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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| cde0015 | Pepper spray," he said, lightly touching her back. "Give it a second." "Pepper spray?" "You were a casualty of your own rescue." He pointed and she turned to look at the scene behind her. Over a dozen old ladies were beating the man with their purses and dousing him with pepper spray. Several police officers hovered nearby, as if they couldn't get close enough to help the guy. They didn't look like they were trying very hard. "What kind of .. | Susan Mallery | ||
| b96eaee | How lovely." The old lady sighed. "An office romance. I always wanted an office romance. Of course I never really had a job, which made the situation more challenging. Oh, I worked on an assembly line during World War II, but there weren't very many men around and as my husband was off serving his country, an office romance would have been unpatriotic, don't you think?--Mrs. Ford" | Susan Mallery | ||
| b9c7903 | I didn't want to hurt you," she blurted. "I never wanted to be someone you would regret. I'm not afraid for me. I'm afraid for you." | Susan Mallery | ||
| c4ceedd | I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother's death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren't there. I was only one step away f.. | grief loss relationship reality past hope delusional delusional-love unreal loner delusion save hunger stalking misery hopeless frustration obsession waste unrequited-love sickness | Donna Tartt | |
| 464609d | With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers-laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. "That's Life." That's what they all said. "That's Life, Harriet, that's just how it is, you'll see." | Donna Tartt | ||
| ccec773 | Beauty is terror. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 4a35eab | The group mind was such (private jokes and bemusement, everyone clustered round vacation videos on the iPhone) that it was hard to imagine any of them going to a movie by themselves or eating alone at a bar; sometimes, the affable sense of committee among the men particularly gave me the slight feeling of being interviewed for a job. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 3ff4e89 | It wasn't the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, .. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 2732bd3 | even when I couldn't see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 199faf3 | Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships. Never mind that half a dozen jerks are clustered round the same person, just because they've been duped by the same pair of eyes. | idealism beauty love attraction | Donna Tartt | |
| 54d563a | You can get used to horror, he thought. When it has lost immediacy and is no longer pungent and has become a steady diet. When it has degraded to a chain of mind-numbing events. ("Lover When You're Near Me")" | jaded | Richard Matheson | |
| 51bd5ef | Rich meant that this room with three beds and a table and chairs and a window filled with glass was something to say sorry for. | Naomi Novik | ||
| f109949 | Do none of you ever ?' I asked, baffled. 'And how do keep from getting all over mud?" she said. We both looked down. I was a good two inches deep in mud along all the bottom of today's skirt: bigger around than a wagon-wheel and made of purple velvet and silver lace. 'I don't,' I said glumly." | Naomi Novik | ||
| f43c6c6 | Anger was a fire in a grate, and I'd never had any wood to burn. Until now, it seemed. | Naomi Novik | ||
| c4a1cf5 | I tried to make him a young court-wizard in my mind--he almost looked the part in his fine clothes, pursuing some lovely noblewoman--and there my imagination stumbled. He was a thing of books and alembics to me, library and laboratory. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 41ca9e4 | I missed home like the ache of hunger, something in me left empty. I'd missed it every day since we crossed out of the valley, going over the mountains. Roots--yes. There were roots in my heart, as deep as any corruption could go. | Naomi Novik | ||
| a21cab5 | I didn't properly think about what was happening even as I kissed him back, my laughter spilling into his mouth and making stutters of my kisses. I was still bound up with him, our magic snarled up into great messy tangled knots. I didn't have anything to compare that intimacy to. I'd felt the hot embarrassment of it, but I'd thought of it vaguely like being naked in front of a stranger. I hadn't connected it to sex--sex was poetic referenc.. | sex | Naomi Novik | |
| c59e9d6 | He slept once again in the small tent by his side, even though he thought Temeraire was well over his distress, and was rewarded in the morning by being woken early, Temeraire peering into the tent with one great eye and inquiring if perhaps Laurence would like to go to Dover and arrange for the concert today. "I would like to sleep until a civilized hour, but as that is evidently not to be, perhaps I will ask leave of Lenton to go," Lauren.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 22938d4 | And listen to me: what you've done here carries power with it, of a different sort. Don't let Solya take all the credit, and don't be shy of using it. | taking-credit | Naomi Novik | |
