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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 973bffe | My dad said to me a few years ago: "There's no harm in thinking." We were talking about Crazy Uncle Albert and whether it was right to use your brain to build weapons. He said, "You can't expect people not to think. Not to know things just because they COULD be bad." I said, "Yeah, but then they built it and a hundred thousand people died." My dad laughed and said there were a lot of steps between the thinking and the doing. Which I know, d.. | head-games judith-ellis mariah-fredericks thinking | Mariah Fredericks | |
| c375278 | Never miss a good chance to shut up. | Brenda Novak | ||
| b28ffbb | are you a person - with volition and maybe some stubborness and at least the capacity if not the actual determination to do something surprising - or are you a tool? A tool just serves its user. It's only as good as the skill of its user, and its not good for anything else. So if you want to accomplish something special - something more than you can do for yourself - you can't use a tool. You have to use a person and hope the surprises will.. | Stephen R. Donaldson | ||
| 77bb3da | And you require no answers", Foamfollower was laughing in his gladness, "You are sufficient to every question"." | being contentment enquiry | Stephen R. Donaldson | |
| 7105a21 | I began to enjoy my own generosity; I felt the pleasure of pleasing others, especially as this was accompanied by money-power. I was paying for them; they were grateful, they had to be; and they could no longer see me as a failure. | fake-friends fake-people generosity money power | Hanif Kureishi | |
| b2b4a24 | He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn't even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he'd carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn't know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years .. | father-daughter parents regret | Hanif Kureishi | |
| 2043346 | But you're beautiful, and the beautiful should be given whatever they want." "Hey, what about the ugly ones?" "The ugly ones." She poked her tongue out. "It's their fault if their ugly. They're to be blamed, not pitied." | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| a9f0b0c | Do you like reading? It's the best thing that can happen to you in life. Writing has other implications. | writing | Manuel Rivas | |
| 8d81e28 | It was one of those moments when you feel the future so much that it humbles the present. | David Levithan and Rachel Cohn. | ||
| a7bd4df | Ignorance is ignorance, not a licence to believe what we like. | Bryan Magee | ||
| 02c8f3f | The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives, and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 66d7394 | It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children's books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers. | Alain de Botton | ||
| b11a9b7 | When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 3f3735f | Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally 'together' - when subjectively, we feel dispersed and confused. | Alain de Botton | ||
| ec6aba3 | We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves -- that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) -- who want to lead the sort of life.. | commandments god life morality morals reason superstition | Alain de Botton | |
| c4dabc4 | My mistake was to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a specific person. It was the error of thinking that Chloe, rather than love, was inevitable. | philosophy | Alain de Botton | |
| 32762a3 | But fantasies are often the best thing we can make of our multiple and contradictory wishes; they allow us to inhabit one reality without destroying the other. Fantasizing spares those we care about from the full irresponsibility and scary strangeness of our urges. | Alain de Botton | ||
| f401973 | If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. | sublime travel unfair world | Alain de Botton | |
| 5f8186c | Alice cold make no sense of the despair into which she had fallen. She had always held that happiness should be defined as an absence of pain rather than the presence of pleasure. So why, with a decent job, good health, and a roof over her head, did she regularly and so childishly collapse into moist sobs? | Alain de Botton | ||
| 7593318 | The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives. But | Alain de Botton | ||
| 8f2227a | established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are. | Alain de Botton | ||
| b2725f5 | Beneath the kiss itself, it is its meaning that interests us--which is why the desire to kiss someone can be decisively reduced (as it may need be, for instance, when two lovers are already married to other people) by a declaration of that desire--a confession which may in itself be so erotic as to render the actual kiss superfluous. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 8a5ac6b | The twenty-four-hour diner, the station waiting room and the motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world, sanctuaries for those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific 'poets'. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 818d74d | Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the simple rather than the ornate. The reason owes nothing to climate or genetics, added Keene, but is the result of the actions of writers, painters and.. | design emotional japan simplicity value visual wabi-sabi | Alain de Botton | |
