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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d92b02d | I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would still be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete. | John Irving | ||
| 266f1b2 | She was pulling a rope out of the water and knew it was coming to the end when the barnacles started to appear and they became more think and clustered. Then it was strangely peaceful and the sound was turned off. She stood at the bow of a ship. If only she could have stood this way above the water and really breathed and let the waves go by like pages being turned and watched everything more closely and chosen things more carefully then sh.. | Susan Minot | ||
| 3b86b4c | I learned that if you love a boy you are o longer free. The boy may become more important than your own self and if it is so, you will find trouble there. The first time you are hurt in your heart, you do not forget the lesson. It stays forever. | Susan Minot | ||
| 3daca15 | I certainly wasn't where I should be and it would be the cautious, the sensible thing to do. But, for God's sake, I was an historian and cautious and sensible were things that happened to other people. I | Jodi Taylor | ||
| 1bea6f0 | He had fallen for Cal like a sperm-whale failing to clear the Grand Canyon on a bicycle. | Jodi Taylor | ||
| 55d35ce | There's something very satisfying about outwitting religious fanaticism. | Jodi Taylor | ||
| 6844665 | Markham even had our banners ready. The polite NON AD CAPITAGIUM (No to the poll tax), the hopeful MAGIS STIPENDIUM HISTORICI (More money for historians) and the always accurate POLICITI NOSTRAE OMNEC WANKERS SUNT (Most politicians are not very good). | Jodi Taylor | ||
| 4a524a8 | I personally think humans have got about as far as we can go. We're wrecking the planet. We're never short of good reasons to massacre each other. Wrong god. Wrong race. Wrong color. Wrong sex. I'm actually quite surprised a thoroughly pissed-off History hasn't waved a flaming sword and we're all back in caves in the snow, chewing on half-cooked mammoth. And even that's more than we deserve. No wonder we still can't get to Mars. I suspect t.. | stupidity universe | Jodi Taylor | |
| 24b62cb | In this century, as in any other, men wore the comfortable, practical stuff, and the women wandered round expiring underneath over-decorated tea-cosies and with inadequate footwear. | Jodi Taylor | ||
| c2d5a8d | I'll love you until there's no breath left in my lungs, Olivia Taylor. | Jodi Ellen Malpas | ||
| e19b912 | Then what in your opinion is a good story?' 'What it's always been, monkey,' Ganesha said. 'One dhansu conflict. Some chaka-chak song and dance. Grief. Love. Love for the lover, love for the mother. Love for the land. Comedy. Terror. One tremendous villain whom we must love also. All the elements properly balanced and mixed together, item after item, like a perfect meal with a dance of tastes. There you have it. | Vikram Chandra | ||
| 480094d | Attolia had brushed Eugenides's cheek almost shyly before sending him with a wave back to his own couch. | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| 80d1200 | He felt a chill on the back of his neck. It was self-doubt, the black beetle that had pursued him all his life, pinching at him, poisoning his every success, whispering in his ear about his flaws and his failures and his unworthiness. He hadn't felt it in months, but the pinprick of its claws was instantly familiar. They informed him with their tiny tattoo that he had almost certainly done something immensely, irrevocably, and unforgivably .. | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| 2608381 | my opponent's self-confidence is usually my best asset. | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| 15fbf02 | Finally I went and found my hat and skewered it on my head with a four-inch hat pin. I wore the hat because I knew my mother never visited without one. The pin I thought would be a comfort in case of emergency. | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| 51a22c6 | You don't know what I mean. She is so strong, and you assume that strength has no end, no breaking point. You and Teleus are among the few she still trusts enough to love, and you say yes, she should have you tortured and killed. What were you thinking? | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| 5610243 | Why would a man not argue his own shameful culpability, why would he not crave responsibility for disaster, when the alternative was to feel himself to be nothing more than a speck of human dust? | Julie Orringer | ||
| 08cad69 | I'm not named after the character,' she said. 'I'm named after the opera. | when-she-is-old-and-i-am-famous | Julie Orringer | |
| ea0ca14 | Sarah had a saying: Der gleichster veg iz ful mit shtainer." "What's it mean?" "The smoothest way is sometimes full of stones." | Julie Orringer | ||
| 5b0cc6c | Because I must do something while I still can. Each soul is still incalculably precious. | Michel Faber | ||
| b4f4344 | She talks about being a Christian as if it's a gym membership you can sign up for. | gym-membership | Michel Faber | |
| 384c7a0 | Strange how a specimen like him, well cared for, healthy, free to roam the world, and blessed with a perfection of form which would surely have allowed him to breed with a greater selection of females than average, could still be so miserable. By contrast, other males, scarred by neglect, riddled with diseases, spurned by their kind, were occasionally known to radiate a contentment that seemed to arise from something more enigmatic than mer.. | Michel Faber | ||
