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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b574808 | But peace isn't determined by circumstances outside us. Peace stems from forgiveness. Pain doesn't stem from the love we're denied by others, but rather from the love that we deny them. | Marianne Williamson | ||
| 4ea9d9b | Dear God, I surrender this situation to you. May it be used for your purposes. I ask only that my heart be open to give love and to receive love. May all the results unfold according to your will. Amen." Whatever you do, do it for God." | Marianne Williamson | ||
| 542eb70 | growth can be messy. | Marianne Williamson | ||
| 76bed9f | God cannot do for us what He cannot do through us, and today I pray that He works through me. May I be used for a higher purpose, as I surrender to Him my hands and feet, my thoughts and behavior. May they reflect His love. May angels guide me, that I might do the part assigned me to help heal the world. | Marianne Williamson | ||
| 70d60d3 | Like the ocean, the native state of the feminine is to flow with great power and no single direction. The masculine builds canals, dams, and boats to unite with the power of the feminine ocean and go from point A to point B. But the feminine moves in many directions at once. The masculine chooses a single goal and moves in that direction. Like a ship cutting through a vast ocean, the masculine decides on a course and navigates the direction.. | David Deida | ||
| 873025b | Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, it was not the Vatican. | David Berlinski | ||
| 94ac54f | He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences. | John Irving | ||
| 87f4bb7 | but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human. | John Irving | ||
| c03ea89 | The beauty myth of the present is more insidious than any mystique of femininity yet: A century ago, Nora slammed the door of the doll's house; a generation ago, women turned their backs on the consumer heaven of the isolated multiapplianced home; but where women are trapped today, there is no door to slam. The contemporary ravages of the beauty backlash are destroying women physically and depleting us psychologically. If we are to free our.. | beauty eating-disorders images magazines marketing self-esteem society | Naomi Wolf | |
| f67b906 | Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart's desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking dist.. | aging beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery cosmetics culture diet-industry double-standards eating-disorders equality fashion-industry feminism images magazines marketing mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery pornography self-esteem sexual-violence sexuality society | Naomi Wolf | |
| 0b50c87 | Men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God | John Irving | ||
| 59ac850 | You live your life at the time you live it -- you don't have much of an overview when what's happening to you is still happening. | John Irving | ||
| 4eea3f2 | Wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she kept reading it and reading it... | John Irving | ||
| c7e432c | His argument runs like this: there is no goodness without free will. Without the ability to freely choose-or reject-the good, an individual possesses no control over his own soul, and without that control, there is not possibility of attaining grace. In the language of Christianity, a beliver cannot be saved unless the choice to follow Christ is freely made, unless the option not to follow him genuinely exists. Compelled belief is no belief.. | Thomas C. Foster | ||
| c88760f | Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone. | readers-and-writers | Thomas C. Foster | |
| 959fa7d | We don't know what we'd do. Nobody knows what accident of fate or DNA or character will determine how we act when the shit hits the fan. | Francine Prose | ||
| e59e7b2 | Read your work aloud, if you can, if you aren't too embarrassed by the sound of your voice ringing out when you are alone in a room. Chances are that the sentence you can hardly pronounce without stumbling is a sentence that needs to be reworked to make it smoother and more fluent. A poet once told me that he was reading a draft of a new poem aloud to himself when a thief broke into his Manhattan loft. Instantly surmising that he had entere.. | writing | Francine Prose | |
| f434383 | Scientists' minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another. | Caleb Carr | ||
| 24b082f | it occurred to her how some people continued through no design of one's own to be in one's life while others might initially enter in a sort of blaze and seem to change everything but then might not stay around. | Susan Minot | ||
| 1ccf50f | No, he's made a very good point,' said Bashford provocatively. 'Women are just vessels, you know.' 'That's very true,' said Sykes, smiling angelically at him. 'I myself am a seventeen-thousand-ton Dreadnought class battleship with enough firepower to destroy a medium-sized city. | Jodi Taylor | ||
| 284d45f | When I first met Cara, she was twelve and angry at the world. Her parents had split up, her brother was gone, and her mom was infatuated with some guy who was missing vowels in his unpronounceable last name. So I did what any other man in that situation would do: I came armed with gifts. I bought her things that I thought a twelve-year-old would love: a poster of Taylor Lautner, a Miley Cyrus CD, nail polish that glowed in the dark. "I can'.. | impression kids parents-dating | Jodi Picoult | |
| a14d459 | What chest?' I said, because everyone knows if you ignore persistent, throbbing pain then it goes away. Like toothache. And small children. And overdrafts. | Jodi Taylor | ||
| 9c28e24 | What could my mother be to yours? What kin is my father to yours anyway? And how did you and I meet ever? But in love our hearts have mingled like red earth and pouring rain. | kinship love poetry | Vikram Chandra | |
