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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3d2023c | We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort! | Charles Stross | ||
| bce8eb9 | Gentlemen are often invited to stay in other people's houses. Rooms hardly ever are. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 2bb1861 | The Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte had been banished to the island of Elba. However His Imperial Majesty had some doubts wheter a quiet island life would suit him - he was, after all, accustomed to governing a large proportion of the known world. | historical-fiction humor | Susanna Clarke | |
| a232743 | I have always heard that Italian women are rather fierce. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 5a6dc29 | And such a pinched-looking ruin of a thing now! I shall advice all the good-looking woman of my acquaintance not to die. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 0cbab53 | John Longridge, the cook at Harley-street, had suffered from low spirits for more than thirty years, and he was quick to welcome Stephen as a newcomer to the freemasonry of melancholy. | humor | Susanna Clarke | |
| a28725b | There was no one there. Which is to say there was someone there. Miss Wintertowne lay upon the bed, but it would have puzzled philosophy to say now whether she were someone or no one at all. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| b3d9931 | Alexander of Whitby taught that the universe is like a tapestry only parts of which are visible to us at a time. After we are dead, we will see the whole and then it will be clear to us how the different parts relate to each other. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 084adc2 | A lovely young Italian girl passed by. Byron tilted his head to a very odd angle, half-closed his eyes and composed his features to suggest that he was about to expire from chronic indigestion. Dr Greysteel could only suppose that he was treating the young woman to the Byronic profile and the Byronic expression. | lord-byron | Susanna Clarke | |
| 69c7014 | In peacetime some sort of introduction is generally required to make a person's acquaintance; in war a small eatable will perform the same office. | humour | Susanna Clarke | |
| 403dd56 | Like many spells with unusual names, the Unrobed Ladies was a great deal less exciting than it sounded. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| df8b4a8 | We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. | Donald Antrim | ||
| 38bbfe6 | Nothing will get you into trouble so deep or as sad as faith. | juggernaut-short-story | Rick Bass | |
| 1bdd597 | It is a kind of church, back in these last cores. It may not be your church -- this last one percent of the West - but it is mine, and I am asking unashamedly to be allowed to continue worshipping the miracle of the planet, and the worship of a natural system not yet touched, never touched by the machines of man. A place with the residue of God - the scent, feel, sight, taste, and sound of God - forever fresh upon it | Rick Bass | ||
| 58fea70 | I've said it's hard. Here's how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory's waters drowns a little. | Mary Karr | ||
| 5854766 | I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger. | Mary Karr | ||
| 289bce2 | Put a pair of high heels on a fellow and just look what he was reduced to. | masculinity transvestites | Celeste Bradley | |
| b7c8abf | Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera. | William Maxwell | ||
| 2f9fe5d | Sweet Evelyn, I think, I should have loved you better. Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above him as he hacks me to bits. I see his rough childhood. I see his mother doing something horrid to him with a broomstick. I see the hate in his heart and the people he had yet to kill before pneumonia gets him at eighty-three. I see the dead kid's mom unable to sleep, pounding her fists against her face in grief at the moment I was burying her s.. | compassion empathy forgiveness hatred | George Saunders | |
| b178de6 | I have lunch, flirt with some local grandmothers, undercut my flirting by crotching myself on the corner of a table as I leave. -- "The Great Divider" | George Saunders | ||
| 9c75765 | This meal we just ate?" says Aunt Lydia. "In many countries, this sort of meal would only be eaten by royalty." "There are countries where people could live one year on what we throw out in one week," says Grandpa Kirk. "I thought it was they could live one year on what we throw out in one day," says Grandma Sally. "I thought it was they could live ten years on what we throw out in one minute," says Uncle Gus. "Well anyway," says Doris. "We.. | George Saunders | ||
| 01e4294 | And I woslike: O wow. | George Saunders | ||
| 014db58 | Strange, isn't it? To have dedicated one's life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one's life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one's labors utterly forgotten? | George Saunders | ||
| 183645b | When young, we're anxious -- understandably -- to find out if we've got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you -- in particular you, of this generation -- may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can.. | George Saunders | ||
