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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e6d0833 | And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets. | Annie Proulx | ||
| 23eca69 | Though there had yet to be a victor in this great war that had begun almost three years ago, Maurice had written to her that they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. Freedom to think hopefully of the future. | true-to-life war | Jacqueline Winspear | |
| 8feae9a | And it occurred to her that she was so used to turning over everything in her mind, as if each thought were an intricate shell found at the beach, that she had never truly known the value of simply accepting things as they were. | Jacqueline Winspear | ||
| 99059e1 | A chaotic situation is always deliberately produced. Ask yourself who or what sort of creature could benefit from such a situation. | William S. Burroughs | ||
| 602afde | A coprophage calls for a plate, shits on it and eats the shit, exclaiming, "Mmmm, that's my rich substance." | William S. Burroughs | ||
| 3e116e3 | Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent un.. | bureaucracy bureaucratization bureaucrats cancer | William S. Burroughs | |
| 3ff351c | There's a boy across the river with an ass like a peach; alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine. | William S. Burroughs | ||
| 019e55b | I don't spot junk neighbourhoods by the way they look, but by the feel, somewhat the same process by which a dowser locates hidden water. I am walking along and suddenly the junk in my cells moves and twitches like the dowsers wand: 'Junk here! | drugs heroin | William S. Burroughs | |
| 6c46aaf | Now, boys, you won't see this operation performed very often and there's a reason for that... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning. | William S. Burroughs | ||
| 25ec15b | You're both mother fuckers." She was half asleep. Her voice was matter-of-fact as if referring to actual incest." | William S. Burroughs | ||
| 3684881 | There is no shame in making an honest effort. | Epictetus | ||
| c4fcb0e | If you wish your house to be well managed, imitate the Spartan Lycurgus. For as he did not fence his city with walls, but fortified the inhabitants by virtue and preserved the city always free;35 so do you not cast around (your house) a large court and raise high towers, but strengthen the dwellers by good-will and fidelity and friendship, and then nothing harmful will enter it, not even if the whole band of wickedness shall array itself ag.. | Epictetus | ||
| 68b62c5 | An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others. Someone just starting instruction will lay the fault on himself. Some who is perfectly instructed will place blame neither on others nor on himself. | Epictetus | ||
| d486d38 | The Stoics taught a life of restraint and control, the personal cultivation of learning, beauty, and reason. The Stoics asked the Romans to realize that much that is encountered in life is beyond the individual's control. Make the best of what can be humanly cultivated. It is a kind of Platonism shrunk to a pursuit of private feelings and thoughts: Do the best with what you can control and refine, and let the rest go. "The world is rational.. | Norman F. Cantor | ||
| cf7baa6 | We are at the mercy of whoever wields authority over the things we either desire or detest. If you would be free, then, do not wish to have, or avoid, things that other people control, because then you must serve as their slave. | Epictetus | ||
| 4e19df8 | If you ever happen to turn your attention to externals, for the pleasure of any one, be assured that you have ruined your scheme of life. Be contented, then, in everything, with being a philosopher; and if you with to seem so likewise to any one, appear so to yourself, and it will suffice you. | Epictetus Epictetus | ||
| 4d6f20f | I became known as Lily Casey, the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County, and it wasn't half bad to be in place where no one had a problem with a woman having a moniker like that. | Jeannette Walls | ||
| 7ea97ab | even though I was getting better education at home than any of the kids in Toyah, I'd need to go to finishing school when I was thirteen, both to acquire social graces and to earn a diploma. Because in this world, Dad said, it's not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you go it. | sarcasm | Jeannette Walls | |
| 622d8bf | We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 717a537 | You fall in love with the girl next door but married her sister. | Luanne Rice | ||
| eb9688c | Some feelings are stronger than fear: love, longing, desire. | Luanne Rice | ||
| 060290b | There aren't many honest men or women in Washington anymore. Politicians get where they are by the sheer force of their egos, not their convictions. And you know what? It's our fault as voters. We don't demand better candidates, so we end up getting what we deserve--on both sides of the aisle. | Brad Thor | ||
| faa1a99 | So I graduated from college with a degree in journalism and was ready to find my dream job at a newspaper in addition to one good man who owned his own car and was certain about his sexuality, my two new, revised qualifying criteria for a potential date. | Laurie Notaro | ||
| bd91cbb | You must understand that seeing is believing, but also know that believing is seeing. | Denis Waitley | ||
| bc396cc | Seekers inevitably want to get a better handle on life; we want to figure things out. We know intuitively that the events of our lives are not always arbitrary. We feel connected, however intangibly. We know that it is in our higher self-interest to unravel the mysteries in our own lives. There must be a higher purpose and greater meaning. As we become more and more spiritually evolved, we become more determined to find wisdom and reach a d.. | Lama Surya Das | ||
