1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
2385
2386
2387
2388
2389
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 |
| 8526bbe | Smile, it can't be that bad! Yeah, actually, it can, jackwad. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| c03c05b | 2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the terrazzo floor, eighty-three in all, arranged them like the map of an imaginary city. Some of the piles of paper, I imagined, were freestanding buildings, some were clustered into neighborhoods, and some were open space. On the outskirts, of course, .. | bridges cities wandering writing | Nick Flynn | |
| 9c2fc19 | Always have a backup plan to the backup plan. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| de5ed22 | Nothing to it but to do it. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 66bafcc | This morning he was stroking my hair and asking what else he could do for me, and I said: "My gosh, Nick, why are you so wonderful to me?" He was supposed to say: YOU DESERVE IT. I LOVE YOU. But he said, "Because I feel sorry for you." "Why?" "Because every morning you have to wake up and be you." I really, truly wish he hadn't said that. I keep thinking about it. I can't stop." | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 1e31f16 | Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chag.. | burping cheap-beer cool-girls dirty-jokes gang-bang thresomes video-games | Gillian Flynn | |
| 40d3749 | Dorothy has one of those kitten-in-a-tree posters-- Hang in There! She posts her poster with all sincerity. I like to picture her running into some self-impressed Williamsburg bitch, all Bettie Page bangs and pointy glasses who owns the same poster ironically. I'd like to listen to them try to negotiate each other. Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness. It's their Kryptonite. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 072201c | because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 23c147b | It's an insane, insane crime, a lot of it isn't going to make sense. That's why people are so obsessed with these murders. If they made any sense, they wouldn't really be mysteries, right? | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 3a8da9a | In truth, I wanted her to read my mind so I didn't have to stoop to the womanly art of articulation. I was sometimes as guilty of playing the figure-me-out game as Amy was. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 464612e | I won't blame Nick. I don't blame Nick. I refuse - refuse! - to turn into some pert-mouthed, strident angry-girl. I made two promises to myself when I married Nick. One: no dancing-monkey demands. Two: I would never, ever say, Sure, that's fine by me (if you want to stay out later, if you want to do a boys' weekend, if you want to do something you want to do) and then punish him for doing what I said was fine by me. I worry I am coming peri.. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 593c758 | There were a lot of people who deserved a lesson, deserved to really understand, that nothing came easy, that most things were going to go sour. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 89c3f6c | Everyone has a moment where life goes off the rails. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 5ed6e4a | instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile. | Nikola Tesla | ||
| b9dd969 | Einstein said that "imagination is more important than knowledge," because "knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." | Sean Patrick | ||
| b51b831 | Adoption, I was to learn although not immediately, is hard to get right. As a concept, even what was then its most widely approved narrative carried bad news: if someone "chose" you, what does that tell you? Doesn't it tell you that you were available to be "chosen"? Doesn't it tell you, in the end, that there are only two people in the world? The ones who "chose" you? And the other who didn't? Are we beginning to see how the word "abandonm.. | Joan Didion | ||
| a87bc9e | the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live. | Joan Didion | ||
| 7eece8c | For forty years I saw myself thru John's eyes. I did not age. | Joan Didion | ||
| a358533 | Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted. | Joan Didion | ||
| 4cb55ca | She hoped that although he could not hear her she could somehow imprint her ordinary love upon his memory through all eternity, hoped he would rise thinking of her, | Joan Didion | ||
| bac61d9 | Barbara is on what is called the woman's trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than ten or twenty dollars a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. "Doing something that shows your love that way," she says, "is just about the most beautiful thing I know." Whenever I hear abo.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 573a65b | Ten watercolors were made from that star. | Joan Didion | ||