| 27505de | Because I loved him so and am in the habit of loving him and that love must take the form of fussing and worry and doing. Only | George Saunders | ||
| a6954b2 | By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions. | George Saunders | ||
| ba97a54 | Across the sea fat kings watched and were gleeful, that something begun so well had now gone off the rails (as down South similar kings watched), and if it went off the rails, so went the whole kit, forever, and if someone ever thought to start it up again, well, it would be said (and said truly): The rabble cannot manage itself. Well, the rabble could. The rabble would. He would lead the rabble in managing. The thing would be won. | america civil-war democracy lincoln united-states united-states-of-america us usa victory war | George Saunders | |
| 1894298 | The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don't know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them--if the storytelling is good enough--we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If t.. | George Saunders | ||
| c7f315d | I was in error when I saw him as fixed and stable and thought I would have him forever. He was never fixed, nor stable, but always just a passing, temporary energy-burst. I had reason to know this. Had he not looked this way at birth, that way at four, another way at seven, been made entirely anew at nine? He had never stayed the same, even instant to instant. He came out of nothingness, took form, was loved, was always bound to return to .. | George Saunders | ||
| 35bbc6f | No one who has ever done anything worth doing has gone uncriticized. | George Saunders | ||
| a83a14e | The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings--the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life. And yet he had always been haunted--had he not?--by the knowledge that there were men, lunatic cryptographers, mad detectives, who squandered their br.. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 4a61431 | Language and hearing are seated in the cerebral cortex, the folded gray matter that covers the first couple of millimeters of the outer brain like wrapping paper. When one experiences silence, absent even reading, the cerebral cortex typically rests. Meanwhile, deeper and more ancient brain structures seem to be activated--the subcortical zones. People who live busy, noisy lives are rarely granted access to these areas. Silence, it appears,.. | activated ancient bedrock brain busy cerebral-cortex deeper experiences gray-matter hearing journey language noisy reading self silence sound structures subcortical thought world | Michael Finkel | |
| 993ec7d | Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| bcc3df6 | What we call cowardice is often just another name for being taken by surprise, and courage is seldom any better than simply being well prepared. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 75b7df2 | Motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| ec15d8e | Slowly, desolately, the fist of what we'd done unclenched the clawed palm of what we'd become. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| ebac1db | So when will be the time to get on the train? I think.....a little bit almost quite very soon and not long. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| b85fcae | The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings. They're wounded worse by sobbing, men like that, than they are by boots and batons. Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips u.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| ec1afdf | The heart doesn't know how to quit, because it doesn't know how to lie. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 69ff29a | Regret is a ghost of love. Regret is a nicer self that we send into the past from time to time, even though we know it's too late to change what we said, or did. We do it because it's human: a thing of our kind. We do it because we care, drawn by threads of shame that only fray and wither in the sea of regret. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 42c0866 | And in that moment of sun and joy, Lupe knew why she loved and also hated Salvador. He gave her wings. He didn't try to lock her in, as had Jaime and the other boys she'd known. No, she could dream her wildest dreams with him and so she loved him for this; but she also hated him because it made her fearful. No one in her family was like this. They were always very cautious. | fear freedom happiness joy love | Victor Villaseñor | |
| 70875ad | Any land will flow with milk and honey if it is worked with honest hands! | Rudolfo Anaya | ||
| ce4dc1d | Good is always stronger than evil. Always remember that...The smallest bit of good can stand against the powers of evil in the world and it will emerge triumphant. | Rudolfo Anaya | ||
| c3b44fc | And I think of the night-blooming cereus, a plant that looks like a leathery weed most of the year. But for one night each summer its flower opens to reveal silky white petals, which encircle yellow lacelike threads, and another whole flower like a tiny sea anemone within the outer flower. By morning, the flower has shriveled. One night of the year, as delicate and fleeting as a life in the universe. | Alan Lightman |