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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| dde067f | Unlike my mother, my father does not cry quietly. His wails roll out like a wave of pain, and I scramble to roll up my window. My mother cannot hear that. I cannot bear to hear it myself. I am not used to my father's crying. I've had no time to harden my heart against him. | denial feelings parents protectiveness | Margaret Peterson Haddix | |
| e7f054b | But that's what kismet is. It makes us careen off in odd directions from which we learn not only what life is about but what it is for. This journey may be nothing less than your chance to discover these things." "You're" | Homer Hickam | ||
| b736990 | Every day try to help uplift physically, mentally, or spiritually suffering people, as you would help yourself or your family. If, instead of living in the misery-making selfish way, you live according to the laws of God, then, no matter what small part you may be playing on the stage of life, you will know that you have been playing your part correctly, as directed by the Stage Manager of all our destinies. Your part, however small, is jus.. | Paramahansa Yogananda | ||
| 232ea71 | Can human folly harbour a more arrogant or ungrateful thought than the notion that whereas God makes man beautiful in body, man makes himself pure in heart? | human-folly purity | Augustine of Hippo | |
| 970dc9d | You have been professing yourself reluctant to throw off your load of illusion because truth was uncertain. Well, it is certain now, yet the burden still weighs you down, while other people are given wings on freer shoulders, people who have not worn themselves out with research, nor spent a decade and more reflecting on these questions. | Augustine of Hippo | ||
| 9a08e40 | It is no less impossible for us not to taste as bitter the death of those whose life for us was such a source of sweetness. | Augustine of Hippo | ||
| 605db75 | But what do I love, when I love You? Not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time. Not the brightness of the light, so welcome to our eyes, Nor sweet melodies of varied songs, Nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments and spices. Not manna and honey, nor the embrace of arms in fleshly pleasure. None of these I love when I love my God. Yet this love is a kind of light and melody and fragrance and meat and embrace. When I love my.. | Augustine of Hippo | ||
| 0b55434 | Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? | theology | Augustine of Hippo | |
| c6ea26a | There is no health in those who are displeased by an element in Your creation, just as there was none in me when I was displeased by many things You had made. Because my soul didn't dare to say that my God displeased me, it refused to attribute to You whatever was displeasing. | contentment sovereignty-of-god | St. Augustine of Hippo | |
| 8dd8635 | O mortals, how long will you be heavy-hearted? Life has come down to you, and are you reluctant to ascend and live? But what room is there for you to ascend, you with your high-flown ways and lofty talk? Come down, that you may ascend, ascend even to God... | Augustine of Hippo | ||
| 3238d8f | A sense of Deity is inscribed on every heart. Nay, even idolatry is ample evidence of this fact. | worship | Augustine of Hippo | |
| a2e0227 | in seeking only to stay upright, you fall, are banished then cursed and reviled, condemned to wander a continent you don't even know where you're going, only when you're expected, which is every Friday at sundown though your calendars were never coordinated and what you always thought had been west was really only a left turn taken with your back to the north, in haste and with little sleep, then upon your forehead, the development of a wor.. | Joshua Cohen | ||
| 5bcda82 | You are so adorable. I just want to take you home and put you in my pocket." I'd prefer her pants, but I guess I'd settle for her pocket" | Penny Reid | ||
| 8ce52c5 | We all belong to ourselves, until we have children. Then our children lease us for as long as they want. | Penny Reid | ||
| b2f78d8 | Greg crossed to me, his gaze moving in a slow, cherishing path over my features. "If you knew how I saw you, how I think of you, your ego would become unmanageable." | Penny Reid | ||
| da8b448 | Elizabeth, in your own misguided, crazy, PMSing-woman way, I think you've been trying to be nice." My mouth fell open. "Hey!" "You're just not very good at being nice. It's not a strength of yours." "I can't believe you just said that." "You should work on it. You should compliment me more, tell me I look pretty." I hit him on the shoulder even as I laughed. "You're an idiot." "And you're beautiful." | Penny Reid | ||
| 85ac0bd | Attending to injustice, no matter how small, is always a worthy cause. | Penny Reid | ||
| 8c674c3 | Stop it." Cletus snapped his fingers in front of our faces. "I hate it when you two mind-meld through your eyeballs." | Penny Reid | ||
| 7f13609 | Not sure if it was compliment, or an insult, or a complisult | Penny Reid | ||
| 30662b4 | Crap. She's going to cry. This was a situation that required neutralizing. I placed my hand over hers and gave her a squeeze. "There, there." Fruit cake. "Calm down--" | Penny Reid | ||
| acd9827 | Who is your famous crush? If a super-hot Hollywood actor who also happened to be a great person wanted to take you home--and the lights stayed on during the deed--what would you do? I mean, not in theory. Honestly, what would you do?" Claire looked at me for a long moment then asked, "Would I get a heads up a few months ahead of time? So I could eat low carb and start working out?" "No." "Then, honestly, I'd run the other way." | Penny Reid | ||
| c854f83 | If you know who you are, rejection matters very little. It says more about the small-mindedness of the person who is doing the rejecting than it does about you. | Penny Reid | ||
| 3353064 | September 29 I will fear no evil: for thou art with me . . . -- Psalm 23:4 No matter what is happening in your relationships, fear nothing and no one. When you walk with the consciousness of the Creator, there is nothing to fear. Do not fear that people will harm you or leave you. Do not fear people who threaten you. Do not fear obstacles that confront you. Have no fear of harm to your body or possessions, you are walking with the strong ar.. | Iyanla Vanzant | ||
| d57a564 | Very often we claim to know something. We get an idea about what to do or not do, yet, for some reason our behavior doesn't change. At times, we just can't seem to do what we know. This is known as mental healing. Something has shifted in your thinking, but it has not reach the other levels of your being--the heart and the spirit. | Iyanla Vanzant | ||
| e6a1a7e | What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance. | inspirational obama poetry | Elizabeth Alexander | |
| ac27dd6 | Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other's lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand.. | Elizabeth Alexander | ||
