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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e73b5a2 | Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 274e321 | At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, 'Come down to the water.' It was an extravagant gesture, but we can't do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi do.. | landscape life nature wisdom | Annie Dillard | |
| 9fcbc22 | I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out. | plays world | Annie Dillard | |
| 4269c03 | Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block. | outdoors thoughtful | Annie Dillard | |
| 1f80fb3 | I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold up his head has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn't the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to find out. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he'll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our origina.. | landscape | Annie Dillard | |
| f3312f7 | The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return fr.. | nature prayer seeing spirituality | Annie Dillard | |
| d6b29bc | think of it.' said Robert Rosenbluth, a doctor whose acquaintance i made at the start of this book. 'no engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine tuned as an anus. to call someone an asshole is really bragging him up. | science | Mary Roach | |
| f8068f1 | The early anatomists were dealing with a chronic shortage of bodies for dissection, and consequently were motivated to come up with ways to preserve the ones they managed to obtain. Blanchard's textbook was the first to cover arterial embalming. He describes opening up an artery, flushing the blood out with water, and pumping in alcohol. I've been to frat parties like that. | Mary Roach | ||
| aed5341 | Upon the occasion of history's first manned flight - in the 1780's aboard the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloons - someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. "What use," he replied, "is a newborn baby?" | Mary Roach | ||
| 5c00009 | It is never difficult to distinguish between with a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 6290ec7 | It was one of the most disgusting spectacles I've ever seen-- this white-haired old man, who should have been thinking of the hereafter, standing there lying like an actor. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 0dc207f | That's always the way in this world. The chappies you'd like to lend money to won't let you, whereas the chappies you don't want to lend it to will do everything except actually stand you on your head and lift the specie out of your pockets. | money | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 2b2e2fc | He picked up one of the dead bats and covered it with his handkerchief. 'Somebody's mother,' he murmured reverently. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| e5765c4 | You probably think that being a guest in your aunt's house I would hesitate to butter you all over the front lawn and dance on the fragments in hobnailed boots, but you are mistaken. It would be a genuine pleasure. By an odd coincidence I brought a pair of hobnailed boots with me!' So saying, and recognising a good exit line when he saw one, he strode out, and after an interval of tense meditation I followed him. (Spode to Wooster) | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| f2cfa41 | The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your p.. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 5c9905e | The fact that pigs were abroad in the night seemed to bring home to me the perilous nature of my enterprise. | p-g-wodehouse right-ho-jeeves | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| f199b9c | He couldn't have moved quicker if he had been the dachshund Poppet, who at this juncture was running round in circles, trying, if I read his thoughts aright, to work off the rather heavy lunch he had had earlier in the afternoon. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| ef3ecf0 | He was in the frame of mind when a weaker man would have started writing poetry. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 937692f | You won't mind my calling you Comrade, will you? I've just become a socialist. It's a great scheme. You ought to be one. You work for the equal distribution of property, and start by collaring all you can and sitting on it. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 0f18774 | What with one thing and another, I can't remember ever having been chirpier than at about this period in my career. Everything seemed to be going right. On three separate occasions horses on which I'd invested a sizeable amount won by lengths instead of sitting down to rest in the middle of the race, as horses usually do when I've got money on them. ~ Bertram "Bertie" Wooster - The Inimitable Jeeves" | horse-racing jeeves wodehouse wooster | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 4d3a1bb | If ever there was a bloke at the very mention of whose name it would be excusable for people to tremble like aspens, that bloke is Sir Roderick Glossop. He has an enormous bald head, all the hair which ought to be on it seeming to have run into his eyebrows, and his eyes go through you like a couple of Death Rays. "How are you, how are you, how are you?" I said, overcoming a slight desire to leap backwards out of the window." | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 9182cba | Hear that, Eustace? He wishes we were staying a good long time." "I expect it will seem a good long time," said Eustace, philosophically." -- | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 2f3236d | You can't go by what a girl says, when she's giving you the devil for making a chump of yourself. It's like Shakespeare. Sounds well, but doesn't mean anything. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 71cfd98 | She was one of those women who kind of numb a fellow's faculties. She made me feel as if I were ten years old and had been brought into the drawing-room in my Sunday clothes to say how-d'you-do. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 55b3314 | The discovery of some toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go, it .. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 24e6187 | If I might suggest, sir--it is, of course, merely a palliative--but it has often been found in times of despondency that the assumption of formal evening dress has a stimulating effect on the morale. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 3d34a8a | Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to have to face over the breakfast table. Brainy, moreover. The sort of girl who reduces you to pulp with sixteen sets of tennis and a few rounds of golf and then comes down to dinner as fresh as a daisy, expecting you to take an intelligent interest in Freud. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| aeff422 | It seems to be one of Nature's laws that the most attractive girls should have the least attractive brothers. Fillmore Nicholas had not worn well. At the age of seven he had been an extraordinarily beautiful child, but after that he had gone all to pieces; and now, at the age of twenty-five, it would be idle to deny that he was something of a mess. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 735aa05 | I say, you don't know how I could raise fifty quid somehow, do you?" "Why don't you work?" "Work?" said young Bingo, surprised. "What, me? No, I shall have to think of some way." | aristocracy gentry work | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 26c4dcc | He looked like a vulture dissatisfied with its breakfast corpse. | vulture | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 70c505b | If you asked me how I felt when they told me I would marry Wen Fu, I can say only this: It was like being told I had won a big prize. And it was also like being told my head was going to be chopped off. Something between those two feelings. | Amy Tan | ||
| de7e0f7 | I hated the tests the raised hopes and failed expectations." - Two Kinds" -- | Amy Tan | ||
| 400dd16 | Forever did not mean what it once had. Forever was what changed inevitably over time. | Amy Tan | ||
| f0902bd | To save myself, I destroyed another, and in doing so, I destroyed myself. | Amy Tan | ||
| 693b3c8 | Hardships can harden even the best person. | Amy Tan | ||
| 5399347 | The things one had to do in life sometimes had nothing to do with what was fun or convenient. | Amy Tan | ||
| 7d47f2e | Ying-ying, you have tiger eyes. They gather fire in the day. At night they shine golden. | Amy Tan | ||
| c1b49e0 | I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn't really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more. But listening to Auntie Lin tonight reminds me once agian: My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more. No doubt she told Auntie Lin I was going b.. | Amy Tan | ||
| 3844aa7 | I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents' promiise. This means nothing to you, because to you promises mean nothing... But later, she will forget her promise. She will forget she had a grandmother. | Amy Tan | ||
| 721db3e | What is true about a person? Would I change in the same way the river changes color but still be the same person?... And then I realized it was the first time I could see the power of the wind. I couldn't see the wind itself, but I could see it carried water that filled the rivers and shaped the countryside. | Amy Tan | ||
| 815fe04 | A mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place. She teaches you the nature of happiness: what is the right amount, what is too much, and the kind that makes you want more of what is bad for you. A mother helps her baby flex her first feelings of pleasure. She teaches her when to later exercise restraint, or to take squealing joy in recognizing the fluttering leaves of the gingko tree, to sense a quieter but more profound satisf.. | mothers pleasure | Amy Tan | |
| 02068ce | Lack of clarity is a writer's truth. | Amy Tan | ||
| 22ef726 | I thought this man had long ago drained everything from my heart. But now something strong and bitter flowed and made me feel another emptiness in a place I didn't know was there. I cursed this man aloud so he could hear. You had dog eyes. You jumped and followed whoever called you. Now you chase your own tail. | Amy Tan | ||
| a4ae236 | What is a secret wish?" "It is what you want but cannot ask." | Amy Tan |