| a7e6060 | She could marry this man, she knew, and still be captain of her soul. | Peter Carey | ||
| ed07a16 | I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead. | Peter Carey | ||
| 42c4302 | I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare. | Peter Carey | ||
| 3215920 | Swimming always cleans your soul | Peter Carey | ||
| 05dd53f | Alas for we who are mortal, and are denied the luxury of dramatic license. We mus live, and go onward. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 65bf76a | In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: "You are standing beside your mother, holding her hand. She is holding her mother's hand, who is holding her mother's hand. . . . " Eventually the line stretches three hundred miles long and goes back five million years, and the clasping hand of the ancestor look.. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| bc28442 | Just about every animal," Scott says--not just mammals and birds--"can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy." | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 4a70838 | In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: "You are standing beside your mother, holding her hand. She is holding her mother's hand, who is holding her mother's hand. . . . " Eventually the line stretches three hundred miles long and goes back five million years, and the clasping hand of the ancestor look.. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| d1c6177 | Volumes of history written in the ancient alphabet of G and C, A and T. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 06ab922 | I do not believe that I am a vindictive man, but when the immortal gods take a hand in the matter it is pardonable to observe the results with complacency. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| ed2a238 | When death stood round the corner, taking lives like a gardener digging up potatoes, it was foolishness to care what dirty things this person or that did with his body. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 64429d7 | m'chitelno e da poglednesh edna zhena, koiato si obichal s tsialoto si s'rtse dotolkova, che si iskal vinagi da ia gledash, i izvedn'zh da razberesh, che ti e vse edno, ako ne ia vidish poveche. Tragediiata na liubovta e v bezrazlichieto. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| d4f1bae | Philip himself asked desperately what was the use of living at all. It all seemed inane. It was the same with Cronshaw: it was quite unimportant that he had lived; he was dead and forgotten; his life seemed to have served nothing except to give a pushing journalist occasion to write an article in a review. And Philip cried out in his soul: 'What is the use of it?' The effort was so incommensurate with the result. The bright hopes of youth h.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 97628d8 | It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it. | psychology | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| d3f8013 | He lit his pipe again, smiling to himself quietly, with that painful smile of his, as though he were enjoying a joke that hurt him. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| aa66e94 | With infinite patience she prepared to snare and bind me. She wanted to bring me down to her level; she cared nothing for me, she only wanted me to be hers. She was willing to do everything in the world for me except the one thing I wanted: to leave me alone. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| d97e73b | I don't ask you to forgive me. I don't ask you to love me as you used to love me. But couldn't we be friends? | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 8844239 | When all things lasted so short a time and nothing mattered very much, it seemed pitiful that men, attaching an absurd importance to trivial objects, should make themselves and one another so unhappy. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 108fe31 | Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one'.. | love passion passion-is-destructive | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| a93ea9c | I don't know what it is that makes someone love you, but whatever it is, it's the only thing that matters, and if it is not there you won't create it by kindness, or generosity, or anything of that sort. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| b6f6946 | The goal is] "liberation from the bondage of rebirth. According to the Vedantists the self, which they call the atman and we call the soul, is distinct from the body and its senses, distinct from the mind and its intelligence; it is not part of the Absolute, for the Absolute, being infinite, can have no parts but the Absolute itself. It is uncreated; it has existed form eternity and when at least it has cast off the seven veils of ignorance.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 22ff4ba | What I can do is the only limit of what I may do. Because we are gregarious we live in society, and society holds together by means of force, force of arms (that is the policeman) and force of public opinion. You have society on one hand and the individual on the other: each is an organism striving for self-preservation. It is might against might. I stand alone, bound to accept society and not unwilling, since in return for the taxes I pay .. | W. Somerset Maugham |