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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a32f550 | Futility is the defining characteristic of life. | Stephen R. Donaldson | ||
| 552249c | Be true, unbeliever. | doubt faith truth | Stephen R. Donaldson | |
| a7c1afc | Do not hurt where holding is enough; do not wound where hurting is enough; do not maim where wounding is enough; and kill not where maiming is enough; the greatest warrior is he who does not need to kill. | Stephen R. Donaldson | ||
| 55750ad | Someone to whom jokes are never told soon contracts enthusiasm deficiency. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| a516311 | Desire is naughty and doesn't conform to our ideals, which is why we have such a need of them. Desire mocks all human endeavour and makes it worthwhile. Desire is the original anarchist and undercover agent - no wonder people want it arrested and kept in a safe place. And just when we think we've got desire under control it lets us down or fills us with hope. Desire makes me laugh because it makes fools of us all. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 6beb25a | If jealousy was the vindaloo of love, I'd imagined her tongue burning, and such a fire forcing her to spill her truth. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 0d88dcd | One falls in love, and then learns, for the duration, that one is at the mercy of someone else's childhood. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 6328705 | My son, there may be a time when I explain these things to you, because there may be a time when I understand them. | hanif-kureishi intimacy | Hanif Kureishi | |
| a103084 | Suddenly I shouted into the night air. 'Yes, yes, yes, it is true!" And now the world had some tension in it; now it twanged and vibrated with meaning and possibility! 'Yes, yes, fucking yes!" | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| a10fd56 | Sex gets us out of the house and out of ourselves. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 58e0a9c | L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to e.. | understanding criticism poems humor life paintings self-understanding plays films gravity art novels vanity desire | Alain de Botton | |
| 35b97e3 | To have a sexual history did not only imply one had made love to a succession of people, it also suggested one had either rejected or been rejected by these same bedroom companions. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 34cae07 | I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for .. | religion god | Alain de Botton | |
| 5eae830 | the truth of the maxim that beauty lies between the extremities of order and complexity. | Alain de Botton | ||
| ff04e21 | We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as ideal as we are corrupt. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 54df529 | Pain is surprising; we cannot understand why we have been abandoned in love... why we are unable to sleep at night.... Identifying reasons for such discomforts does not spectacularly absolve us of pain, but it may form the principal basis of a recovery. While assuring us that we are not uniquely cursed, understanding grants us a sense of the boundaries to, and bitter logic behind, our suffering. 'Griefs, at the moment when they change into .. | Alain de Botton | ||
| d9f0c3f | It might be a Proustian slogan: n'allez pas trop vite. And an advantage of not going by too fast is that the world has a chance of becoming more interesting in the process. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 7465f4f | Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the color of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread. At the same time,.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 6600119 | Insecurity is a sign of well-being. It means we haven't allowed ourselves to take other people for granted, that we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn out badly and that we are invested enough to care. It | Alain de Botton | ||
| 2165694 | The world upsets, disappoints, frustrates and hurts us in countless ways at every turn. It delays us, rejects our creative endeavours, overlooks us for promotions, rewards idiots and smashes our ambitions on its bleak, relentless shores. And almost invariably, we can't complain about any of it. It's too difficult to tease out who may really be to blame; and too dangerous to complain even when we know for certain (lest we be fired or laughed.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| c654565 | Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it | questioning ignorance curiosity knowledge | Alain de Botton | |
| dc9d97b | As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 1a83e76 | Epicurus founded a school of philosophy which placed great emphasis on the importance of pleasure. "Pleasure is the beginning and the goal of a happy life," he asserted, confirming what many had long thought, but philosophers had rarely accepted. Vulgar opinion at once imagined that the pleasure Epicurus had in mind involved a lot of money, sex, drink and debauchery (associations that survive in our use of the word 'Epicurean'). But true Ep.. | philosophy inspirational | Alain de Botton | |
| c597a08 | We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or 'human flourishing'. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 8e2b746 | He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only having one perspective to play with. | writing philosophy perspective | Alain de Botton | |
| 544cf57 | Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves. | Alain de Botton | ||
| a20f3b0 | Our capacity for calm ultimately depends on our levels of expectation: if we suppose that most things normally turn out to be slightly disappointing (but that this is OK); that change occurs slowly (but that life is long); that most people are neither terribly good nor very wicked (and this includes us); that humanity has faced crisis after crisis (yet muddled through) - if we are able to keep these entirely obvious but highly fugitive thou.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 0e70c2d | Say what you will about organized crime, at least it's organized. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| c209c28 | Melba thought with a touch of pity. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 370737a | Annie," Tilly said. "If I wanted to suck vile fluids out of a flaccid and indifferent tube, I'd have stayed on Earth with my husband." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 27a4fdf | The pachinko machines lit them blue and green and shrieked in artificial delight. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 6d92df9 | Tachi's galley had a full kitchen and a table with room for twelve. It also had a full-size coffeepot that could brew forty cups of coffee in less than five minutes whether the ship was in zero g or under a five-g burn. Holden said a silent prayer of thanks for bloated military budgets and pressed the brew button. He had to restrain himself from stroking the stainless steel cover while it made gentle percolating noises. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 261cf4b | I still feel haunted,' she said. 'I thought it would go away. I thought if I faced it, it would all go away.' 'It doesn't go away. Ever. But you get better at it.' 'At what?' 'At being haunted,' Avasarala said. | bobbi-draper chrisjen-avasarala haunted | James S.A. Corey | |
| 6c5f9b6 | History, Michio believed, was a long series of surprises that seemed inevitable in retrospect. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 27b1dcf | History is made up of people recovering from the last disaster, | James S.A. Corey | ||
| d006b93 | We who are in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair . . . pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship with the chaotic and unfair realities . . . We have to create our own standards of discipline. | Anna Deavere Smith | ||
| 2b3a621 | For all men serve him of their own free will. And he whom Love touches not walks in darkness. | Edith Hamilton | ||
| 066dd02 | One good thing, however, was there - Hope. It was the only good thing the casket had held among the many evils, and it remains to this day mankind's sole comfort in misfortune. | Edith Hamilton | ||
| b6baad7 | On the streets of the city They have taken my Who-I-Am As well as my What-I-Was And now I am desperate for them both Again | Walter Dean Myers | ||
| 64701d7 | But now, like a fallen sparrow On a golden chain, I'm forever bound in shadow, A prisoner to my pain. | Walter Dean Myers | ||
| d88654b | These days, there are angry ghosts all around us, dead from wars, sickness, starvation--and nobody cares. So you say you're under a curse? Well, so what? So's the whole damned world. | pessimism ghosts | Hayao Miyazaki | |
| 68755c8 | No matter what the circumstances. I am more like most men in this regard. No second chances. It's not so much about morality, but about my inability to forgive. I'm a champion grudge holder, and I don't think I could change this about myself even if I wanted to. | Emily Giffin | ||
| d819e96 | I feel a sudden wave of homesickness, but not the kind that makes you sad. The kind that reminds you of who you are and where you come from. | Emily Giffin | ||
| 0ee510f | I'm glad you were both here," I finally manage, thinking how strange it is to be standing with the two people who made you, something most kids take for granted every day of their lives." | adoption parents | Emily Giffin |