| 2c4462c | I strip myself emotionally when I confess need - that I would be lost without you, that I am not necessarily the independent person I have tried to appear, but am a far less admirable weakling with little clue of life's course or meaning. When I cry and tell you things I trust you will keep for yourself, that would destroy me if others were to learn of them, when I give up the game of gazing seductively at parties and admit it's you I care .. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 24e60f0 | I can't understand people who don't like chocolate. I was once going out with a guy, this guy Robert I was telling you about, and I was never really comfortable with him, but I couldn't work out why. Then one day it all became clear: he didn't like chocolate. I mean he didn't just not love it, this guy actually hated it. You could have put a bar in front of him and he wouldn't have touched it. That kind of thinking is so far removed from an.. | chocolate | Alain de Botton | |
| c7a414e | Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union wit.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 92607b0 | Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not everything which hurts may be bad. | Alain de Botton | ||
| ca50891 | since I was a little boy, she had always wanted me to go. She was always sending me off on a bus someplace, to elementary school, to camp, to relatives in Kentucky, to college. She pushed me away from her just as she'd pushed my elder siblings away when we lived in New York, literally shoving them out the front door when they left for college. | James McBride | ||
| 8655c1c | See, a marriege needs love. And God. And a little money. That's all. | James McBride | ||
| f121178 | It occurred to me then that you is everything you are in this life at every moment. And that includes loving somebody. If you can't be your own self, how can you love somebody? How can you be free? That pressed on my heart like a vise right then. Just mashed me down. | James McBride | ||
| af0a059 | Whatever you is, Onion," he said, "be it full." | existence purpose self self-actualization understanding | James McBride | |
| 129e4d9 | Fish and company start to smell after three days. | James S. A. Corey | ||
| b963671 | God, save me from temperance," Tilly said. "You haven't seen a party till you get a group of Anglicans and Catholics trying to beat each other to the bottom of a bottle." "Now, that's not nice, Mrs Fagan," Father Michel said. "I've never met an Anglican that could keep up with me." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 2087c14 | All of human civilization had been built out of the ruins of what had come before. Life itself was a grand chemical improvisation that began with the simplest replicators and grew and collapsed and grew again. Catastrophe was just one part of what always happened. It was a prelude to what came next. "You" | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 100f65f | There were two sides fighting--that was true enough--but they weren't the inner planets versus the Belters. They were the people who thought it was a good idea to kill people who looked or acted differently against the people who didn't. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 775528d | Reputation never has very much to do with reality," she said. "I could name half a dozen paragons of virtue that are horrible, small-souled, evil people. And some of the best men I know, you'd walk out of the room if you heard their names. No one on the screen is who they are when you breathe their air." -- | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 0d1b713 | Nothing with meat inside it could outrun metal and silicon. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 084cd53 | The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster," she said. It was a truism of ecological biologists, and she said it the way a religious person might pray. To make sense of what she saw. To comfort herself. To give the world some sense of purpose or meaning. Species rose in an environment, and that environment changed. It was the nature of the universe, as true here as it had been on Earth." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 33febfa | Things changed, and they didn't change back. But sometimes they got better. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 2c26572 | You use a welding rig to weld things. You use a gun to shoot things. You use a Bobbie Draper to fuck a bunch of bad guys permanently up. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| dcd9e67 | I have killed, but I am not a killer because a killer is a monster, and monsters aren't afraid. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 6f87ba1 | Anyone can kill a planet from orbit," Holden replied. "You don't even need bombs. Just push anvils out the airlock. That thing out there could kill... Shit. Anything." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 06c77ce | Avasarala laughed at that. "True. But if he's sending his hired killer to Earth, we--" "Wait, what?" "If Holden was--" "Forget Holden. You called me his hired killer. Is that how you guys think of me? The killer on Holden's payroll?" Avasarala frowned. "You're not?" "Well, mostly I'm a mechanic. But the idea that the UN has a file on me somewhere that lists me as the Rocinante's killer? That's kind of awesome." | James S.A. Corey |