1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
2527
2528
2529
2530
2531
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a7fb813 | For a time after my divorce everything began to seem profoundly ironic to me. I found myself thinking of other peoples' worries as sources of amusement and private derision which I thought about at night to make myself feel better. | Richard Ford | ||
| 35230af | I thought that the difference between a successful life and an unsuccessful one, between me at that moment and all the people who owned the cars that were nosed-in to their proper places in the lot, maybe between me and that woman out in the trailers by the gold mine, was how well you were able to put things like this out of your mind and not be bothered by them, and maybe too, by how many troubles like this one you had to face in a lifetim.. | Richard Ford | ||
| c4749e1 | When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what's in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again--which is a loss. But to shield yourself--as I didn't do--seems to be an even greater error, since what's lost is the truth of your parents' life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how y.. | Richard Ford | ||
| 1186f8c | I didn't know with certainty what to say about the large world, and didn't care to risk speculating. And I still don't. That we all look at it from someplace, and in some hopeful-useful way, is about all I found I could say--my best, most honest effort. And that isn't enough for literature, though it didn't bother me much. Nowadays, I'm willing to say yes to as much as I can: yes to my town, my neighborhood, my neighbor, yes to his car, her.. | Richard Ford | ||
| 3a1ef2c | This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality's brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| a8d30c9 | Standing on your own feet, naturally, is as tiresome and dangerous as standing your ground; and when the wild dogs begin to circle grinning round you with their dripping tongues hanging out and you know that with mock servility they like to go for your toes first, why, then, you should stand on someone else's feet, or head if necessary. It is a point of faith for me never to be Hitler; he stood his ground in his own two shoes in his own lit.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 4bc7955 | Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 81ae5c8 | In the preface of "The Rifles" "Another rule we followed was never kill an animal that we were not going to use for food or clothing." Barnabas Piryuaq "Well, in those high latitudes we found such quantities of seals and walruses that we simply did not know what to do with them.There were thousands and thousands lying there; we walked among them and hit them on the head, and laughed heartily in the abundance which God had created." Jan Wel.. | environment hunters native-americans slaughter violence | William T. Vollmann | |
| 139a5fc | Who dies best, the soldier who falls for your sake, or the fly in my whiskey-glass? The happy agony of the fly is his reward for an adventurous dive in no cause but his own. Gorged and crazed, he touches bottom, knows he's gone as far as he can go, and bravely sticks. I sleep on. In the morning I pour new happiness upon the crust of the old, and only as I raise the glass to my lips descry through that rich brown double inch my flattened her.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| d76d14b | Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 816b3e4 | It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 6afeda4 | If a man spoke to you in that tone, you'd invite him to step outside and ask someone to hold your coat." 378" | Hilary Mantel | ||
| d71839f | this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash. | loss | Hilary Mantel | |
| 0decbcd | As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire. | jurnalism | Hilary Mantel | |
| a8e7490 | 92, '93, '94. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 7e4d631 | He wants to say, because Anne is not a carnal being, she is a calculating being, with a cold slick brain at work behind her hungry black eyes. "I believe any woman who can say no to the King of England and keep on saying it, has the wit to say no to any number of men, including you, including Harry Percy, including anyone else she may choose to torment for her own sport while she is arranging her career in the way it suits her. So I think, .. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 4569913 | Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die? | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 0ead177 | You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability fo the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess i.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| ea6b50e | They's lots of work in this world that aint never paid for. But the accounts gets balanced anyway. In the long run. A man that contracts for work and then dont pay for it, the world will reckon with him fore it's out. With the worker too. You live long enough and you'll see it. They's a ledger kept that the pages dont never get old nor crumbly nor the ink dont never fade. If it dont balance then they aint no right in this world and if they .. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 2813324 | A malign star kept him. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| c1f6ad5 | Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact. | disbelief god | Cormac McCarthy | |
