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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b6ecfb8 | How peaceful it was, with the light evening breeze stirring the small leaves of the grapevine that clustered around the electric bulb, making the shadows move and change on the yellow mat below. For a moment he pushed aside the thought of money. From time to time the dark water beside them rippled audibly, as if a tiny fish had come to the surface for an instant and then darted beneath. It was in peaceful moments such as this, his father ha.. | yearning | Paul Bowles | |
| c9192d5 | Well, I'm over it. Let's just forget about it." He blinked at me, seeming surprised by my easy forgiveness. I gave him a small smile and took a sip of my juice. He leaned back in his chair and observed me. "How's your orange juice, Ann? Does it have a touch of lime?" The glass paused at my lips as I processed his innuendo, and I took a second to make sure my embarrassment stayed hidden inside. I let the drink swish over my tongue a moment b.. | Wendy Higgins | ||
| 6bbb290 | The awakening passed from simple recognition of my need for God at the center of my life, to a depth where the will is stirred And that is a deeper place by far. That is the place of response, of unifying one's heart, mind, soul and feet around a decision. | Sue Monk Kidd | ||
| 5ea28d9 | I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time. | novelists novels writers writing | Sue Monk Kidd | |
| d21010a | Sometimes you want to fall on your knees and thank God in heaven for all the poor news reporting that goes on in the world. | Sue Monk Kidd | ||
| b60e36d | I missed Rosaleen's snoring the way you'd miss the sound of the ocean waves after you've gotten used to sleeping with them. I didn't realize how it had comforted me. Quiteness has a strange, spongy hum that can nearly break your eardrums. | Sue Monk Kidd | ||
| 897f9fc | Ah earth you old extinguisher. | earth fire heat | Samuel Beckett | |
| 6b79deb | On trouve toujours quelque chose, hein, Didi, pour nous donner l'impression d'exister? | Samuel Beckett | ||
| 9ee0157 | No choice but stand. Somehow up and stand. Somehow stand. That or groan. The groan so long on its way. No. No groan. Simply pain. Simply up. A time when try how. Try see. Try say. How first it lay. Then somehow knelt. Bit by bit. Then on from there. Bit by bit. Till up at last. | Samuel Beckett | ||
| f0c99c0 | I began playing with the cries, a little in the same way as I had played with the song, on, back, on, back, if that may be called playing. As long as I kept walking I didn't hear them, because of the footsteps. But as soon as I halted again I heard them again, a little fainter each time, admittedly, but what does it matter, faint or loud, cry is cry, all that matters is that it should cease. For years I thought they would cease. Now I don't.. | Samuel Beckett | ||
| 12e6007 | fy lZlm . Sryr lsryr jz mn Hyty l 'Hb 'n ykhtfy . | Samuel Beckett | ||
| 5fc966a | Another happy day. | Samuel Beckett | ||
| 6f4ac35 | For I shall be far away, before these lines are read, in a place where no one will dream of coming to look for me. | Samuel Beckett | ||
| 97b876f | Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be no.. | Samuel Beckett | ||
| fbf28da | Yes, there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who are dead, but all the others. So you get up and go to your mother, who thinks she is alive. That's my impression. But now I shall have to get myself out of this ditch. How joyfully I would vanish here, sinking deeper and deeper under the rains. | Samuel Beckett | ||
| e68aaf0 | He was split, one part of him never left this mental chamber that pictured itself as a sphere full of light fading into dark, because there was no way out. But motion in this world depended on rest in the world outside. A man is in bed, wanting to sleep. A rat is behind the wall at his head, wanting to move. The man hears the rat fidget and cannot sleep, the rat hears the man fidget and dares not move. They are both unhappy, one fidgeting a.. | Samuel Beckett | ||
| 8151c19 | And yet I am afraid, afraid of what my words will do to me, to my refuge, yet again.... If I could speak and yet say nothing, really nothing? Then I might escape being gnawed to death. | Samuel Beckett | ||
| 681cae7 | I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray, I'm all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I'm something qu.. | anxiety turmoil words | Samuel Beckett | |
| e0287d2 | ESTRAGON: In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent. VLADIMIR: You're right, we're inexhaustible. ESTRAGON: It's so we won't think. VLADIMIR: We have that excuse. ESTRAGON: It's so we won't hear. VLADIMIR: We have our reasons. ESTRAGON: All the dead voices. | Samuel Beckett | ||
| f92afeb | Wait until you see him up on a horse | Linda Lael Miller | ||
| 4614751 | The wise man understands his weakness and seeks to find a lesson from it. The fool lets it control and destroy him. | Christie Golden | ||
| 57de669 | He dreamt that night that he rode through the woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule's barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed, he'd never pass again. They rode over his face lik.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 5f531ba | Son, not everbody thinks that life on a cattle ranch in west Texas is the second best thing to dyin and goin to heaven. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 29cbbb2 | The gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale peculiar to himself. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 1e06bf7 | Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 44893fe | It is certainly not then--not in dreams--but when one is wide awake, in moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 9cd2ce6 | In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| a62ec4d | He was one of those persons whom one loves not because of some lustrous streak of talent (this retired businessman possessed none), but because every moment spent with them fits exactly the gauge of one's life. There are friendships like circuses, waterfalls, libraries; there are others comparable to old dressing gowns. You found nothing especially attractive about Maximov's mind if you took it apart: his ideas were conservative, his tastes.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| eaf475f | I think she always nursed a small mad hope. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| a480bab | Drug addicts, especially young ones, are conformists flocking together in sticky groups, and I do not write for groups, nor approve of group therapy (the big scene in the Freudian farce); as I have said often enough, I write for myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts. Young dunces who turn to drugs cannot read "Lolita," or any of my books, some in fact cannot read at all. Let me also observe.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 61c6ac1 | This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 29d4a3d | I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world- nymphet love. (135) | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| da2e18d | But then what should I have done with you, Nina, how should I have disposed of the store of sadness that had gradually accumulated as a result of our seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings? | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| a781880 | She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 1ef4b95 | No you can't take a pistol and plug a girl you don't even know simply because she attracts you. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 21784d1 | There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, [...]; and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 9a237f9 | It happens that over a long period you are promised a great success, in which from the very start you do not believe, so dissimilar is it from the rest of fate's offering, and if from time to time you do think of it, then you do so as it were to indulge your fantasy - but when, at last, on a very ordinary day with a west wind blowing, the news comes - simply, instantaneously and decisevely destroying any hope in it - then you are suddenly a.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| b646a6f | For life has worn me down: continual uneasiness, concealment of my knowledge, pretense, fear, a painful straining of all my nerves--not to let down, not to ring out ... and even to this day I still feel an ache in that part of my memory where the very beginning of this effort is recorded, that is, the occasion when I first understood that things which to me had seemed natural were actually forbidden, impossible, that any thought of them was.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| bc4d326 | If I am not master of my life, not sultan of my own being, then no man's logic and no man's ecstatic fits may force me to find less silly my impossibly silly position: that of God's slave; no, not his slave even, but just a match which is aimlessly struck and then blown out by some inquisitive child, the terror of his toys. | atheism evangelism god | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| ae3a6d5 | My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on "ideas." Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the "how" above the "what" but do not let it be confused with the "so what." Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point... | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 0094513 | I am here through an error--not in this prison, specifically--but in this whole terrible, striped world; | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 0d181bd | Actually he was a pessimist, and, like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 7a3a6b9 | Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, 'When I grow up I will go there.' The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, .. | maps | Joseph Conrad | |
| 2ad59b6 | Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other's yarns--and even convictions. | Joseph Conrad |