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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c0cd4a1 | He had thought of love as a rapture which seized one so that all the world seemed spring-like, he had looked forward to an ecstatic happiness; but this was not happiness; it was a hunger of the soul, it was a painful yearning, it was a bitter anguish, he had never known before. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 209baa5 | I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it? | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 399c5da | As is well-known, when the moon hours lengthen, human beings come adrift from the regularity of their mechanical clocks. They nod at noon, dream in waking hours, open their eyes wide to the pitch-black night. It is a time of magic. And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between worlds. Dreams and stories merge with lived experience, the dead and the living brush against each other in their .. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| ff8cefc | He turned from the daughters of minor aristocrats to those of farriers, farmers and foresters. Personally he couldn't tell the difference, yet the world seemed to mind less. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8be7263 | In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always ask what it is, and who will be paying. If you don't, then the agenda makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay. QUELLCRIST | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| e57bbea | There's a sameness to streetlife. On every world I've ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above. | human-behaviour machines patterns planets political science-fiction streetlife worlds | Richard K. Morgan | |
| 340b47f | it's amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvious truths irritating enough to disagree with. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| ac31b32 | There are no alternatives. You live with what is. And you don't let your ghosts rent room in your head. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 2224b9e | Two of them drifted over to intercept me with the easy calm of big cats that have been fed recently. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 85ff020 | Overhead soft-bellied clouds panic toward the horizon like whales before the harpoon, and the wind runs addict's fingers through the trees that line the street. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 8b6694e | I looked at Mum and realized -- -- that she was telling an untruth. A untruth. And I remember thinking in that instant how thrilling and grown-up it must be to say something so untrue, as opposed to the little amateur fibs I was already practiced at -- horrid little apprentice sinner that I was --like the ones about you'd already said your prayers or washed under the fingernails. Yes, I was . I too must learn to say these gorgeous un.. | lies mendacity | Christopher Buckley | |
| 5d79f4f | and rout the magical mystical moonlight with fierce proof of its own greater power to light, to heat, to make everything known. | Irving Stone | ||
| 42618ef | We are giving the world back to man, and man back to himself. Man shall no longer be vile, but noble. We shall not destroy his mind in return for an immortal soul. Without a free, vigorous and creative mind, man is but an animal, and he will die like an animal, without any shred of a soul. We return to man his arts, his literature, his sciences, his independence to think and feel as an individual, not to be bound to dogma like a slave, to r.. | Irving Stone | ||
| 8c132e3 | It's pleasant to get used to the expensive, the soft, the comfortable. Once you're addicted, it's so easy to become a sycophant, to trim the sails of your judgment in order to be kept on. The next step is to change your work to please those in power, and that is death to the sculptor. | Irving Stone | ||
| 2d769db | The artist has to take risks. | Irving Stone | ||
| 9ef7596 | A man who has not suffered has nothing to tell with his paintings. | Irving Stone | ||
| 50e5103 | What is there, in the mention of Time To Come, that is so quick to wrench at the heart, to inflict a pain in the senses that is like the run of a sword, I wonder. Perhaps we feel our youngness taken from us without the soothe of sliding years, and the pains of age that come to stand unseen beside us and grow more solid as the minutes pass, are with us solid on the instant, and we sense them, but when we try to assess them, they are back aga.. | Richard Llewellyn | ||
| 32f83b3 | You will only learn in a fight how much you've got to learn. | discipleship humility spiritual-warfare | Richard Llewellyn | |
| 91909e4 | Dear little house that I have lived in, there is happiness you have seen, even before I was born. In you is my life, and all the people I have loved are a part of you, so to go out of you, and leave you, is to leave myself. | home loved-ones loving-home | Richard Llewellyn | |
| f62524f | The human mind searches for cause and effect, always; and we all prefer the weird and thrilling to the dull and commonplace as an answer. | Jack Finney | ||
| b00551b | It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions. | instinct | Jack Finney | |