| a10fdc3 | He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised. | fate luck | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 36b54c2 | Let every writer tell his own lies That's freedom of the press. | freedom-of-the-press lies lying news the-news truth | Norman Mailer | |
| 009a72c | You've seen too many movies. If you're holding a gun and you shoot a defenseless man, then you're a poor creature, a dastardly person. That's a perfectly ridiculous idea, you realize. The fact that you're holding the gun and the other man is not is no accident. It's a product of everything you've achieved, it assumes that if you're . . . you're aware enough, you have the gun when you need it. | Norman Mailer | ||
| c41d80a | Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 2869399 | Long voyages often lose themselves. Mam? You will see. It is difficult even for brothers to travel together on such a voyage. The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all. Listen to the corridos of the country. They will tell you. Then you will see in your own life what is the cost of things. Perhaps it is true that nothing is hidd.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 0a27679 | The night is quiet. Like a camp before battle. The city beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea? The murengers have walled the pale, the gates are shut, but lo the thing's inside and can you guess his shape? Where he's kept or what's the counter of his face? Is he a weaver, bloody shuttle shot through a time warp, a carder of souls from the world's nap? Or a hunter with hounds or do bone horses draw his dead cart throug.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 9e9126c | Le spine della rosa sono nacoste dal fiore: the thorns of the rose are hidden by the bloom. | Lynda La Plante | ||
| 323ee7a | They were your friends?" "Yes, they were my friends." "And they will leave you to suffer alone?" "Now I see it." "And until this, were they friends you could trust?" "I could trust them." "I see what you mean. You mean they were the kind of friends that a good man could choose, upright, hard-working, obeying the law? Tell me, were they such friends? And now they leave you alone? Did you not see it before?" "I saw it." | cry-the-beloved-country friends friendship | Alan Paton | |
| a409550 | One thing is about to be finished, but here is something that is only begun. And while I live it will continue | Alan Paton | ||
| 3435877 | Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this. The thousand brawls and stoven jaws, the clubbings and the broken bottles and the little knives that come from nowhere. For him perhaps it all was done in silence, or how would it sound, the shot that fired the bullet that lay already in his brain? These small enigmas of time and space and death. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 0e96779 | And the thing is, we can't fail. We've already hit the bottom and come out of it. From here on out, if we just love and listen, we can't go wrong, babe. | listen love success | Erin McCarthy | |
| a66c5f7 | In the deep glens where they lived, all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 959506d | The immappable world of our journey. A pass in the mountains. A bloodstained stone. The marks of steel upon it. Names carved in the corrosible lime among stone fishes and ancient shells. Things dimmed and dimming. The dry sea floor. The tools of migrant hunters. The dreams encased upon the blades of them. The peregrine bones of a prophet. The silence. The gradual extinction of rain. The coming of night. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 03b3511 | They rode in a narrow enfillade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bakeoven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 86413b8 | But once you cross the Shannon - even though geographically you have only come a short distance - different rules of time apply, and most people still understand the crucial secret of human happiness: that it's better to do a few things slowly, than a lot of things fast. | Pete McCarthy | ||
| ecfbe2a | How can I be secure? (Pause.) Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what's beyond measure? That's a sickness. That's a trap. There is no measure. Only greed. | David Mamet | ||
| 89a2f84 | And a bird who was on a crooked branch is suddenly gone without my even hearing him. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 05a7104 | I left with my canvas bag in which a few fundamental things were packed and took off for the Pacific Ocean with the fifty dollars in my pocket. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 167b5b1 | Society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all. | Annie Dillard | ||
| a3f5298 | It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 25f63f9 | The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they .. | beauty spirituality universe | Annie Dillard | |
| 8655986 | Father had stretched out his long legs and was tilting back in his chair. Mother sat with her knees crossed, in blue slacks, smoking a Chesterfield. The dessert dishes were still on the table. My sisters were nowhere in evidence. It was a warm evening; the big dining-room windows gave onto blooming rhododendrons. Mother regarded me warmly. She gave me to understand that she was glad I had found what I had been looking for, but that she an.. | benign-neglect childhood curiosity imagination parenting | Annie Dillard | |
| aa4e5c1 | What would you read to someone who was dying? Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. There, at the memorial service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you tell? | Alexander Chee |