury and hurl themselves at shut windows. I have seen tiny dogs, no bigger than a fluffy slipper, jerk little old ladies off their feet and drag them.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 76c83ae | It's a bit burned," my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something -- a much-loved pet perhaps -- salvaged from a tragic house fire. "But I think I scraped off most of the burned part," she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream -- s.. | humor parents | Bill Bryson | |
| 6d93d52 | A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. | technology | Bill Bryson | |
| 0839173 | To tell you the truth, I'm amazed we've come this far," he said, and I agreed. We had hiked 500 miles, a million and a quarter steps, since setting off from Amicalola. We had grounds to be proud. We were real hikers now. We had shit in the woods and slept with bears. We had become, we would forever be, mountain men." | Bill Bryson | ||
| bb4c29a | Columbus's real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal Sout.. | columbus columbus-day | Bill Bryson | |
| 087e369 | We're going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn't produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we're going to concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We're going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandes.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| b7e0c76 | The dandelion was long popularly known as the 'pissabed' because of its supposed diuretic properties, and other names in everyday use included 'mare's fart', 'naked ladies', 'twitch-ballock', 'hounds-piss', 'open arse', and 'bum-towel'. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7f1dd51 | it occurred to me, not for the first time, what a remarkably small world Britain is. That is its glory, you see--that it manages at once to be intimate and small scale, and at the same time packed to bursting with incident and interest. I am constantly filled with admiration at this--at the way you can wander through a town like Oxford and in the space of a few hundred yards pass the home of Christopher Wren, the buildings where Halley foun.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 88e5edd | London isn't a place at all. It's a million little places. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 749691b | Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, "You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass." Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of ti.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9faa568 | As we parted at the Natural History Museum in London, I asked Richard Fortey how science ensures that when one person goes there's someone ready to take his place. He chuckled rather heartily at my naivete. 'I'm afraid it's not as if we have substitutes sitting on the bench somewhere waiting to be called in to play. When a specialist retires or, even more unfortunately, dies, that can bring a stop to things in that field, sometimes for a ve.. | science | Bill Bryson |