| 8dd980f | How can women be in the image of God if God cannot be imaged in female form? | images women | Marcus J. Borg | |
| f90e198 | When tradition is thought to state the way things really are, it becomes the director and judge of our lives; we are, in effect, imprisoned by it. On the other hand, tradition can be understood as a pointer to that which is beyond tradition: the sacred. Then it functions not as a prison but as a lens. | faith perspective tradition | Marcus J. Borg | |
| 776098f | The political vision of the religious right is for the most part an individualistic politics of righteousness, not a communal politics of compassion. | individualism politics religious-right righteousness | Marcus J. Borg | |
| 63e7a60 | Mr. Young hadn't had to quiet a screaming baby for years. H'ed never been much good at it to start with. He'd always respected Sir Winston Churchill, and patting small versions of him on the bottom had always seemed ungracious. | Neil Gaiman Terry Pratchett | ||
| efc9702 | I believe in the power of origins, a belief that, as Ecclesiastes put it, 'that wich is done is that wich shall be done: and there is no new thing under de sun'; that we claim as originality and discovery are nothing but the airs and delusios of our innocence, ignorance, and arrogance: that whatever is said was said better - more powerfully, beautifully, and purely, long ago | purity rock | Nick Tosches | |
| dea6c89 | It is time to realize, however, that the real dangers to America today come not from the newly rich people of East Asia but from our own ideological rigidity, our deep-seated belief in our own propaganda. | Chalmers Johnson | ||
| 7683f18 | Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess. | princess | Jack Vance | |
| 8d6bfb4 | When the ships had lifted, they returned across the river to the silence of death. Then his grandfather told him, "Many fine things your father had planned for you: learning and useful work and a life of satisfaction and peace. Do you recall this?" "Yes, Grandfather." "The learning you shall have. You will learn patience and resource, the ability of your hands and your mind. You will have useful work: the destruction of evil men. What work .. | the-star-king vengeance | Jack Vance | |
| 1f60ff8 | Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience. Otherwise they fall into desuetude and become unfashionable, unorthodox--finally irregulationary. | Jack Vance | ||
| b6f9e0f | These are the stories that the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north. Then each family circle gathers at the hearthstone and the pups sit silently and listen and when the story's done they ask many questions: "What is Man?" they'll ask. Or perhaps: "What is a city?" Or: "What is a war?" | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 51d57e3 | Norway...looked to Roosevelt "as funny a kingdom as was ever imagined outside of opera bouffe....It is much as if Vermont should offhand try the experiment of having a king." | observational | Edmund Morris | |
| 3c97254 | Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as rain. | rain river time | Gene Wolfe | |
| 87b6d4d | Reason shows reason can only bring pain - how wise to forget and be happy again! | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 64221d8 | Time turns our lies into truth | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 3667e29 | You think whatever is wrong with you is contagious, then?' She laughed again. 'Yes, but you have it already. You caught it from your mother. Death. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 5a04ea4 | We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard defining edges. | symbol | Gene Wolfe | |
| 061cb60 | Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. [...] We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 179322d | The upshot was that she lost her religion - with a vengeance - and walked out on him, taking these three daughters with her. Faith, Hope and Brenda. | Jonathan Coe | ||
| 543a2b1 | quando perdi qualcuno e questo qualcuno ti manca, tu soffri perche la persona assente si e trasformata in un essere immaginario: irreale. Ma il tuo desiderio di lei non e immaginario. Cosi e a quello che devi aggrapparti: al desiderio. Perche e reale. | Jonathan Coe | ||
| e35ca3c | Man has one name, and many more than two natures. But the essential two are these: that he shall strive to impose order on chaos, and that he shall strive to take advantage of chaos... A third element of man's nature is this: that he shall not understand what he is doing. | human-nature order pattern understanding | John Brunner | |
| fc0fd1f | in the union of nature, loyalty is no dream! We part only to be more intimately at one, more divinely at peace with all, with each other. We die so as to live. | Friedrich Hölderlin | ||
| d02e4a6 | Thus the sons of earth now drink in The fire of heaven without danger. And it is our duty, poets, to stand Bare-headed under the storms of God, Grasping with our own hand The Father's beam itself, And to offer the gift of heaven, | Friedrich Hölderlin | ||
| 8f1bda4 | Here was the world wide-awake and yet only for me, all the fresh pure air only for me, all the fragrance breathed only by me, not a living soul hearing the nightingale but me, the sun in a few moments coming up to warm only me. | Elizabeth von Arnim |