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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c9f4602 | I think of the turtles swimming steadily against the current all the way to Ascension. I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water. Then it doesn't.. | Russell Hoban | ||
| 36975a3 | His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler.. | E.L. Doctorow | ||
| 7b41e15 | You're nothing more than a clever prostitute. You accepted the conditions in which you found yourself and you triumphed. | E.L. Doctorow | ||
| a62ea65 | I remember holding her in my arms and absolving God of meaninglessness. | E.L. Doctorow | ||
| 050ddab | Abelman's Dry Goods Kansas City, Missouri U.S.A. Mr. I. Abelman, Mongoloid, Esq.: We have received via post your absurd comments about our trousers, the comments revealing, as they did, your total lack of contact with reality. Were you more aware, you would know or realize by now that the offending trousers were dispatched to you with our full knowledge that they were inadequate so far as length was concerned. "Why? Why?" You are, in your i.. | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| 6c86ac2 | Will you please stop screeching like a fishmonger and run along? Don't you have a bottle of muscatel baking in the oven? | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| 20be10c | Do you think that I want to live in a communal society with people like that Battaglia acquaintance of yours, sweeping streets and breaking up rocks or whatever it is people are always doing in those blighted countries? What I want is a good, strong monarchy with a tasteful and decent king who has some knowledge of theology and geometry and to cultivate a Rich Inner Life. | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| c77f2ed | I don't know who started the myth that sheep are fluffy and white. They were more the color of an old mop and just as matted with dirt. | Connie Willis | ||
| 3e479cb | He looked resigned, as though he knew that wretched door--to where? Home? Heaven? Peace?--would never open, and at the same time he seemed resolved, ready to do his bit even though he couldn't possibly know what sacrifices that would require. Had he been kept here, too--in a place he didn't belong, serving in a war in which he hadn't enlisted, to rescue sparrows and soldiers and shopgirls and Shakespeare? To tip the balance? | Connie Willis | ||
| 2a09ba9 | What's Management up to?" I whispered to Bennett. "My guess is a new acronym," he whispered. "Departmental Unification Management Business." He wrote down the ltters on his legal pad. "D.U.M.B." | mnagement dumb | Connie Willis | |
| 3b73c7b | Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent. | medival middle-ages | Thomas Cahill | |
| d48dee5 | The village is coming back, like it or not. | David Brin | ||
| 0c51016 | You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, that republic is Italy. | Jay McInerney | ||
| 308e5f7 | I suppose one finally learns, after much searching, that we really only belong to ourselves. | Colum McCann | ||
| ba60b01 | But being rational about it didn't cure it. | Colum McCann | ||
| c9df398 | He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable. | Colum McCann | ||
| 8590689 | He's at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right toe knowing the left knee, the height, the depth, the form, the control, the twist of his wrist, the bend of his elbow, the tilt of his neck, notes digging into arteries, and he is in the air now, forcing the legs up beyond muscular memory, one last press of the thighs, an elongation of form, a loosening of human contour, he goes higher and is.. | dancer | Colum McCann | |
| d6b7e6a | the moment you begin to believe you're worthy of the good things in your life - God gets all Old Testament on your ass and does something vicious, something insane, something totally uncalled for. He gives you lupus or He allows Satan to slaughter your children and cattle or He delivers Ohio to George W. Bush. | Dan Savage | ||
| cc3f279 | You know he told me he'd rather be your friend for the rest of his life than risk not being able to make sure you guys are happya nd okay | Molly McAdams | ||
| 888171d | Except heaven is a hope , and eden is a memory . | heaven hope memory | Craig Thompson | |
| fea5db9 | Hiroshima is like a nakedly exposed wound inflicted on all mankind. | Kenzaburō Ōe | ||
| 26a71ac | It's a little bit like what Akari said to his grandmother in Shikoku, during her final illness: 'Please cheer up and die! | Kenzaburō Ōe | ||
| 42c3d3c | The fear of blindness created a moment's vacuum, serving as a relaxant for my exhausted and overheated brain. | Kenzaburō Ōe | ||
| f07caf4 | I did pray. I kept on Praying. But prayer did nothing to alleviate their suffering. | silence prayer | Shūsaku Endō | |
| 1342788 | Life always seems to have worries, even if you own a big and beautiful house on the best street in town. | Natalie Babbitt | ||
| 32e1732 | You really have to love words if you're going to be a writer, because as a writer, you certainly spend a lot of time with words. | Natalie Babbitt | ||
