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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2329f5f | The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long aft.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 494d1f9 | Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| a182e11 | In the background is the hiss of the gas heater; we hear the sound without hearing it for, side by side, together and miles apart, we are deep in our books. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| eca2f98 | For at eight o'clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| ba023a9 | Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 922f448 | You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven't you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you've seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?" She made a tiny spitting sound. "You can always get some more people. they reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that .. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 115af1b | No such thing as time travel, he'd rumbled patiently, once. Only live with what you've done, and try in the future to do what you're happy to live with. | regret zen | Richard K. Morgan | |
| bd8b0df | What others believe is not my concern, unless they attempt to force it on me. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 39227a3 | If you don't know the men at your back by name, don't be surprised if they won't follow you into battle. On the other hand, don't be surprised if they will, either, because there are countless other factors you must take into account. Leadership is a slippery commodity, not easily manufactured or understood. | leadership-vs-management | Richard K. Morgan | |
| 889a503 | Where is the voice that said altered carbon would free us from the cells of our flesh? The vision that said we would be angels. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 1d24d99 | Hand over your responses to the man who triggers them, and you have already lost the battle for self. Look beyond, and find yourself there instead. | life zen | Richard K. Morgan | |
| 4dc4a38 | Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal's great foe William F. Buckley who launched my part-time television career, by inviting me on to when I was still quite young, and giving me one of the American Right's les.. | cable-television cable-television-in-the-us conservatism conservatism-in-the-us gore-vidal guilt illusion literature perception sex television united-states william-f-buckley | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 6c98529 | Prayer is only another name for good, clean, direct thinking. When you pray, think well what you are saying, and make your thoughts into things that are solid. In that manner, your prayer will have strength, and that strength shall become part of you, mind, body, and spirit. | prayer strength thought | Richard Llewellyn | |
| 5f90113 | Bad news has good legs. | gossip hearsay | Richard Llewellyn | |
| 784f4c8 | Everywhere was singing, all over the house was singing, and outside the house was alive with singing, and the very air was song. | Richard Llewellyn | ||
| 27f5af6 | The spoken word has come to dominate many Protestant forms of worship: the words of prayers, responsive readings, Scripture, the sermon, and so forth. Yet the spoken word is perhaps the least effective way of reaching the heart; one must constantly pay attention with one's mind. The spoken word tends to go to our heads, not our hearts. | experience faith god language words | Marcus J. Borg | |
| ed1c673 | I'm a citizen in a democracy. To call me an activist would be redundant. It's not a spectator sport. If we all become non-participants, it no longer works. | Michael Moore | ||
| 296465a | One thing I learned as a journalist is that there is at least one disgruntled person in every workplace in America -- and at least double that number with a conscience. Hard as they try, they simply can't turn their heads away from an injustice when they see one taking place. | journalism whistleblowers work | Michael Francis Moore | |
| b9512a0 | What exists is real; therefore it is tragic, since whatever lives must die. Only fantasy, the vapors rising from sheer nonsense, can now excite my laughter. | Jack Vance | ||
| 11b361a | Light slanting down across Alode the Cliff illuminated a hundred forests; the irradiated foliage seemed to glow with internal light: bitter lime, intense gray-blue given pointillist fire by scarlet seed-pots, dark umber, black-blue, black-green | Jack Vance | ||
| c187549 | I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies. | Jack Vance | ||
| 53753bb | Having to amuse myself during those earlier years, I read voraciously and widely. Mythic matter and folklore made up much of that reading--retellings of the old stories ( ), anecdotal collections and historical investigations of the stories' backgrounds--and then I stumbled upon the books which took me back to and the like. I was in heaven when began the Unicorn imprint for Ballantine and scoured the other publishers for similar good .. | book-genres books fantasy influences reading recommendations sci-fi science-fiction sf | Charles de Lint | |
| 70bc41b | there is no underlying reality to the world. "Reality," in the everyday sense, is not a good way to think about the behavior of the fundamental particles that make up the universe; yet at the same time those particles seem to be inseparably connected into some invisible whole, each aware of what happens to the others." | John Gribbin | ||
