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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7a87b0d | Sensuality, as long as it is straightforward did not repel him, but this derived sensuality - the sort that classes a mistress among motor-cars if she is beautiful, and among eye-flies if she isn't - was alien to his own emotions . . . It was, in a new form, the old, old trouble that eats the heart out of every civilization: snobbery, the desire for possessions, creditable appendages; and it is to escape this rather than the lusts of the fl.. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 4811412 | I'm afraid that in nine cases out of ten Nature pulls one way and human nature another. | nature | E.M. Forster | |
| b763b94 | Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 98a8560 | In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said: "'From far, from eve and morning, And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I' George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy.. | E.M. Forster | ||
| d95e02b | Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important today, and when you say of a thing that 'nothing hangs on it,' it sounds like blasphemy. There's never any knowing--(how am I to put it?)--which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever. | consequences idleness | E.M. Forster | |
| 37b42ef | Oh, what's the use of your fairmindedness if you never decide for yourself? Anyone gets hold of you and makes you do what they want. And you see through them and laugh at them - and do it. It's not enough to see clearly; I'm muddle-headed and stupid, and not worth a quarter of you, but I have tried to do what seemed right at the time. And you - your brain and your insight are splendid. But when you see what's right you're too idle to do it... | E.M. Forster | ||
| f9fe7db | Fed by neither Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward . . . He hadn't a God or a lover--the two usual incentives to virtue. But on he struggled with his back to ease, because dignity demanded it. There was no one to watch him, nor did he watch himself, but struggles like his are the supreme achievements of humanity, and surpass any legends about Heavan. | self-respect | E.M. Forster | |
| b0b823a | They moved from the drawing room to a dining room on the ground floor where they found spiders large as saucers lurking in the dresser (Ron left the room hurriedly to make a cup of tea and did not return for an hour and a half) | ron-weasley spiders | J.K. Rowling | |
| 7f09960 | I feel like a house-elf," grumbled Ron [general cleaning of Black's house] "Well, now that you understand what dreadful lives they lead, perhaps you'll be a bit more active in S.P.E.W!" ... "You know, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to show people exactly how horrible it is to clean all the time -- we could do a sponsored scrub of Gryffindor common room, all proceeds to S.P.E.W, it would raise awareness as well as funds --" "I'll sponsor yo.. | ron-weasley spew | J.K. Rowling | |
| 340eea9 | After all, you don't have to be a sword-wielding Gryffindor to be a hero; sometimes, all it takes is having your heart in the right place. | J.K. Rowling | ||
| d321bac | You won't have to do all the work alone this time, Hermione. I'll help." "Oh, Ron!" Hermione flung her arms around Ron's neck and broke down completely." | J.K. Rowling | ||
| 5041432 | Fussing over food was important. It gave a shape to the day: breakfast, lunch, dinner; beginning, middle, end. | breakfast cooking daily-life dinner end food lunch middle | Robert Hellenga | |
| 782a94a | I revere the Bill of Rights, but at the same time I believe that anyone who's using three or more of them at a time is hogging them too much. (152) | Sarah Vowell | ||
| e4da39c | For years they've grumbled that England is a cesspool governed by an immoral king under the spell of the Whore of Babylon, which is their cute nickname for the pope. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 88cf18e | The most important reason I am concentrating on Winthrop and his shipmates in the 1630s is that the country I live in is haunted by the Puritans' vision of themselves as God's chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 567e4e9 | A couple of days after the last time I saw him, I got a typically well-written postcard. He said that after he kissed me goodbye at LAX he was driving away and turned on the radio. Elvis was singing "It's Now or Never." In my personal religion, a faith cobbled together out of pop songs and books and movies, there is nothing closer to a sign from God than Elvis Presley telling you "tomorrow will be too late" at precisely the moment you drop .. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 0c0d265 | He spent part of last year working in Canada, and I think it rubbed off on him, diminishing his innate American ability to celebrate the civic virtue of idiocy. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| c34eb52 | It goes without saying that in order for me to buy a teapot at the Oneida, Ltd., outlet store at the Sherrill Shopping Plaza, the second coming of Jesus Christ had to have taken place in the year 70 A.D. To the Oneida Community, 70 A.D., the year the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, marks the beginning of the New Jerusalem. Which means we've all been living in heaven on earth for nearly two thousand years. Everyone knows there is no marri.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 8170a26 | I don't know how to describe the magnificence of Carlsbad Caverns without making it sound like a cartoon or a drug trip or a cartoon of a drug trip. The only thing I can say is that it is one of those dear places that make you love the world. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| af4a3c8 | I told her that my happy yellow teapot has a kinky backstory involving a nineteenth-century vegetarian sex cult in upstate New York whose members lived for three decades as self-proclaimed "Bible communists" before incorporating into the biggest supplier of dinnerware to the American food-service industry, not to mention harboring their most infamous resident, an irritating young maniac who, years after he moved away, was hanged for assassi.. | yay-history | Sarah Vowell | |
| aa11ce0 | there's nothing more depressing than bad capitalism. | capitalism | Sarah Vowell | |
