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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d80f1f8 | Britain is relying on you, Bob, so try not to make your usual hash of things. | stross | Charles Stross | |
| ff41beb | MINUS TEN POINTS FOR PUBLIC NUDITY. | Charles Stross | ||
| 1d497b6 | I stared at him. "You're a , Rudi! She's a mermaid. What you thinking?" | mermaid | Charles Stross | |
| c3a08d3 | What you or I would recognize as an alien invasion by tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime Angleton would see as a teachable moment. | Charles Stross | ||
| 739ebe5 | They were Englishmen and, to them, the decline of other nations was the most natural thing in the world. They belonged to a race blessed with so sensitive an appreciation of its own talents (and so doubtful an opinion of anybody else's) that they would not have been at all surprised to learn that the Venetians themselves had been entirely ignorant of the merits of their own city - until Englishmen had come to tell them it was delightful. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 141e540 | It has been remarked (by a lady infinitely cleverer than the present author) how kindly disposed the world in general feels to young people who either die or marry. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| f4a04f4 | One cannot write about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell without considering the footnotes. The experienced reader is conditioned to see footnotes as dry, as a way of grounding the text in reality. But footnotes are also an intervention, or intrusion into the flow of the text, and Clarke takes advantage of this figuring. In Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, it is in the footnotes that the world of the fantastic slips through to disrupt the m.. | susanna-clarke | Farah Mendlesohn | |
| 28f9953 | You think that I am angry, but I am not. You think I do not know why you have done what you have done, but I do. You think you have put all your heart into that writing and that every one in England now understands you. What do they understand? Nothing. I understood you before you wrote a word. What you wrote, you wrote for me. For me alone. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| d613e42 | Strange stared thoughtfully at her for several seconds, so that Arabella mistakenly supposed he must be considering what she had just said. But when he spoke it was only to say in a tone of gentle reproof, "My love, you are standing on my papers." He took her arm and moved her gently aside." | Susanna Clarke | ||
| c0fe806 | If I could change a single thing about my life,' she said gently, 'I would not have been so unhappy when I was young. | Lan Samantha Chang | ||
| 67416ae | We try and map boundaries, and to string fence - we try to set up a border between life and death, between man and nature, and complicity versus innocence. But the truth is, there is no complicity, there is no innocence; and there is no death, there is only life. | life | Rick Bass | |
| 24edb93 | I wrote. Something. Yes. And you were truthful. No. You weren't truthful? I was accurate. | truth writing | Richard Flanagan | |
| 628e4ec | There grew between him and Ella a conspiracy of experience, as if the raising of children, the industry of supporting each other in ways practical and tender, and the sum of years and then decades of private conversations and small intimacies--the odour of each other on waking; the trembling sound of each other's breathing when a child was unwell; the illnesses, the griefs and cares, the tendernesses, unexpected and unbidden--as if all this.. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 64289cb | To have been part of a Pharaonic slave system that had at its apex a divine sun king led him to understand unreality as the greatest force in life. And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter--professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space--was vested with the greatest significance, and e.. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| dc624ef | definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others. I had endured too much to be reduced to an idea. Onto that pyre I threw so many, many words - that entire untrue literature of the past which had shackled & subjugated my as surely as the spiked iron collars & leg locks & jagged basils & balls & chains & headshaving - that had so long denied me my free voice & the stories I n.. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| a96036c | Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 6c5f333 | At some point the talk got heated, and Paolo called Mother a strumpet, for which Daddy was said to have stomped a serious mudhole in Paolo's ass. | Mary Karr | ||
| d9d35f4 | Dumb hope is what it hurts most to write, occupying the foolish schemes we pursued for decades, the blind alleys, the cliffs we stepped off. | Mary Karr | ||
| 5331cce | He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated. | Mary Karr | ||
| acafd65 | That bar also delineated the realm of sweat and hourly wage, the working world that college was educating me to leave. Rewards in that realm were few. No one congratulated you for clocking out. Your salary was spare. The Legion served as recompense. So the physical comforts you bouth there--hot boudain sausage and cold beer--had value. You attended the place, by which I mean you not only went there but gave it attention your job didn't dese.. | Mary Karr | ||
| c115231 | Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and they think they hit a home run. | Mary Karr | ||
