1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
2303
2304
2305
2306
2307
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 116fadf | Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure. | grief humour stories | Colson Whitehead | |
| 046831c | The music stopped. The circle broke. Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always - the overseer's cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude.. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 63b30fc | You should read the book that you hear two booksellers arguing about at the registers while you're browsing in a bookstore. * You should read the book that you see someone on the train reading and trying to hide that they're laughing. * You should read the book that you see someone on the train reading and trying to hide that they're crying. * You should read the book that you find left behind in the airplane seat pocket, on a park bench, o.. | reading inspiration | Janet Potter | |
| 86d5186 | These ideas can be made more concrete with a parable, which I borrow from John Fowles's wonderful novel, The Magus. Conchis, the principle character in the novel, finds himself Mayor of his home town in Greece when the Nazi occupation begins. One day, three Communist partisans who recently killed some German soldiers are caught. The Nazi commandant gives Conchis, as Mayor, a choice -- either Conchis will execute the three partisans himself .. | Robert Anton Wilson | ||
| 07416a7 | Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money. | money privilege | John Fowles | |
| 534d743 | I am Emma Woodhouse. I feel for her, of her and in her. I have a different sort of snobbism, but I understand her snobbism. Her priggishness. I admire it. I know she does wrong things, she tries to organize other people's lives, she can't see Mr Knightley is a man in a million. She's temporarily silly, yet all the time one knows she's basically intelligent. Creative, determined to set the highest standards. A real human being. | jane-austen intelligence mr-knightley snobbery | John Fowles | |
| 3840cd8 | I'd like to shower and change clothes," she said. "Would you mind waiting for me a half hour?" The question seemed to amuse him. "Not at all," he said with exaggerated formality. "Please take all the time you need." Michael watched her walk away. Did he mind waiting a half hour for her? | Judith McNaught | ||
| 16af1e7 | Do they still hurt?" she whispered in anguished surprise. | lovers passion romance once-and-always | Judith McNaught Once and Always | |
| ef64113 | You can't outwit fate by trying to stand on the sidelines and place little side bets about the outcome of life. Either you wade in and risk everything to play the game, or you don't play at all. And if you don't play, you can't win. | Judith McNaught | ||
| 77fe8ca | She'd tried her hand at most things, but drew the line at honesty. | Roddy Doyle | ||
| f3e1f8e | And I was glad she had the camera as a fence to protect herself, an excuse to be invisible. Cameras are a lifesaver for the very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. | Pat Conroy | ||
| 5385ef1 | The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, "had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man." | maturity manhood | Pat Conroy | |
| 085691b | I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy. Distrusting the approval of the chosen, I would take the applause of exiles anytime. My friends were all foreigners, and they wore their unbelongingness in their eye.. | Pat Conroy | ||
| 1946433 | I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever. | Pat Conroy | ||
| 21e1595 | when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of.. | Pat Conroy | ||
| d73e9e0 | Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen. | Pat Conroy | ||
| fc042b5 | I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbidden territory. I would look for that moment when I would begin to pour alone and in wonder. I would always try to seize that moment and to accept its challenge. I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was bet.. | Pat Conroy | ||
| 78cc43b | I always say that I only wish to have three sorts of people as my friends, those who are very rich, those who are very witty, and those who are very beautiful. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 89d1383 | I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 55ffc5c | She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| f3cb203 | The Nazis were right to hate the Jews. But their hating of Jews was without a cause. No one hates without a cause. | minority | Christopher Isherwood | |
| e499086 | George feels that, even if all this double talk hasn't brought them any closer to understanding each other, the not-understanding, the readiness to remain at cross-purposes, is in itself a kind of intimacy. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 17e3f95 | For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery--that most unstable existential moment--the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real. | discovery inspiration science | Richard Rhodes | |
| 7bcdf83 | It is, I think, the rarest of leisure, hard work mixed with hard pleasure, to refine one's time of deep thought or light regard into the utterly self-absorbed and equally and abundantly outward-seeking shape of the personal essay -- a story comprised of found fact, of analyzed emotion, of fictive memory. | story personal-essay | Barry Lopez | |
| 5306390 | Thoreau the "Patron Saint of Swamps" because he enjoyed being in them and writing about them said, "my temple is the swamp... When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum... I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place...far away from human society. What's the need of visiting far-off mountains.. | marsh swamp wetlands green ecology | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 00e7b31 | A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| ac6058c | Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 642373f | I am too high born to be propertied, To be a second at control, Or useful serving-man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 61ea032 | The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 3cfbe6f | If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know how much truth is stronger than errors, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. | injustice voting | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 325316e | Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 9e691d8 | I love a broad margin to my life. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| aa2945d | So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 1593b36 | Men say they know many things; But lo! they have taken wings, -- The arts and sciences, And a thousand appliances; The wind that blows Is all that any body knows | science ecology | Henry David Thoreau | |
| ee51793 | Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| ddc77e0 | Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them. | shelter | Henry David Thoreau | |
| e92811c | The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there. | nature woods mountains thoreau maine-woods maine | Henry David Thoreau | |
| b4a5070 | It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal ne.. | words literature reading | Henry David Thoreau | |
| a8defcb | Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. We are scarcely less afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our conduct in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the intensity of our grief, which is our atonement, measures inversely the degree by which this is separated from an actual unworthiness. For in dreams we but act a part which must have been learned and rehearsed in our waking hours, and no doubt could discover some waking.. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| c89e931 | Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| aee7a56 | We like to think of individuals as unique. Yet if this is true of everyone, then we all share the same quality, namely our uniqueness. What we have in common is the fact that we are all uncommon. Everybody is special, which means that nobody is. The truth, however, is that human beings are uncommon only up to a point. There are no qualities that are peculiar to one person alone. Regrettably, there could not be a world in which only one indi.. | individuality | Terry Eagleton | |
| 0d438db | You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism. | Terry Eagleton | ||
| ca9254b | All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all. | faith linguistics | Terry Eagleton | |
| da0d61e | My goodness', thought Milo. 'Everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best. | Norton Juster |