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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ea661fd | The color of his pallor, however, was a curiously basic white - unmixed, that is, with the greens and yellows of guilt or abject contrition. It was very like the standard bloodlessness in the face of a small boy who loves animals to distraction, all animals, and who has just seen his favourite, bunny-loving sister's expression as she opened the box containing his birthday present to her - a freshly caught young cobra, with a red ribbon tied.. | J. D. Salinger | ||
| fd4b5f7 | His date kept saying to him, "How horrible . . . Don't, darling. Please, don't. Not here." Imagine giving somebody a feel and telling them about a guy committing suicide at the same time! They killed me." | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 46daddd | Postponed pain is among the most abominable kind to experience. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 315cc9b | In my opinion, if you really want to know, half of the nastiness in the world is stirred up by people who aren't using their true egos. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 21ec304 | I believe I essentially remain what I have always been--a narrator, but one with extremely pressing personal needs. I want to introduce, I want to describe, I want to distribute mementos, amulets, I want to break out my wallet and pass around snapshots, I want to follow my nose. In this mood I don't dare go anywhere near the shortstory form. It eats up little fat undetatched writers like me. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 75d2f12 | Then I'd throw my automatic down the elevator shaft-after I'd wiped off all the fingerprints and all. Then I'd crawl back up to my room and call up Jane and have her come over and bandage up my guts. I pictured her holding a cigarette for me to smoke while I was bleeding and all. The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I'm not kidding. | holden-caulfied | J.D. Salinger | |
| d5819a4 | He said he was - this is exactly what he said - he said he was sitting at the table in the kitchen, all by himself, drinking a glass of ginger ale and eating sal and reading ' bey and Son', and all of a sudden Jesus sat down in the other chair and asked if he could have a small glass of ginger ale. A glass, mind you - that's exactly what he said. I mean he says things like that, and yet he thinks he's perfectly qualified to give a lot .. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| cfcffdc | This is too grand to be said (so I'm just the man to say it), but I can't be my brother's brother for nothing, and I know - not always, but I know - there is no single thing I do that is more important than going into that awful Room 307. There isn't one girl in there, including the Terrible Miss Zabel, who is not as much my sister as Boo Boo or Franny. They may shine with the misinformation of the ages, but they shine. This thought manages.. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| b2b7802 | I've read this same sentence about twenty times since you came in." Anybody else except Ackley would've taken the goddamn hint. Not him though... "What the hellya reading?" "Goddamn book." | j-d-salinger the-catcher-in-the-rye | J. D. Salinger | |
| debf739 | When I'd checked into the bathroom with Seymour's diary under my arm, and had carefully secured the door behind me, I spotted a message almost immediately. It was not, however, in Seymour's handwriting but, unmistakably, in my sister Boo Boo's. With or without soap, her handwriting was always almost indecipherably minute, and she had easily managed to post the following message up on the mirror; 'Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like A.. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 5e3152b | I'm sorry, I'm awful, I've just felt so terribly destructive all week. It's awful. I'm horrible. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 1ef7983 | There's hardly anybody who doesn't hate somebody now, and nobody at all whom somebody doesn't hate. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| ea96b08 | And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 9c9c06c | Lover?" se asks, her voice reminding me of someone human." | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| f96a275 | Disappear here. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 40adb1a | Nothing was affirmative, the term "generosity of spirit" applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer and issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire-meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world i.. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 3b15d5f | Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in ... this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged ... | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 1248513 | There was a song I heard when I was in Los Angeles by a local group. The song was called 'Los Angeles' and the words and images were so harsh and bitter that the song would reverberate in my mind for days. The images, I later found out, were personal and no one I knew shared them. The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. Ima.. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 63fe437 | The conservatives won. They turned the Democrats into a center-right party. They got the entire country singing 'God Bless America,' stress on God, at every single major-league baseball game. They won on every fucking front, but they especially won culturally, and especially regarding babies. In 1970 it was cool to care about the planet's future and not have kids. Now the one thing everyone agrees on, right and left, is that it's beautiful .. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 036c3fc | Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 3b79dae | He was remembering the nights he'd sat upstairs with one or both of his boys or with his girl in the crook of his arm, their damp bath-smelling heads hard against his ribs as he read aloud to them from "Black Beauty" or "The Chronicles of Narnia". How his voice alone, its palpable resonance, had made them drowsy. These were evenings, and there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, when nothing traumatic enough to leave a scar had befallen.