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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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. | white-people women | 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. | readers-and-writers reading writing 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.. | hasidic-judaism life science seeing | 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 | |
| 19ac45c | The suffix 'naut' comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. suggests 'a sailor in space.' suggests 'a chimpanzee in sailor pants'. | Mary Roach | ||
| fbbb7d9 | T]he success of every novel -- if it's a novel of action -- depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, "What are my big scenes?" and then get every drop of juice out of them." | focus novels writing | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 0d718ad | Sir?" said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He's like one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I've got a cousin who's what they call a Theosophist, and he says he's often nearly wo.. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| ea3dac8 | Wait a minute while I think," said Miss Peavey. There was a pause. Miss Peavey sat with knit brows. "How would it be..." ventured Mr. Cootes. "Cheese it!" said Miss Peavey. Mr. Cootes cheesed it." | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 852fd3e | Billie knew all. And, terrible though the fact is as an indictment of the male sex, when a woman knows all, there is invariably trouble ahead for some man. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 9030d67 | I say, Bertie, is it really true that you were once engaged to Honoria?" "It is." Biffy coughed. "How did you get out - I mean, what was the nature of the tragedy that prevented the marriage?" "Jeeves worked it. He thought out the entire scheme." "I think, before I go," said Biffy thoughtfully, "I'll just step into the kitchen and have a word with Jeeves." I felt that the situation called for complete candour. "Biffy, old egg," I said, "as .. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 1e3d2f0 | One of the advantages a sister has when arguing with a brother is that she is under no obligation to be tactful. If she wishes to tell him that he is an idiot and ought to have his head examined, she can do so and, going further, can add that it is a thousand pities that no-one ever thought of smothering him with a pillow in his formative years. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| d531e42 | I wonder the food didn't turn to ashes in our mouths! Eggs! Muffins! Sardines! All wrung from the bleeding lips of the starving poor!" "Oh, I say! What a beastly idea!"... Jeeves came in to clear away, and found me sitting among the ruins. It was all very well for Comrade Butt to knock the food, but he had pretty well finished the ham; and if you had shoved the remainder of the jam into the bleeding lips of the starving poor it would hardly.. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 6155c45 | I don't know why it is, but women who have anything to do with Opera, even if they're only studying for it, always appear to run to surplus poundage. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 6bb53dd | The boy is of an outspoken disposition, and had made an opprobrious remark respecting my personal appearance." "What did he say about your appearance?" "I have forgotten, sir," said Jeeves, with a touch of austerity. "But it was opprobrious." | P.G. Wodehouse |