| 56dee6f | I grabbed back at him just as incautiously with my hand and my magic both, even as he pressed magic on me from his side as well. His breath huffed out sharply, and our workings caught on one another, magic gushing into them. | magic | Naomi Novik | |
| 4e8d33b | I held that last gown of plain undyed wool in my hands, feeling like it was a rope I was clinging to, and then in a burst of defiance I left it on my bead, and pulled myself in the green-and-russet gown. I couldn't fasten the buttons in the back, so I took the long veil from the headdress, wound it twice around my waist and made a knot, just barely good enough to keep the whole thing from falling off me, and marched downstairs to the kitche.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 7163e0c | There is just this moment. We are not trying to improve or to get anywhere else. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 8f3879b | Life only unfolds in moments. The healing power of mindfulness lies in living each of those moments as fully as we can, accepting it as it is as we open to what comes next--in the next moment of now. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 86571bd | Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.] | software soul | Charles Stross | |
| 90e13a5 | Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts. | science | Charles Stross | |
| 07d1acc | I spent six hours becoming one with a shrubbery last night. There were three cloudbursts and a rain of small and very confused frogs | humor | Charles Stross | |
| 6942936 | Let's see.' She fiddles with her terminal and the room card reader. 'You're in 403 and 404. Have a nice day.' I hand Persephone the Forbidden Room card and keep Room Not Found for myself. She looks at me oddly. | nerd | Charles Stross | |
| 3b116c2 | I am the Eschaton. I am not your God. I am descended from you, and exist in your future. Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else. | Charles Stross | ||
| 863b683 | In memory of Terry Pratchett, who showed us all how it's done | Charles Stross | ||
| 2a6ab10 | It is the right of a traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends. | travel | Susanna Clarke | |
| c3cf71d | O, wherever men of my sort used to go, long ago. Wandering on paths that other men have not seen. Behind the sky. On the other side of the rain. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| d30141d | Tis not too late to seek a newer world. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| ae45ac6 | Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him i.. | change life growth | Richard Flanagan | |
| 4cc0355 | Sometimes I think I was better off not knowing any men. I truly had no idea they could be so very stupid." She sighed. "It's quite disappointing, really." | Celeste Bradley | ||
| dd35719 | It was around this time that I'd begun trying to perfect the art of fucking with people's minds. I'd figured out that when someone else was hogging the limelight, you could cut him down to size by bringing up a subject he didn't know anything about. If the other person knew a lot about literature, I'd talk about the Velvet Underground; if he knew a lot about rock, I'd talk about Messiaen; if he knew a lot about classical music, I'd talk abo.. | Ryū Murakami | ||
| da00408 | We sat side by side on the swings. The creaking sound they made seemed sexier to me than a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo. | Ryū Murakami | ||
| e7b882b | To distort our faces with joy, or wail and weep with sorrow, or collapse in agony, or wallow in sentimentality - wasn't an inviolable human trait but something we can lose simply by leading dull and dreary lives. 'A rich emotional life,' she'd written, 'is a privilege reserved only for the daring few'. | feelings living sadness happiness life numbness emotions | Ryū Murakami | |
| 0c4236a | So e possivel confiar em alguem quando se acredita no dialogo com essa pessoa. (Miso soup, trad. Jefferson Jose Teixeira, ed. Cia. das Letras, 2005, p. 153) | Ryū Murakami | ||
| eabcb6d | American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born japanese. | Ryū Murakami | ||
| 52d1da9 | Ponekad je mnogo teze izaci na kraj s gluposcu nego sa svesnim zlom. | Ryū Murakami | ||
| 70f3e46 | He came out of nothingness, took form, was loved, was always bound to return to nothingness. | grief death | George Saunders | |
| 4b5ef5f | Oh, the pathos of it! - haggard, drawn into fixed lines of unutterable sadness, with a look of loneliness, as of a soul whose depth of sorrow and bitterness no human sympathy could ever reach. The impression I carried away was that I had seen, not so much the President of the United States, as the saddest man in the world. | George Saunders | ||
| 7aefba7 | We consider speech to be the result of thought (we have a thought, then select a sentence with which to express it), but thought also results from speech (as we grope, in words, toward meaning, we discover what we think). | George Saunders | ||
| 00b158e | Some blows fall too heavy upon those too fragile. | pain heavy fragile weakness fragility | George Saunders |