| 80acf38 | When the gravity of death first touched me, I'd found preoccupation with the minutiae of daily life meaningless. If we ultimately die, and turn to dust in the ground, should it ever truly upset us if the floor hasn't been swept quite recently enough. | Shirin Ebadi | ||
| a4d39f8 | It seems that intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 778bc23 | Group headquarters was alarmed, for there is no telling what people might find out once they felt felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to. Colonel Cathcart sent Colonel Korn to stop it, and Colonel Korn succeeded with a rule governing the asking of questions. Colonel Korn's rule was a stroke of genius, Colonel Korn explained in his report to Colonel Cathcart. Under Colonel Corn's rule the only people permitted to ask questions we.. | Joseph Heller | ||
| aeea6ec | The Germans will be beaten in a few months. And Japan will be beaten a few months after that. If I were to give up my life now, it wouldn't be for my country. It would be for Cathcart and Korn. So I'm turning my bombsight in for the duration. From now on I'm thinking only of me. | Joseph Heller | ||
| e343e6a | Those who are close to us, when they die, divide our world. There is the world of the living, which we finally, in one way or another, succumb to, and then there is the domain of the dead that, like an imaginary friend (or foe) or a secret concubine, constantly beckons, reminding us of our loss. What is memory but a ghost that lurks at the corners of the mind, interrupting our normal course of life, disrupting our sleep in order to remind u.. | father-daughter-relationship iran iranian-revolution memoir mother-daughter-relationship | Azar Nafisi | |
| b691ab7 | yshj`wnn `l~ Zhr msh`r Hbn llmm b'qS~ 'shkl lt`byr mGl@, bynm yHrWmwn `lyn 'n nZhr 'y t`byr `lny `n msh`rn lshkhSy@, w'`ny lHb bshkl khS | Azar Nafisi | ||
| a29741f | I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires, of constantly having access .. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 5431fc2 | Modern fiction brings out the evil in domestic lives, ordinary relations, people like you and me -- Reader! Bruder! as Humbert said. Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to "see" others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, or imposing our visions and desir.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 084ab88 | There are different forms of seduction, and the kind I have witnessed in Persian dancers is so unique, such a mixture of subtlety and brazenness, I cannot find a Western equivalent to compare it to. I have seen women of vastly different backgrounds take on that same expression: a hazy, lazy, flirtatious look in their eyes. . . . This sort of seduction is elusive; it is sinewy and tactile. It twists, twirls, winds and unwinds. Hands curl and.. | iran persian seduction | Azar Nafisi | |
| e5db5a3 | On television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment. Everything that makes religion an historic, profound, sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. | Neil Postman | ||
| 50f4e71 | The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by 'better' such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with 'image.' But not because p.. | campaigns debate democracy discourse elections irrelevancy politics polling | Neil Postman | |
| ae6609f | People of a television culture need "plain language" both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience." | Neil Postman | ||
| ee8876e | television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing; that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice--the voice of entertainment" | Neil Postman | ||
| 2f8f48e | Sometimes I notice I'm demented, especially at sunset. | insanity | Jaroslav Hašek | |
| 14d9aa2 | The lieutenant's fooling around again with the telegraph girl at the station," said the corporal, after he had gone. "He's been running after her for a fortnight and he's always frightfully furious when he comes from the telegraph office and he says about her: "She's a whore. She won't sleep with me!" | humorous | Jaroslav Hašek | |
| fe79755 | Without question, the notion of the doctor as a legitimate fee-for-service entrepreneur, making his fortune from misfortunes of is patients, is old-fashioned, distasteful, and doomed. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 6f6304a | I believe the experiences reported in this book are reproducible by anyone who wishes to try. I went to Africa. You can go to Africa. You may have trouble arranging the time or the money, but everybody has trouble arranging something. I believe you can travel anywhere if you want to badly enough. And I believe the same is true of inner travel. You don't have to take my word about chakras or healing energy or auras. You can find about them .. | psychic skepticism spiritual spirituality travel | Michael Crichton | |
| 1c8fabe | He did not want an affair with his boss. He did not even want a one-night stand. Because what always happened was that people found out, gossip at the water cooler, meaningful looks in the hallway. And sooner or later the spouses found out. It always happened. Slammed doors, divorce lawyers, child custody. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 2225199 | Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don't do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big eq.. | Michael Crichton |