| e3cfe53 | It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 6a5fc2c | We say, 'Shall we meet for a drink?', as though drinking were the main end of the appointment, and the matter of company only incidental, we are so shy about admitting our need for one another. [...] We say, 'Would you like to come for some coffee?', as though it were less frightening to acknowledge that we are heavily dependent on mildly stimulating drinks, than to acknowledge that we are at all dependent on the companionship of other peop.. | Jonathan Coe | ||
| de2b4ca | I was going to say 'my friend Stuart', but I suppose he's not a friend any more. I seem to have lost a number of friends in the last few years. I don't mean that I've fallen out with them, in any dramatic way. We've just decided not to stay in touch. And that's what it's been: a decision, a conscious decision, because it's not difficult to stay in touch with people nowadays, there are so many different ways of doing it. But as you get older.. | Jonathan Coe | ||
| fa160ea | Some instinct made her lift her hand and cup his cheek with her fingers. The room was too dark for her to see him, but she could feel the stickiness of the blood, and a wetness that was not blood. "Little bird," he said once more, his voice raw and harsh as steel on stone. Then he rose from the bed. Sansa heard cloth ripping, followed by the softer sound of retreating footsteps. When she crawled out of bed, long moments later, she was alone.. | George R. R. Martin | ||
| e40a3ca | Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?" "That is the only time a man can be brave," -- | courage fear | George R.R. Martin | |
| 4a098ee | The letter . . . What did your lords make of it, I wonder?" Stannis snorted. "Celtigar pronounced it admirable. If I showed him the contents of my privy, he would declare that admirable as well." | George R.R. Martin | ||
| 545d7f3 | She recalled him as a forceful and witty speaker with a ready repartee and a penetrating voice. He had once, for example, put down a spokesman for the pesticide industry with a remark that people still quoted at parties: "And I presume on the eighth day God called you and said, 'I changed my mind about insects!" | pesticides pollution | John Brunner | |
| 9711e3e | Somewhere there exists all the possible variations of all the possible people I could be. I could be any of them- but I cannot be all. I can only be one of the variations. I will be the variation of myself that pleases me the most. | David Gerrold | ||
| 6ab16f9 | I have a very simple philosophy of life: Kindness. Ferocious, unrelenting, ruthless, committed, passionate, kindness. | kindness philosophy-of-life | David Gerrold | |
| f06ed36 | To the Parcae" A single summer grant me, great powers, and a single autumn for fully ripened song that, sated with the sweetness of my playing, my heart may more willingly die. The soul that, living, did not attain its divine right cannot repose in the nether world. But once what I am bent on, what is holy, my poetry, is accomplished: Be welcome then, stillness of the shadows' world! I shall be satisfied though my lyre will not | Friedrich Hölderlin | ||
| 2639f70 | The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| 135e392 | With her curling blond hair and her slender limbs and her beautiful clothes, Inez was alluring in an obvious way, and yet it was easy enough to see that her slightly protruding blue eyes were blank screens of self-love on which a small selection of fake emotions was allowed to flicker. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| dd7499a | Rome wasn't deconstructed in a day. | rome | Edward St. Aubyn | |
| 3145af8 | Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| ec36463 | This time he was going to fall apart silently. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| cb14abf | It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place, | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| 06886c8 | More than anything, I began to hate women writers. Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Browning, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. Bronte, Bronte, and Bronte. I began to resent Emily, Anne, and Charlotte--my old friends--with a terrifying passion. They were not only talented; they were brave, a trait I admired more than anything but couldn't seem to possess. The world that raised these women hadn't allowed them to write, yet th.. | elizabeth-browning female-authors female-empowerment female-writers feminism george-eliot jane-austen mary-shelley virginia-woolf | Catherine Lowell | |
| 0bf16e2 | All down the stone steps on either side were periwinkles in full flower, and she could now see what it was that had caught at her the night before and brushed, wet and scented, across her face. It was wistaria. . . . she remembered the advertisement. Here indeed were both in profusion. The wistaria was tumbling over itself in its excess of life, its prodigality of flowering; and where the pergola ended the sun blazed on scarlet geraniums,.. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| ad71f7a | I wish,' said Rose anxiously, 'I understood you.' 'Don't try,' said Lotty, smiling. 'But I must, because I love you. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| 1815b17 | You have waged bitter and undeclared war upon the green, gutting the rain forests, mile after mile, day after day, but know this: the war has come home! It is man's turn to embrace the scythe. | Alan Moore | ||
| da4c72a | Books require titles; reading them doesn't | class reading titles | Alan Moore |