| ca24bff | He was so much the picture of different kinds of assimilation that it was almost a case of multiple personalities. | edward-said multiple-personalities personalities | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 438e578 | Now, I have always wanted to agree with Lady Bracknell that there is no earthly use for the upper and lower classes unless they set each other a good example. But I shouldn't pretend that the consensus itself was any of my concern. It was absurd and slightly despicable, in the first decade of Thatcher and Reagan, to hear former and actual radicals intone piously against 'the politics of confrontation.' I suppose that, if this collection has.. | england margaret-thatcher oscar-wilde political-radicalism politics ronald-reagan social-class social-structure-of-the-uk the-importance-of-being-earnest united-kingdom united-states | Christopher Hitchens | |
| c437587 | Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn't) 'if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn't quite recognize", Blumenthal recalls with horror the night that I 'gave' a farewell party for Martin Walker of the | argumentation betrayal bill-clinton diana-princess-of-wales england friendship journalism london martin-walker-reporter marty-peretz mother-teresa new-york nightline oxford pettiness politics presidency-of-bill-clinton sidney-blumenthal television the-guardian the-new-republic united-states university-of-oxford | Christopher Hitchens | |
| ea51db2 | All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable. I felt this when sitting in the old Ottoman courtyards of Jerusalem, and I felt it even more when I saw the hideous 'Fort Condo' settlements that had been thrown up around the city in order to give the opposite impression. If the statelet was only based on a narrow strip of .. | israel israeli-palestinian-conflict jerusalem jews mediterranean-basin moses oil ottoman-empire palestine palestinians religion settlements | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 6dcbd8a | The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book. | freethought piety rebellion religion strength wisdom | Christopher Hitchens | |
| ba6dd2e | Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question The Obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim 'de omnius dubitandum' [All is to be doubted]. | contrarian doubt routine wisdom | Christopher Hitchens | |
| a98f7b1 | As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the mo.. | al-qaeda algeria central-intelligence-agency daniel-lapin democracy egypt federal-bureau-of-investigation george-w-bush humanism islam islamism jerry-falwell jihad leftism national-security pakistan pat-robertson saudi-arabia secularism september-11-attacks taliban terrorism working-class | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 645c8cf | Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 43b4e5f | There came an awful day when I picked up the phone and knew at once, as one does with some old friends even before they speak, that it was Edward. He sounded as if he were calling from the bottom of a well. I still thank my stars that I didn't say what I nearly said, because the good professor's phone pals were used to cheering or teasing him out of bouts of pessimism and insecurity when he would sometimes say ridiculous things like: 'I hop.. | edward-said friends friendship insecurity leukemia pessimism self-pity | Christopher Hitchens | |
| b3c9b0e | Death has this much to be said for it: You don't have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you--free. --Kingsley Amis | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 84549a9 | ' it used to be called, even by Jews. 'The Jewish Question.' I find I quite like this interrogative formulation, since the question--as Gertrude Stein once famously if terminally put it--may be more absorbing than the answer. Of course one is flirting with calamity in phrasing things this way, as I learned in school when the Irish question was discussed by some masters as the Irish 'problem.' Again, the word 'solution' can be as neutral as .. | gertrude-stein holocaust irish-question jewish-question jews problems questions solutions | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 0d2ece0 | Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty--or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, .. | apoliticism argument atheism berlin bought-priesthood cape-coloureds cold-war communism conviction critical-thinking enlightenment euphemism eurocentricism faith film george-hw-bush george-orwell german-people germany groupthink hedonism humanism individualism irony journalism left-wing-politics lies literary-criticism literature los-angeles margaret-thatcher monotheism munich orthodoxy personality-politics politics polytheism populism postmodernism potus progress radical-politics religion right-wing-politics ronald-reagan russia science sectarianism self-love self-pity socialism solipsism south-africa soviet-union thomas-mann totalitarianism tribalism truth united-states xhosa-people zulu-people | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 7a97bb3 | I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots--written off in those days as mere 'fringe' elements--and found that they called themselves or--it sounded just as bad in English--'The Bloc of the Faithful.' Why not just say 'Party of God' and have done with it? At least they didn't have the nerve to say that they stole other people's land because their own home in Poland or Belarus had been taken from them. They said they .. | belarus colonialism god guns gush-emunim hebron israel israeli-palestinian-conflict jews palestine palestinians poland religious-extremism squatters students yeshivas zionists | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 7a21507 | There are all sorts of families," Tom's grandmother had remarked, and over the following few weeks Tom became part of the Casson family, as Micheal and Sarah and Derek-from-the-camp had done before him. He immediately discovered that being a member of the family was very different from being a welcome friend. If you were a Casson family member, for example, and Eve drifted in from the shed asking, "Food? Any ideas? Or shall we not bother?" .. | kids love | Hilary McKay | |
| 8bdd665 | The cause of the Party's defectiveness must be found. All our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but whenever we applied the healing knife anew sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested? We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 76ac805 | What had he said to them? "I bow my knees before the country, before the masses, before the whole people...." And what then? What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been driven through the desert, with threats and promises, with imaginary terrors and imaginary rewards. But where was the Promised Land? Did there really exist any such goal for this wandering mankind? That was a question to which he would have lik.. | darkness-at-noon | Arthur Koestler | |
| 6884b0e | Nothing is worse in prison than the consciousness of one's innocenc; it prevents acclimatizatin and undermines one's morale... | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 2d9edd6 | But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history's absolution. | Arthur Koestler |