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 3ed6ae3 | Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the drama of being her -- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 68ad1ec | There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don't, there's no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also mean.. | identity secrets trust | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 1b82e0b | The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media will only refer to partial birth abortion as 'what its opponents refer to as partial birth abortions.' What do its supporters call it? Casual Fridays? Bean-with-bacon potato chip dip? Uh . . . Steve? | Ann Coulter | ||
| c7fb56e | We were defined by what we did. What we had to do. I think this is why guys like football, and why they join the army, because as long as you are playing the game or following orders you do not have to figure out who you really are. | Pete Hautman | ||
| b590704 | Sylvie had an amazing life, but she didn't get to live it very often. | humor | Roderick Townley | |
| f1896bd | The sun shines. Readers read. | Roderick Townley | ||
| 15492f6 | It means 'female dog,'" I'd explained to my sisters, "but it also means 'a woman who's crabby and won't let you be yourself." | David Sedaris | ||
| f6b6335 | The only bright spot in the entire evening was the presence of Kevin "Tubby" Matchwell, the eleven-year-old porker who tackled the role of Santa with a beguiling authenticity. The false beard tended to muffle his speech, but they could hear his chafing thighs all the way to the North Pole." | christmas humor santa | David Sedaris | |
| c079207 | Use the word 'ya'll' and before you knew it, you'd find yourself in a haystack french-kissing an underage goat | i-repeat-this-quote-all-the-time say-y-all-and-i-ll-actually-puke | David Sedaris | |
| d7164f1 | The combination of ammonia and chloride can be lethal but I've discovered it can work miracles as long as you keep telling yourself, "I want to love, I want to live..." | funny humor joke | David Sedaris | |
| 6072e39 | If there'd been anything decent in the house, anything approaching real ice cream, it would have been eaten long ago. I knew this, so I bypassed the freezer in the kitchen and the secondary freezer in the toolshed and went to the neglected, tundralike one in the basement. Behind the chickens bought years earlier on sale, and the roasts encased like chestnuts in blood-tinted frost, I found a tub of ice milk, vanilla-flavored, and the color o.. | David Sedaris | ||
| 011f2c4 | I'm not a misogynist. I'm a misanthrope. I hate everyone equally. | David Sedaris | ||
| 30d33b1 | But at the end of every show we would realize that true happiness often lies where you very least expect it. It might arrive in a form of a gentle breeze or a handful of peanuts, but when it came, we would seize it with our own brand of folksy wisdom. | David Sedaris | ||
| 2f3b6de | Don't be so goddamn proper. Don't be such a fucking saint. | James Ellroy | ||
| cc2ff41 | If a person were to concentrate all his will power on a certain end, then he would achieve it. That's all. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| e5ec64b | Ask the river about it, my friend! Listen to it, laugh about it! Do you then really think that you have committed your follies in order to spare your son them? Can you then protect your son from Samsara? How? Through instruction, through prayers, through exhortation? My dear friend, have you forgotten that instructive story about Siddhartha, the Brahmin's son, whiuch you once told me here? Who protected Siddhartha the Samana from Samsara, f.. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| eaf0c15 | and gradually his face assumed the expressions which are so often found among rich people - the expressions of discontent, of sickliness, of displeasure, of idleness, of lovelessness. Slowly the soul sickness of the rich crept over him. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| 189c1d2 | it would be better for our country and the world in general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with blind obsession for new war. | pacifism peace reason war | Hermann Hesse | |
| 7be62b7 | l~ lmr 'n ykwn qdran `l~ ltslsl l~ dkhl nfsh tmman mthl lslHf@. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| 1d6dfde | What is the world doing? Have new gods been discovered, new laws, new freedoms? Who cares! But up here a primrose is blossoming and bearing silver fuzz on its leaves, and the light sweet wind is singing below me in the poplars, and between my eyes and heaven a dark golden bee is hovering and humming--I care about that. It is humming the song of happiness, humming the song of eternity. Its song is my history of the world. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| 778adca | You will learn it,' said Vasudeva, 'but not from me. The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it too. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths.' ...Was it not a comedy, a strange and stupid thing, this repetition, this course of events in a fateful circle?... The river laughed. Yes, that was how it was... | Hermann Hesse | ||
| da16c12 | When a person seeks," Siddhartha said, "it can easily happen that his eye sees only the thing he is seeking; he is incapable of finding anything, of allowing anything to enter into him, because he is always thinking only of what he is looking for, because he has a goal, because he is possessed by his goal. Seeking means having a goal. Finding means being free, being open, having no goal. You, Venerable One, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for,.. | seeking truth | Hermann Hesse | |
| c5dbb21 | Romantic souvenirs had a way of attaching themselves to one when one wanted to move on, but they were not to be taken seriously. | Hermann Hesse |