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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7d724ec | In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| b719b13 | A shadow strolled past the car, indifferent to our curbside melodrama. This was my second time imperiled in a a parked vehicle in the space of three hours. I wondered what goonish spectacles I'd overlooked in my own career as a pavement walker. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| e354f70 | People sometimes act as though owning books you haven't read constitutes a charade or pretense, but for me, there's a lovely mystery and pregnancy about a book that hasn't given itself over to you yet--sometimes I'm the most inspired by imagining what the contents of an unread book might be. ~ Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude | reading | Leah Price | |
| 48d3f06 | None of us mattered to her, not me, or her critics or defenders. No more than bugs on a lampshade. | Alice Munro | ||
| 3946f0e | People open shops in order to sell things, they hope to become busy so that they will have to enlarge the shop, then to sell more things, and grow rich, and eventually not have to come into the shop at all. Isn't that true? But are there other people who open a shop with the hope of being sheltered there, among such things as they most value - the yarn or the teacups or the books - and with the idea only of making a comfortable assertion? T.. | shops | Alice Munro | |
| 6589729 | A certain kind of seriousness in a girl could cancel out looks | Alice Munro | ||
| b714dc4 | Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after -- like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word | Alice Munro | ||
| 7d46036 | What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever. | Alice Munro | ||
| d51ab27 | Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self - my old, devious, ironic, isolated self - beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss. | love | Alice Munro | |
| 8e4654c | She got in, as she had persuaded Jerott Blyth to bring her half across France, by force of logic, a kind of flat-chested innocence and the doggedness of a flower-pecker attacking a strangling fig. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 85a8f6f | Intentions, yours or anyone else's, don't matter; they never matter and never excuse. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| b1c125e | because he believed that if you wanted to get rid of a hole, you filled it. He had not realized at the time that there were all sorts of filler that took up space, but had no substance. That made you feel just as empty. | Jodi Picoult | ||
| 46db6ef | The crossroads may not be of your own seeking, but at least the road you choose will be your own. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 0fc4857 | We have reached the open sea, with some charts; and the firmament. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 5157544 | Isn't it only laughter we can stay human? | James Clavell | ||
| bd8d5ca | Not to every young girl is it given to enter the harem of the Sultan of Turkey and return to her homeland a virgin. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| ffb40c2 | The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy are to spend money on common needs. The rich don't need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 1a5ea7c | Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?--and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 4ea2115 | I noticed then that the red-haired woman was buying the food you eat when you live alone: a box of cereal, a few apples, a plastic container of plain yogurt....With an abrupt clarity, I saw how I had been launched into another category. I had been the red-haired woman; for a decade of my adult life, I had bought cereal and yogurt, I'd stood near couples and watched them nuzzle, and now I was part of such a couple. And I would not be launche.. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 2c11c9e | You give too much attention to things that make you unhappy,' Allison says. No doubt she is right. And yet attending to things that make Hannah unhappy--it's such a natural reflex. It feels so intrinsic, it feels in some ways like who she is. The unflattering observations she makes about other people, the comments that get her in trouble, aren't these truer than small talk and thank-you notes? Worse, but truer. And underneath all the decoru.. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 9fbc517 | After I'd told her - the mall, the taxi, Cross stroking my hair - she said, 'Did he kiss you?' 'John and Martin totally would have seen that,' I said, and as I felt myself implying the circumstances had prevented our kissing, I thought maybe this was why you told stories to other people - for how their possibilities enlarged in the retelling. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| c00faac | Let's go to bed. Those four words differentiate a marriage from every other kind of relationship. We aren't going to find a way to agree, but let's go to bed. Not because we want to, but because we have to. We hate each other right now, but let's go to bed. It's the only one we have. Let's go to our sides, but the sides of the same bed. Let's retreat into ourselves, but together. How many conversations had ended with those four words? How m.. | love marriage | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 08a6bbc | I pull the skull off my head. Even though it's made of papier-mache it's really hard. I smash it against Jimmy Snyder's head, and I smash it again. He falls to the ground, because he is unconscious, and I can't believe how strong I actually am. I smash his head again with all my force and blood starts to come out of his nose and ears. But I still don't feel any sympathy for him. I want him to bleed, because he deserves it. And nothing else .. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| d4d9f87 | You do not have to utter anything you do not want to utter," I told her, and she said, "Then I would never utter another word again." "You do not have to do anything that you do not want to do." "Then I would never do anything again." | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 63519d0 | I am willing to be annoying if that's what was necessary. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 3887a38 | It was inevitable: Yankel fell in love with his never-wife. He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too-real chest, making his widower's rememberences that much more convincing and his pain that much more real. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 1e4f011 | I ran rather than walked, anxious to lose my way. All I wanted was to be unsure. | uncertainty | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 3ab9553 | It hurts me when you do not want to hurt me. | love | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 4c15d35 | What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans -- small and large, crude and multifaceted -- that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 961d52c | How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her? | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| a83e087 | In my dream, people apologized for things that were about to happen, and lit candles by inhaling. | regret remorse sorrow | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| e1204e4 | I remember spending an afternoon with Mr. Richter in the Central Park Zoo, I went weighted down with food for the animals, only someone who'd never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them, Mr. Richter told a joke, I tossed hamburger to the lions, he rattled the cages with his laughter, the animals went to the corners, we laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore what.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| b2608ee | He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 18cf0b6 | She spent an afternoon staring at their front door. Waiting for someone? Yankel asked. What color is this? He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, It certainly tastes like red. Yes, it is red, isn't it? Seems so. She buried her head in her hands. But couldn't it be just a bit more red? | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| fd2cccb | As long as I am thinking, I am alive. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| d29dc14 | Brod discovered 613 sadnesses, each perfectly unique, each a singular emotion, no more similar to any other sadness than to anger, ecstasy, guilt, or frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness of Domesticated Birds. Sadness of Being Sad in front of One's Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness of Love Without Release. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 88a5817 | Everyone performs bad actions. I do. Father does. Even you do. A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 04ac9c0 | Is that why I went wild over her? Because once I saw her truly? Is devotion as simple as that? | Denis Johnson | ||
| e93fd88 | War is ninety percent myth anyway, isn't it? In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don't we, and we constantly invoke our God. It's got to be about something bigger than dying, or we'd all turn deserter. I think we need to be much more conscious of that. I think we need to be invoking the other fellow's gods too. | Denis Johnson | ||
| fd080c6 | G]ive him this much: death didn't just walk up and inhale him. He wasn't exactly whisked away. He left claw marks on his life. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 57bc012 | She was resting at a table between numbers in the Greek nightclub where she was dancing. A little of the stage light touched her. She was very frail. She seemed to be thinking about something far away, waiting patiently for somebody to destroy her. | Denis Johnson | ||
| d7d260b | I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body, lonesome behind the face | Denis Johnson | ||
| dec247f | It's plain to you that at the time I write this, I'm not dead. But maybe by the time you read it. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 89f86c9 | The three of us had formed a group based on something erroneous, some basic misunderstanding that hadn't yet come to light, and so we kept on in one another's company, going to bars and having conversations. | Denis Johnson |