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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 78ba95a | We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 3223aa0 | No, we love war. War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment. "It's the mark of a very, very young soul," Mr. Whittier used to say, "to try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery." We have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we're here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore fores.. | plague starvation war | Chuck Palahniuk | |
| 336873a | It sounds trite, but only because words make everything true sound trite. Because words always screw up whatever you're trying to say. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| e30e998 | At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 3dabada | Quand'e che il futuro e passato da essere una promessa a essere una minaccia? | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| a283c50 | The most boring thing in the entire world," Brandy says, "is nudity." The second most boring thing, she says, is honesty." | invisible-monsters life | Chuck Palahniuk | |
| e83b9eb | We fight wars. We fight for peace. We fight hunger. We love to fight. We fight and fight and fight, with our guns or mouths or money. And the planet is never one lick better than it was before us. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 568cde3 | all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 0f822bd | If you love something... Set it free." Just don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes" | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| b92f57c | It took my whole life to buy this stuff. | wordplay | Chuck Palahniuk | |
| f0d7179 | And if you believe that we really have free will, then you know that God can't really control us. And since God can't control us, all God does is watch and change channels when He gets bored. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| a37a079 | If you lose your nerve before you hit the bottom, Tyler says, you never really succeed. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 194819d | You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 685a3ec | It would be that time--late at night-- when your ears reach out for any sound. When you can see more with your eyes closed than open. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| c0de511 | Of course I'm not going to look through the keyhole. That's something only servants do. I'm going to hide in the bay window. | servants spying | Penelope Farmer | |
| b3e2dc0 | Bond insisted ordering Leiter's Haig-and-Haig "on the rocks" and then he looked carefully at the barman. "A Dry Martini", he said. "One. In a deep champagne goblet." "Oui, monsieur." Just a moment. Three measures of Gordons, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemonpeel. Got it?" "Certainly, monsieur." The barman seemed pleased with the idea." | Ian Fleming | ||
| 72ee473 | Bond sat for a moment frozen to his chair. Suddenly, there flashed unwanted into his mind that most sinister line in poetry: 'They reckon ill who leave me out. When me they fly, I am the wings. | flight pursuit | Ian Fleming | |
| afccb1c | She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love. | sadness | P.D. James | |
| 642bebf | It was all very well to be ambitious, but ambition should not kill the nice qualities in you. | Noel Streatfeild | ||
| 0bb9218 | We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we endured birth. You can't share either experience. | P.D. James | ||
| c0b71aa | Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people's money, other people's safety, other people's future. | P.D. James | ||
| 645171e | He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?" | P.D. James | ||
| 526a031 | Back to the land of freedom. Back to breaking the law with her sisters to make sure justice got served. God, just the thought had her tingling all over. | sisterhood sisters women | Fern Michaels | |
| 4ee318a | There's a term you don't hear these days, one you used to hear all the time when the Carnegie branches opened: Palaces for the People. The library really is a palace. It bestows nobility on people who otherwise couldn't afford a shred of it. People need to have nobility and dignity in their lives. And you know, they need other people to recognize it in them too. | libraries libraries-rule public-library | Eric Klinenberg (author) | |
| ba4128b | I like your Jesus ... there's no doubt he was a great , most likely trained in India, but you know, he was wrong about God. God is not a judgemental giant sitting up in heaven, it's a force within us all - we are light bulbs in the electrical system of the universe. | sarah-macdonald | Sarah MacDonald | |
| e65b924 | Because it hardly ends with falling in love. Just the opposite. I don't need to tell you, Your Honor, I sense that you understand true loneliness. How you fall in love and it's there that the work begins: day after day, year after year, you must dig yourself up, exhume the contents of your mind and sould for the other to sift through so that you might be known to him, and you, too, must spend days and years wading through all that he excava.. | love | Nicole Krauss | |
| 115f90d | Later - when things happened that they could never have imagined - she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything | Nicole Krauss | ||
| 74e0be0 | All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| b051c26 | I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245) | life sad | Nicole Krauss | |
| ef67fbc | One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing. | writing-advice | Bill Bryson | |
| c392d81 | What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4ffab9a | The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether--very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment reading remained most people's principal method for filling idle time. | Bill Bryson | ||
| d510b9a | Confused and unable to help, my hair went into panic mode. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 39aa9ff | It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own. | growing-up love parenthood | Bill Bryson | |
| 24d75e0 | I am not, I regret to say, a discreet and fetching sleeper. Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant. My legs fall open in a grotesque come-hither manner; my knuckles brush the floor. Whatever is inside--tongue, uvula, moist bubbles of intestinal air--decides to leak out. From time to time, like o.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| cdcfbbb | Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment, the amazing complex delicacy of the words, the casual ease with which elemental things come together to form a composition that is--whatever the season, wherever I put my besotted gaze--perfect. | mountaineering nature outdoors wilderness | Bill Bryson | |
| b29eacd | When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke's commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e891f92 | Do you like that?" I'll say in surprise since it doesn't seem like her type of thing, and she'll look at me as if I'm mad. That!?" She'll say, "No, it's hideous" Then why on earth," I always want to say, "did you walk all the way over there to touch it?" but of course...I have learned to say nothing when shopping because no matter what you say... Read more - "I'm hungry", "I'm bored", "My feet are tired", "Yes, that one looks nice on you .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 62c1399 | It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. | humorous humour | Bill Bryson | |
| bb2c43b | It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today. | farming health paleo | Bill Bryson | |
| 846a404 | For you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. | Bill Bryson | ||
| b72a9c1 | I had recently read that 3.7 million Americans, according to a Gallup poll, believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me." --On his move back to America after living in England for twenty years." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 44a6561 | a waitress came out and plonked in front of each of us a small standard terra-cotta flowerpot in which had been baked a little loaf of bread. "What's this?" I asked. "It's bread," she replied. "But it's in a flowerpot?" She gave me a look that I was beginning to think of as the Darwin stare. It was a look that said, "Yeah? So?" "Well, isn't that kind of unusual?" She considered for a moment. "Is a bit, I suppose." "And will we be following .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ce798e3 | The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people. | Bill Bryson |