| b95d353 | The mourner is in fact ill, but because this state of mind is common and seems so natural to us, we do not call mourning an illness.... To put my conclusion more precisely: I should say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and overcomes it. | Joan Didion | ||
| 4a2ea46 | These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. | Joan Didion | ||
| 1b73854 | Research to date has shown that, like many other stressors, grief frequently leads to changes in the endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous, and cardiovascular systems; all of these are fundamentally influenced by brain function and neurotransmitters. | Joan Didion | ||
| 8ba97d3 | Once a man begins to recognize himself in another, he can no longer look on that person as a stranger. | Paul Auster | ||
| 2c35799 | What people saw when he appeared before them, then, was not really him, but a person he had invented, an artificial creature he could manipulate in order to manipulate others. He himself remained invisible, a puppeteer working the strings of his alter-ego from a dark, solitary place behind the curtain | Paul Auster | ||
| 5ca9638 | Better to wait quietly in their corner, they think, than to be dashed against the stones. | Paul Auster | ||
| 609c728 | I was looking for a quiet place to die. | Paul Auster | ||
| 9471b5c | Pero cuando la fe desaparece, cuando comprendes que ni siquiera te queda las esperanza de recuperar la esperanza, entonces tiendes a llenar los espacios vacios con suenos, pequena fantasias y cuentos infantiles que te ayuden a sobrevivir. | Paul Auster | ||
| bdddc4f | Pity is such an awful, useless emotion- you have to bottle it up and keep it to yourself.The moment you try to express it, it only makes things worse. | Paul Auster | ||
| 5765a0b | Nevertheless, this is where it begins. The first word appears only at a moment when nothing can be explained anymore, at some instant of experience that defies all sense. To be reduced to saying nothing. Or else, to say himself: this is what haunts me. And then to realize, almost in the same breath, that this is what he haunts. | realisation | Paul Auster | |
| b7c4e8a | Always lost, always striking out in the wrong direction, always going around in circles. You have suffered from a life-long inability to orient yourself in space, and even in New York, the easiest of cities to negotiate, the city where you have spent the better part of your adulthood, you often run into trouble. Whenever you take the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan (assuming you have boarded the correct train and are not traveling deeper .. | Paul Auster | ||
| 69eb54a | tsh`r wk'n l shy ymlk lqdr@ 'bdan `l~ qtHmh wkhtrqh, k'nW l Hj@ lh l'y shy mmW y`rfh l`lm. | Paul Auster | ||
| 21aea6b | But it would be wrong to say you were unhappy there, for you had no trouble adjusting to your reduced circumstances, you found it invigorating to learn that you could get by on almost nothing, and as long as you were able to write, it made no difference where or how you lived. | Paul Auster | ||
| 395c07a | He had to say; words were a lens to focus one's mind, and he could not use words for anything else tonight. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 7f803b6 | The helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human-- feeling as you went-- groping in corners and opening your arms to light-- all of it part of navigating the unknown. | Alice Sebold | ||
| ca2c104 | I was like I was in science class: I was curious. | science | Alice Sebold | |
| 8d4b09c | memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 70c531c | It was late in Ruana and Ray's visit when Samuel started talking about the gothic revival house that Lindsey and he had found along an overgrown section of Route 30. As he told Abigail about it in detail, describing how he had realized he wanted to propose to Lindsey and live there with her, Ray found himself asking, "Does it have a big hole in the ceiling of the back room and cool windows above the front door?" "Yes," Samuel said, as my f.. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 4b33bff | Ruth hadn't talked to my sister since before my death, and then it was only to excuse herself in the hallway at school. But she'd seen Lindsey walking home with Samuel and seen her smile with him. She watched as my sister said yes to pancakes and no to everything else. She had tried to imagine herself being my sister as she had spent time imagining being me. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 2c8dbd7 | As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 8369a12 | At the tips of the feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light....still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 216db98 | And there she was, alone and walking out in the cornfield while everyone else I cared for sat together in one room. She would always feel me and think of me. I could see that, but there was no longer anything I could do. Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose tot ell it, even to one person at a time. | Alice Sebold |