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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 47ad36b | Time turns our lies into truths. | time truth | Gene Wolfe | |
| 73435de | The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 56d2231 | I have no way of knowing whether you, who eventually will read this record, like stories or not. If you do not, no doubt you have turned these pages without attention. I confess that I love them. Indeed, it often seems to me that of all the good things in the world, the only ones humanity can claim for itself are stories and music; the rest, mercy, beauty, sleep, clean water and hot food (as the Ascian would have said) are all the work of t.. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 0a583ee | You must know the story of how the race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away all the wild half of themselves to do so, so that they no longer cared for the taste of the pale wind, no for love or lust, nor to make new songs nor to sing old ones, nor for any of the other animal things they believed they had brought with them out of the rain forests al the bottom of time--though in fact, so my uncle told me, those thi.. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 29bd30c | Tous, nous aimons ce que nous detruisons. | mort destruction | Gene Wolfe | |
| 3f42161 | I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when I came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came .. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 8f704c0 | Here is light. You will say that it is not a living entity, but you miss the point that it is more, not less. Without occupying space, it fills the universe. It nourishes everything, yet itself feeds upon destruction. We claim to control it, but does it not perhaps cultivate us as a source of food? May it not be that all wood grows so that it can be set ablaze, and that men and women are born to kindle fires? | Gene Wolfe | ||
| a97a3c2 | I don't mind summer rain. In fact I like it. It's my favourite sort.' 'Your favourite sort of rain?' said Thea. I remember that she was frowning, and pondering these words, and then she announced: 'Well, I like the rain before it falls. | Jonathan Coe | ||
| e506808 | Then and Now In younger days each morning I rose with joy, To weep at nightfall; now, in my later years, Though doubting I begin my day, yet Always its end is serene and holy. | Friedrich Hölderlin | ||
| 0145bbd | The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much 'relevance'. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic. | literature | Edward St. Aubyn | |
| 9ce6604 | She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured her worst punishment was to be herself and I didn't have to do anything more. | Edward St Aubyn | ||
| 6e2ef7f | Books were my friends," said Catherine, and cooled her cheek, which was red from the heat of cooking, on her wineglass. "I think I learned all my feelings from books. In them I loved and laughed and found out more than in my whole nonreading life." -- | Nina George | ||
| fbff1c7 | Not the least of my many blessings is that we have only one neighbour. If you have to have neighbours at all, it is at least a mercy that there should be only one; for with people dropping in at all hours and wanting to talk to you, how are you to get on with your life, I should like to know, and read your books, and dream your dreams to your satisfaction? | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| b3d9059 | Oh, my dear, relations are like drugs, - useful sometimes, and even pleasant, if taken in small quantities and seldom, but dreadfully pernicious on the whole, and the truly wise avoid them. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| cae8bff | I am not man so much as syndrome; as a voice that bellows in the human heart. I am rain. I cannot be contained | rain | Alan Moore | |
| 2da4876 | I am going to look at the stars. They are so far away, and their light takes so long to reach us. All we ever see of stars are their old photographs. | Alan Moore | ||
| 3640605 | Things have their forms not only in space, but also in time. | Alan Moore | ||
| d75d2e5 | What's up, doc? "Up" is a relative concept; it has no intrinsic value." | watchmen | Alan Moore | |
| 05db138 | Affected most, they understand the least... | Alan Moore | ||
| 7d40df8 | The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it's giving way to something else. | politics | Julian Barnes | |
| 4b9a26d | What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies. | literature writing writers | Julian Barnes | |
| 680ee2b | I've been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don't get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn't even true at the time - love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions - and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives - then I pl.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 40e4673 | The strong cannot help confronting; the less strong cannot help evading. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 19bc03b | When we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 72409c3 | juries should ask not "Is he guilty?" but rather "Is he dangerous?" | Julian Barnes | ||
| 5573239 | We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it? | Julian Barnes | ||
| 6d95a1f | Everything is connected, even the parts we don't like, especially the parts we don't like. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 8c1f968 | You realize how sympathy and antagonism can coexist. You are discovering how many seemingly incompatible emotions can thrive, side by side, in the same human heart. | human heart | Julian Barnes | |
| 9e9c250 | Why should anything happen when everything has happened? | Julian Barnes | ||
| 4209a16 | Our lack of originality is something we usefully forget as we hunch over our--to us--ever-fascinating lives. My friend M., leaving his wife for a younger woman, used to complain, "People tell me it's a cliche. But it doesn't feel like a cliche to me." Yet it was, and is. As all our lives would prove, if we could see them from a greater distance--from the viewpoint, say, of that higher creature imagined by Einstein. " | life originality | Julian Barnes | |
| f97ad32 | I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn't love me; we were unhappy; I miss her. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 68bc834 | Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 9e18943 | There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd. | grief life existential-crisis purpose | Julian Barnes | |
| 5428f2d | Books are not life, however much we may wish they were | Julian Barnes | ||
| c32bc0b | History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 024b1b6 | A little brother may live to be a hundred, but he will always be a little brother. | George R.R. Martin | ||
| d60b226 | Someone was absolutely going to get punched in the head today. | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| 399a51e | I'll be back at sea by then," Bradshaw put in, "so I'll comfort myself with the knowledge that you'll name the infant after me." "I don't think 'Half-wit' will pass muster with Georgie, but I'll let her know that's your suggestion." | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| 2b182e9 | Never judge a book by its cover, especially when the book is a person, was the lesson. | Mary Higgins Clark | ||
| f3a4845 | Now I understand why King Stannis let the wildlings through the Wall. He means for us to eat them. | humor stannis-baratheon wildlings wall | George R.R. Martin | |
| ed1d4a5 | It is chivalry that makes a true knight, not a sword. | knight | George R.R. Martin | |
| 5c77585 | Abrir los ojos es lo unico necesario. El corazon miente y la mente engana, pero los ojos ven. Mira con los ojos. Escucha con los oidos. Saborea con la boca. Huele con la nariz. Siente con la piel. Y solo luego piensa, y asi sabras la verdad. | George R.R. Martin | ||
| 51a0a49 | a few days ago she had been wandering around with a swatch of black silk tied over her eyes. Syrio was teaching her to see with her ears and her nose and her skin, she told him. Before that, he had her doing spinds and back flips. "Arya, are you certain you want to persist in this?" | George R.R. Martin | ||
| 2df67be | Hoooodor," said Hodor, swaying. "Hooooooodor, hoooooodor, hoDOR, hoDOR, hoDOR." Sometimes he liked to do this, just saying his name different ways, over and over and over." | George R.R. Martin |