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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1721343 | It's a queer thing is a man's soul. It is the whole of him. Which means it is the unknown him, as well as the known. It seems to me just funny, professors and Benjamins fixing the functions of the soul. Why, the soul of man is a vast forest, and all Benjamin intended was a neat back garden. And we've all got to fit into his kitchen garden scheme of things. Hail Columbia ! The soul of man is a dark forest. The Hercynian Wood that scared the.. | the-unconscious virtues | D.H. Lawrence | |
| e4f81d3 | I'm pretty healthy and I don't mind the idea of dying, but I also don't want to get mowed down by some freaky high school kid in a trench coat who's high on Zoloft and has traded in his Xbox for a semiautomatic. | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| aee2b5e | Have you ever bullied a wave? | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| 96f5866 | We don't forgive people because they deserve it," she said. "We forgive them because we deserve it." | Richard Russo | ||
| 69da3c6 | An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental. | morality | Richard Russo | |
| ba26717 | It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated. | Richard Russo | ||
| 1a35e39 | One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them. | Richard Russo | ||
| 195547e | Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle. | Richard Ford | ||
| 8ca2e24 | His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 3c1a06d | She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| af5020a | Christ, he thinks, by my age I ought to know. You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook; somehow he thinks that's what Norris is, and he feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme, the cardinal in the mud, the humiliating tussle to .. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 2facca6 | an elegant woman, with a refinement that makes mere prettiness seem redundant. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 394138f | You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.' 'No.' More shakes his head. 'I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth - but you will put words into it. | humor | Hilary Mantel | |
| e9c9521 | He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 5d99f39 | A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 3c681db | He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything they need to know. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 42fcfe3 | We do not work for men. We work for the land and the people. We do not even work for money. | Alan Paton | ||
| 72bf034 | I got here the same way the coin did. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 0c9c0bd | Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone. She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said. | strangers | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 8308e62 | The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| c7ca192 | Men do not turn from God so easily. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot e fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of him. | faith god | Cormac McCarthy | |
| e5f8a39 | How do I know you're one of the good guys? You dont. You'll have to take a shot. Are you carrying the fire? Am I what? Carrying the fire. You're kind of weirded out, arent you? No. Just a little. Yeah. That's okay. So are you? What, carrying the fire? Yes. Yeah, We are. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| e445ccb | There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there. | confusion | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 1b18ec1 | The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? ... The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the .. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| b79ebf6 | I've seen all I want to see and I know all I want to know. I just look forward to death. He might hear you, Suttree said. I wisht he would, said the ragpicker. He glared out across the river with his redrimmed eyes at the town where dusk was settling in. As if death might be hiding in that quarter. No one wants to die. Shit, said the ragpicker. Here's one that's sick of livin. Would you give all you own? The ragman eyed him suspiciously but.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 01d901e | in dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras seem commonplace. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 59f3976 | Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| f5cb46d | He looked into those blue eyes like a man seeking some vision of the increate future of the universe. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 229cf5c | White pussy is nothin but trouble. | women white-people | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 3b4e4cc | In the spaniards heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love for truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance. And a deep conviction that nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| f08e6c8 | This is a terrible place to die in. Where's a good one? | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 5d6c4e4 | If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay. | war | Cormac McCarthy | |
| d44a195 | And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 803be53 | If fate is the law, then is fate also subject to that law? At some point we cannot escape naming responsibility. It's in our nature. Sometimes I think we are all like that myopic coiner at his press, taking the blind slugs one by one from the tray, all of us bent so jealously at our work, determined that not even chaos be outside of our own making. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| eec6388 | Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that mazeis itself an enslavement for it voids every alternate and binds one ever more tightly in to the constraints that make a life. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| e4f8944 | The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 94bc7d3 | There was a sharp crack from somewhere on the mountain. Then another. It's just a tree falling, he said. It's okay. The boy was looking at the dead roadside trees. It's okay, the man said. All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| b1bfa49 | You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of - of all things - an "idea for a story," and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that .. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 7f175f9 | Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. | Annie Dillard | ||
| bcfc51b | The world did not have me in mind; it had no mind. It was a coincidental collection of things and people, of items, an I myself was one such item...the things in the world did not necessarily cause my overwhelming feelings; the feelings were inside me, beneath my skin, behind my ribs, withing my skull. They were even, to some extent, under my control. | Annie Dillard | ||
| bd49a23 | I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' 'No,' said the priest, 'not if you did not know.' 'Then why,' asked the Eskimo earnestly, 'did you tell me? | Annie Dillard | ||
| fb3186d | So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened. | reading writing readers-and-writers writing-craft writing-process | Annie Dillard | |
| d1e74ac | I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. I am really here, alive on the intricate earth under trees. But under me, directly under the weight of my body on the grass, are other creatures, just as real, for whom also this moment, this tree, is "it"... in the top inch of soil, biologists found "an average of 1,356 living creatures in each square foot... I might as well include these creatures in this moment, as best as I can. My ignoring.. | seeing science life hasidic-judaism | Annie Dillard | |
| 95337fb | Meaning 'by way of the anus'. 'Per Annum', with two n's, means 'yearly'. The correct answer to the question, 'What is the birthrate per anum?' is zero (one hopes). | humorous | Mary Roach |