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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 848d006 | November is the most disagreeable month in the whole ear,' said Margaret, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frostbitten garden. 'That's the reason I was born in it,' observed Jo pensively, quite unconscious of the blot on her nose. 'If something very pleasant should happen now, we should think it a delightful month,' said Beth, who took a hopeful view of everything, even November. | louisa-may-alcott | Louisa May Alcott | |
| 8abc6c3 | to the inspiration of necessity, we owe half the wise, beautiful, and useful blessings of the world. | louisa-may-alcott | Louisa May Alcott | |
| 472dbad | Psychological studies have recently shown that adversity can be a more powerful motivator than support. Successful people often remember being told that they could not do what they have, in fact, done brilliantly. Stubbornness drove them. Their parents or teachers have told them they will never make any money, or that they will never get a college degree, or that they will never marry and have children. The urge to prove authority wrong has.. | Susan Cheever | ||
| 83eda33 | Hope and keep busy', | Louisa May Alcott | ||
| d0d4f82 | misfortune was much more interesting to her than good luck. | louisa-may-alcott misfortune | Louisa May Alcott | |
| 33f4441 | Ma il vero peccato sta nell'intenzione essenziale. Un uomo che non puo scegliere cessa di essere un uomo | Anthony Burgess | ||
| 5b8bd6e | With older people, it's quite different. They're reliable, they show you what to do, and there's solidity in their affection. | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| c779f3f | Then time started flowing again and the emptiness grew larger. | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| d01b504 | I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon. | existentialism | Jean-Paul Sartre | |
| 008c09b | I am, I am, I exist, I think therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think anymore. | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| 2b2f9a5 | J'etais un enfant, ce monstre qu'ils fabriquent avec leurs regrets. | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| 1efb63a | Everything that burns, everything that rips me apart, I want to suffer with my body. I'd rather have a hundred wounds, whips, poisons - than this kind of suffering in the head, this phantom of suffering, which touches me softly and caresses me without ever really hurting. | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| e99c5a2 | What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it. | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| 9679bf9 | Will you do me the honour of lunching with me on Wednesday?" "With pleasure." I had as much desire to eat with him as I had to hang myself." | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| 3fc42d0 | This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it. | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| e424110 | But you looked much more like a fellow who had just realised that he has been living on ideas that don't pay. | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| 091c760 | Don't be afraid; I'll keep looking at you for ever and ever, without a flutter of my eyelids, and you'll live in my gaze like a mote in a sunbeam. | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| f7aa205 | If... if I didn't try to get my life moving on my own account, I should think it just absurd to go on living.' A look of smiling obstinacy had come into Marcelle's face. 'Yes, yes - it's your vice.' 'It's not a vice. It's how I'm made.' 'Why aren't other people made like that, if it isn't a vice?' 'They are, only they don't know it. | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| 565745d | As attentive readers may have noted, the standard narrative of heterosexual interaction boils down to prostitution: a woman exchanges her sexual services for access to resources. Maybe mythic resonance explains part of the huge box-office appeal of a film like Pretty Woman, where Richard Gere's character trades access to his wealth in exchange for what Julia Roberts's character has to offer (she plays a hooker with a heart of gold, if you m.. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 7e62be5 | I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don't think it is years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children.. | grief growing-older | Jane Smiley | |
| 562cd23 | The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 40e2d45 | The pursuit of unhappiness is an inalienable right of all humans. | Frank Herbert | ||
| ecde1e9 | She thought of the boy's features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns-endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus. | randomness | Frank Herbert | |
| a853662 | I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice? | cowardice mediocrity priest religion | Frank Herbert | |
| 45d3995 | A person cries out in life because it's lonely and because life's been broken off from whatever created it. But no matter how much you hate life, you love it too. It's like a caldron boiling with everything you have to have, but very painful to the lips. | Frank Herbert | ||
| df49780 | All of history is a malleable instrument in my hands. Ohhh, I have accumulated all of these pasts and I possess every fact--yet the facts are mine to use as I will and, even using them truthfully, I change them. | truth | Frank Herbert | |
| 31bae25 | My family sat in their pool courtyard," Harah said, "in air bathed by the moisture that arose from the spray of a fountain. There was a tree of portyguls, round and deep in color, near at hand. There was a basket with mish mish and baklawa and mugs of liban--all manner of good things to eat. In our gardens and, in our flocks, there was peace . . . peace in all the land." "Life was full with happiness until the raiders came," Alia said. .. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 680aab0 | The wise man molds himself--the fool lives only to die. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 8c16c1b | A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his world's language... it's different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you don't hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... Understanding must move with the flow of the process. | experience flow languages leadership life mystery persuasion problem process reality team understanding | Frank Herbert | |
| 4520850 | Each man is a little war. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 8f654fd | I didn't want to be different. I wanted to be able to laugh But I'm sister to an Emperor who's worshiped as a god. People fear me. I never wanted to be feared. I don't want to be part of history, I just want to be loved . . . and to love. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 00702fb | Some say," Scytale said, "that people cling to Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place. They can turn toward him and say: 'See, there He is. He makes us one.' Perhaps religion serves the same purpose, m'Lord." | emperor religion scytale | Frank Herbert | |
| d8ebed7 | There exists a limit to the force even the most powerful may apply without destroying themselves. Judging this limit is the true artistry of government. Misuse of power is the fatal sin. The law cannot be a tool of vengeance, never a hostage, nor a fortification against the martyrs it has created. You cannot threaten any individual and escape the consequences. | consequences fatal force government law limit sin tool true vengeance | Frank Herbert | |
| d813ebf | Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 9073b9e | But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost--swallowed up in the ocean--unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 37db76b | Every true heart needed a pragmatic counterweight, and every cynic an idealist to lift his spirits. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 011953a | He has reverted, in other words, back into a pure balls-to-the-wall nerdism rivaled only by his early game-coding days back in Seattle. The sheer depth and involution of the current nerdism binge would be hard to convey to anyone. Intellectually, he is juggling half a dozen lit torches, Ming vases, live puppies, and running chainsaws. In this frame of mind he cannot bring himself to give a shit about the fact that this incredibly powerful b.. | true | Neal Stephenson | |
| 18e8172 | I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0e77f3a | Unfortunately, this category of secret is itself so secret that it's very existance is secret, and he can't actually reveal it to anyone. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7c4ee8e | Really, he has only two emotions: sleeping and adrenaline overdrive. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 230490e | Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones. | suburbia | Neal Stephenson | |
| 2f60690 | And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle--all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe--for he s.. | point-of-view | Neal Stephenson | |
| b651216 | Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations - whiskey, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes - without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9757052 | If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him? | Neal Stephenson |