| cc9c52e | Technically, it's a family restaurant, but it will only remind you of your family if your mom chain-smoked menthols. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 9f9e5dc | While history might be full of exemplary fathers, recorded history is not where to find them. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 9c38790 | Steuben explained to his friend, "You say to your soldier, 'Do this,' and he does it; but I am obliged to say, 'This is the reason why you ought to do that,' and then he does it." | Sarah Vowell | ||
| d0e3ed4 | The same wakefulness the individual Calvinist was to use to keep watch over his own sins Winthrop and Cotton called for also in the group at large. This humility, this fear, was what kept their delusions of grandeur in check. That's what subsequent generations lost. From New England's Puritans we inherited the idea that America is blessed and ordained by God above all nations, but lost the fear of wrath and retribution. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| b3bf805 | When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal's 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 37ec3f9 | Designers love subtle cues, because subtlety is one of the traits of sophisticated design. But Web users are generally in such a hurry that they routinely miss subtle cues. | designers usability web-design | Steve Krug | |
| 9845c55 | Your primary role should be to share what you know, not to tell people how things should be done. | Steve Krug | ||
| f84994c | Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to a bare minimum. | usability | Steve Krug | |
| 5bf7601 | The idea of labor, of hard work, leading to increased productivity was so novel, so radical, in the overall span of Western history that most ordinary people, most of those who labored, could scarcely believe what was happening to them. Labor had been so long thought to be the natural and inevitable consequence of necessity and poverty that most people still associated it with slavery and servitude. Therefore any possibility of oppression, .. | labor prosperity radicalism | Gordon S. Wood | |
| 340b614 | Grandmaster games are said to begin with novelty, which is the first move of the game that exits the book. It could be the fifth, it could be the thirty-fifth. We think about a chess game as beginning with move one and ending with checkmate. But this is not the case. The games begins when it gets out of book, and it end when it goes into book..And this is why Game 6 [between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue] didn't count...Tripping and falling .. | deep-blue novelty | Brian Christian | |
| a41765e | Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like 'uncertainty's antidote.' This turns out also to be the formal definition- the amount of information comes from the amount by which something reduces uncertainty...The higher the [information] entropy, the more information there is. It turns out to be a value capable of measuring a startling array of things- from the flip of a coin to a telephone call, to a Joyce novel.. | information | Brian Christian | |
| cf77cdc | The problem with our "change the world" rhetoric is that it is too often a thinly veiled grasp for power and a quest for dominance--things that are antithetical to the way Jesus calls his disciples to live." | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 792c03e | They were furious. Did he not know he might catch cold? Why did he not answer their hail? It was no good his telling them he had not heard; they knew better; he had not got flannel ears--Why had he not waited for them? --What was a boat for? Was this a proper time to go a-swimmin? -- Did he think this was midsummer? Or Lammas? -- He was to see how cold he was, blue an trembling like a fucking jelly -- Would a new-joined ships boy have done .. | Patrick O'Brian | ||
| 0f84989 | What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time. | life | Brian Christian | |
| beaad8a | every woman has some reason to weep and weeping is sweetest when it is for another's sorrow. | weep woman | Ivo Andrić | |
| 91ed886 | Po tom visku koji nosi svako umetnicko delo kao neki trag tajanstvene saradnje izmedu prirode i umetnika, vidi se demonsko poreklo umetnosti. Postoji legenda da ce Antihrist, kada se bude pojavio na zemlji, stvarati sve sto je i Bog stvorio, samo sa vecom vestinom i sa vise savrsenstva [...] Mozda je umetnik preteca Antihrista. Mozda se hiljade i hiljade nas "igramo Antihrista", kao sto se deca, usred mira, igraju rata." | Ivo Andrić | ||
| a818a84 | u krvi im je saznanje da se pravi zivot sastoji od samih zatisja i da bi ludo i uzaludno bilo mutiti ta retka zatisja, trazeci neki drugi, cvrsci i stalniji zivot koga nema. | Ivo Andrić | ||
| 98e7997 | Vidite, umetnik, to je "sumnjivoo lice", maskiran covek u sumraku, putnik sa laznim pasosem. Lice pod maskom je divno, njegov rang je mnogo visi nego sto u pasosu pise, ali sta to mari? Ljudi ne vole tu neizvesnost ni tu zakukuljenost, i zato ga zovu sumnjivim i dvolicnim. A sumnja, kad se jednom rodi, ne poznaje granica. Sve i kad bi umetnik mogao nekako da objavi svetu svoju pravu licnost i svoje pozvanje, ko bi mu verovao da je to njegov.. | art | Ivo Andrić | |
| 51a33b2 | Ja, covjek nestalna srca koji zivim bez mira i radosti; gorak zivot o tudjem hljebu, nemirne proslosti, pune lutanja, nesnalazenja i stradanja, nestalne, teske sadasnjosti i mracne buducnosti,siban strastima, potresen dogadajima, i mucen od ljudi, oboren i gazen na ulazu u zivot, podgrizen grijehom, i borbom proti grijehu-ja zudim svom dusom mir i molim nocas od Boga zivot vedar i tih da se ne kidam u sebi i ne lomim svijetom. | Ivo Andrić | ||
| 9314c54 | Ako hoces da znas kakva je neka drzava i njena uprava, i kakva im je buducnost, gledaj samo da saznas koliko u toj zemlji ima cestitih i nevinih ljudi po zatvorima, a koliko zlikovaca i prestupnika na slobodi. To ce ti najbolje kazati. | Ivo Andrić | ||
| 15111d5 | Ovih dana sam mnogo citao i mnogo razgovarao sa ljudima - vise nego sto je zdravo i dobro za mene - a nauk koji se moze izvuci iz svega toga uvek je isti. Iznutra treba rasti, cutke i neprimetno napredovati, i u pravi cas se zaustaviti. Sve drugo znaci: sam sebi plesti zamku, spremati svoj sopstveni pad. | Ivo Andrić | ||
| 7c313b8 | Never can that be told, for those who saw and lived through it have lost the gift of words and those who are dead can tell no tales. Those were things which are not told, but forgotten. Fore where they not forgotten, how could they ever be repeated? | Ivo Andrić | ||
| a82c128 | For Time, driving all things before it, may bring with it evil as well as good. | Niccolò Machiavelli |