| 5ae0e50 | It was I who was conquered. In just seven nights, that fledgling goddess not only discovered that I had a heart, but she stole it forever, then cradled it in the palm of her hand. | Celeste Bradley | ||
| 506fef1 | A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own. | social-class | William Maxwell | |
| b26c641 | There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one's parents. Death, about which so much mystery is made,is perhaps no mystery at all. But the history of one's parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and characters guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that projects one small surface above the level of smooth lawn, and when you come to dig around it, i.. | William Maxwell | ||
| 0c7fb73 | In the town where I live, I have frequently observed a phenomenon I have come to think of as Samish-Sex Marriage. | page-66 | George Saunders | |
| 6f6694d | Is this the baby?" I said. Ma turned on me again. "What do you think it is?" she said. "A midget that can't talk?" -- | sarcasm | George Saunders | |
| d3196a1 | You were torturing a cat," she says. "With a freaking prod." "A prod I built myself in metal shop," he says. "But of course you never mention that." | animal-cruelty humor | George Saunders | |
| 2cc58eb | I have plenty of friends," she says. "Name one." She looks at me. Which I guess is sort of sweet." | George Saunders | ||
| b30a772 | A house on the park. He'd seen it a million times. And now was in it. It smelled of man sweat and spaghetti sauce and old books. Like a library where sweaty men went to cook spaghetti. | george saunders | ||
| 55417ea | I wander cowboy sidewalks of wood, wearing a too-small hat, filled with remorse for the many lives I failed to lead. | failure pathetic-people reflection-on-life regret remorse | George Saunders | |
| 5cd1407 | Do not really like rich people, as they make us poor people feel dopey and inadequate. Not that we are poor. I would say we are middle. We are very, very lucky. I know that. But still, it is not right that rich people make us middle people feel dopey and inadequate. | poor poverty rich wealth | George Saunders | |
| b0c4a6d | The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present. | George Saunders | ||
| 8354b64 | The thousand dresses, laid out so reverently that afternoon, flecks of dust brushed off carefully in doorways, hems gathered up for the carriage trip: where are they now? Is a single one museum-displayed? Are some few yet saved in attics? Most are dust. As are the women who wore them so proudly in that transient moment of radiance. | George Saunders | ||
| 80c23cd | We must see God not as a Him (some linear rewarding fellow) but an IT, a great beast beyond our understanding, who wants something from us, and we must give it, and all we may control is the spirit in which we give it and the ultimate end which the giving serves. | George Saunders | ||
| 5b52e8e | And next time we hear someone saying something like, 'We are pursuing this strategy because other strategies, when we had considered them, we concluded that, in terms of overall effectiveness, they were not sound strategies, which is why we enacted the one we are now embarked upon, which our enemies would like to see us fail, due to they hate freedom,' we will wait to see if the anchorperson cracks up, or chokes back a sob of disgust, and i.. | pages-8-9 punditry the-braindead-megaphone | George Saunders | |
| 4b144c6 | Though firm, we are never too firm, though we love fun, we never have fun in a silly way that makes us appear ridiculous, unless that is our intent. | humor satire | George Saunders | |
| 5f66ccb | For dinner Jade microwaves some Stars-n-Flags. They're addictive. They put sugar in the sauce and sugar in the meat nuggets. I think also caffeine. Someone told me the brown streaks in the Flags are caffeine. We have like five bowls each. After dinner the babies get fussy and Min puts a mush of ice cream and Hershey's syrup in their bottles and we watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half hour computer simulation of tragedies that have neve.. | George Saunders | ||
| 2b664bd | THIS IS WHY He will never be given to wonder much if he was the mouth for some cruel force that said it. But if he were (this will comfort her) less than one moment out of millions had he meant it. So many years and so many turns they had swerved around the subject. And he will swear for many more the kitchen and everything in it vanished -- the oak table, their guests, the refrigerator door he had been surely propped against-- all changed.. | crazy desperation poetry | Michael Ryan | |
| c3643fc | La sencilla y sorprendente verdad sobre la India y sobre su gente es que cuando vas a su pais y tratas con ellos, el corazon siempre te guia mas sabiamente que la cabeza. No hay lugar en el mundo donde eso sea mas cierto. | spanish | Gregory David Roberts | |
| b8a7831 | It isn't a secret, unless keeping it hurts. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 4a426a0 | If fate doesn't make you laugh, Karla said, in one of my first conversations with her, then you just don't get the joke. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 4c8eb67 | Indian actors know how to shout with the eyes. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 60bb70c | Fear dries a man's mouth, and hate strangles him. That's why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 72c0f89 | Mistakes are like bad loves, the more you learn from, the more you wish they'd never happened. | mistakes retrospection | Gregory David Roberts |