| cfe1e0a | Cheats prosper until there are enough who bear grudges against them to make sure they do not prosper. | evolution philosophy ethics | Peter Singer | |
| 9d6e73d | One could argue that the clash of monotheisms is the inevitable result of monotheism itself. Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it not only rejects all other gods, it rejects all other explanations for God. If there is only one God, then there may be only one truth, and that can easily lead to bloody conflicts of irreconcilable absolutisms. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 0fef65c | You can have anything you want, if you go out and get it. If you claim it as your own. You have a right to it. | life love | Danielle Steel | |
| f398f74 | Love is a shooting star that lands in your heart, and lives forever. | Danielle Steel | ||
| cb3a537 | I was frightened by the optimism of adults, their stupid trust in science to treat a troubled heart. Afraid of their obsession with believing they have to treat troubled kids. I just wanted them to leave me alone, so how come they didn't get it? But that's the way it always is. | Natsuo Kirino | ||
| d63a19d | lkhS rwbrt byr (whw msy'wl dr@ l`mlyt f~ ls~ a~ yh lmd@ `shryn `m wmtkhSS f~ shy'wn lshrq lwsk )lmr bqwlh " f~ bdy@ sb`ynt lqrn l`shryn Hyn bd' tdfq mwl lbtrwl bd' SHb lmshrw`t llbnnywn bthryb l`hrt llmmlk@ mn 'jl lmr ...wln frd lsr@ lmlk@ l y`rfwn kyf yrSdwn 'rqm lwrd wlmnSrf mn Hsbthm lbnky@ fqd 'd~ dhlk l~ thr llbnnyyn thr fHsh" | John Perkins | ||
| dbbce37 | Life," said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night." -- | Henry Miller | ||
| f0890df | But it is not emancipation that the great majority seeks. When pressed, most men will admit that it takes but little to be happy. (Not that they practice this wisdom!) Man craves happiness here on earth, not fulfillment, not emancipation. Are they utterly deluded, then, in seeking happiness? No, happiness is desirable, but it is a by-product, the result of a way of life, not a goal which is forever beyond one's grasp. Happiness is achieved .. | Henry Miller | ||
| 580dfca | Surely every one realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen. What stays him, usually, is the fear of the sacrifices involved. (Even to relinquish his chains seems like a sacrifice.) yet everyone knows that nothing is accomplished without sacrifice. | Henry Miller | ||
| f7e15f9 | If you tell a guy in the street you're hungry you scare the shit out of him, he runs like hell. That's something I never understood. I don't understand it yet. The whole thing is so simple - you just say Yes when some one comes up to you. And if you can't say Yes you can take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help you out. Why you have to don a uniform and kill men you don't know, just to get that crust of bread, is a mystery to me... | Henry Miller | ||
| 2df22a7 | I stood before a mirror and said fearfully: "I want to see how I look in the mirror with my eyes closed." These wrods of Richter's, when I first came upon them, made an indescribable commotion in me. As did the following, which seems almost like a corollary of the above--from Novalis: The seat of the soul is where inner world and outer world touch each other. For nobody knows himself, if he is only himself and not also another one at the sa.. | Henry Miller | ||
| 0ad6f2e | People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes out, but you can't permanently get deloused. Everywhere I go, people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now - misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch - until there is no skin left. However, t.. | Henry Miller | ||
| 864b79c | One thing is certain, that when you die and are resurrected you belong to the earth and whatever is of the earth is yours inalienably. You become an anomaly of nature, a being without shadow; you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about you. | Henry Miller | ||
| f5a82d2 | I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed but my illusions(...) | Henry Miller | ||
| 9bcd0de |
The creative life! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out into the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting the world up by the scalp, rousing the angels from their ethereal lairs, drowning in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets. Nietzsche had written of it ecstatically --and then swooned forward into the mirror to die in root and flower. < |
Henry Miller | ||
| dd3af71 | The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission is to preach and to teach. These are gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don't ask you to be.. | Henry Miller | ||
| 85a21be | lky y`rf lnsn lslm yjb 'n yjrb lSr`, `lyh 'n ymr blmrHl@ lbTwly@ qbl 'n ytmkn mn ltSrf kHkym, yjb 'n ySbH DHy@ nf`lth qbl 'n ytmkn mn lt`ly `lyh | Henry Miller | ||
| 7386c16 | The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. | history robot slaves society | Erich Fromm |