| a86a4d1 | Our eyes met. We had so very many shared memories between us, Bao and I. Some were wonderous, and some were terrible. Some were both. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 8967375 | Costis flinched and looked away from this compensation to the king's handicap, only to find himself staring directly into the king's face instead. Eugenides matched Costis look for look, his expression grave, his eyes like pools of darkness deeper than Costis could penetrate. For a moment Costis could see, not so much what was hidden but that there were things hidden that the king did not choose to reveal. Things that were not for Costis to.. | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| dcc8be4 | to be underestimated by an enemy is the greatest advantage a man can have. | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| c27b6f6 | In the end, though, vodsels couldn't do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn't siuwil, the couldn't mesnishtil,they had no concept of slan. | Michel Faber | ||
| bed0634 | Falling in love: how does it work? Over the years we gather the odd clue, but nothing adds up. We'd like to think we have a picture of our future partner projected in our mind, all their qualities recorded as if on film, and we just search the planet for that person until we find them, sitting in Casablanca waiting to be recognised. But in reality our love lives are blown around by career and coincidence, not to mention lack of nerve on giv.. | innamoramento | Michel Faber | |
| cbb3422 | Without you at my side, I feel as though my eyes are just a camera, like a closed-circuit camera without film in it, registering what's out there, second by second, letting it all vanish instantly to be replaced by more images, none of them properly appreciated. | Michel Faber | ||
| 9bd7b4b | You know,' Amlis went on, 'Some water fell out of the sky not so long ago.' His voice was a little higher than usual, vulnerable with awe. 'It just fell out of the sky. In little droplets, thousands of them close together. I looked up to see where they were coming from. They seemed to be materializing out of nowhere. I couldn't believe it. Then I opened my mouth to the sky. Some droplets fell straight in. It was an indescribable feeling. As.. | Michel Faber | ||
| 66a905a | As ever, his grief made my heart ache. "Ambition is a dangerous thing," I murmured. "One can harbor it unknowing, only to find it sparked into life when the opportunity presents itself." | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 6dea4e1 | Oh, we were a degree or two hotter than improper. | Peter Carey | ||
| 8c9e422 | He was tender with her. He wiped her eyelids with his handkerchief, not noticing how soiled it was. It was stained with ink, crumpled, stuck together. Her lids were large and tender and the handkerchief was stiff, not nearly soft enough. He moistened a corner in his mouth. He was painfully aware of the private softness of her skin, of how the eyes trembled beneath their coverings. He dried the tears with an affection, a particularity, that .. | fiction | Peter Carey | |
| 1cc1bc1 | What does it mean to be good? | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 53127a2 | By morning, Joscelin was resigned. "You know, betimes I think you are a little mad, Imriel no Montreve," he said to me in the courtyard outside the stable, holding the Bastard's reins. "You never said that to Phedre," I reminded him. "Ah, well." He grinned despite himself. "In her case, there is no question." | joscelin-verreuil kushiel-s-justice | Jacqueline Carey | |
| ccfdd12 | But they were all dead now, even Arya, everyone but her half-brother, Jon. Some nights she heard talk of him, in the taverns and brothels of the Ragman's Harbor. The Black Bastard of the wall, one man had called him. Even Jon would never know Blind Beth, i bet. That made her sad. | asoiaf chest-pains jon-snow | George R.R. Martin | |
| d63e892 | Humans have always exalted dreams. Pindar of Thebes, the Greek lyric poet, suggested that the soul is more active while dreaming than while awake. He believed that during a dream, the awakened soul may see the future, "an award of joy or sorrow drawing near." So it's no wonder that humans were quick to reserve dreams for people alone; researchers for many years claimed dreams were a property of "higher" minds. But any pet owner who has hear.. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| d785006 | the sea offers the only broad horizon, and the immense he saw now gave him a peculiar, an indescribable thrill. He felt suddenly elated. Though he did not know it, it was the first time that he had experienced, quite undeluted with foreign emotions, the sense of beauty. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 9c2c836 | There was neither good nor bad there. There were just facts. It was life. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 172c52f | Our wise old church...has discovered that if you will act as if you believed belief will be given to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled; if you will surrender yourself to the beauty of that liturgy the power of which over the human spirit has been proved by the experience of the ages, peace will descend upon you. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 2febf8d | His death had been as futile as his life. He died ingloriously, of a stupid disease, failing once more, even at the end, to accomplish anything. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| ba3a0f5 | I'm not afraid of my fear. It's folly, the Christian argument that you should live always in view of your death. The only way to live is to forget that you're going to die. Death is unimportant. The fear of it should never influence a single action of the wise man. I know that I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that I shall be horribly afraid. I know that I shall not be able to keep myself from regretting bitterly the life that h.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 51e3c75 | It is hard that a man's exterior should tally so little sometimes with his soul. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 9c63eac | I have noticed that when I am most serious people are apt to laugh at me, and indeed when after a lapse of time I have read passages that I wrote from the fullness of my heart I have been tempted to laugh at myself. It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his str.. | W. Somerset Maugham |