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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6a74ec1 | There is no measuring Muad'Dib's motives by ordinary standards. In the moment of his triumph, he saw the death prepared for him, yet he accepted the treachery. Can you say he did this out of a sense of justice? Whose justice, then? Remember, we speak now of the Muad'Dib who ordered battle drums made from his enemies' skins, the Muad'Dib who denied the conventions of his ducal past with a wave of the hand, saying merely: 'I am the Kwisatz Ha.. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 2735b71 | You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 1db1081 | in the background she can hear the shopping carts performing their clashy, anal copulations. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7b80d0b | Entire sections of them simply cannot be translated - the characters are legible and well-known, but when put together they do not say anything that leaves an imprint on the modern mind." "Like instructions for programming a VCR." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| d17b602 | The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder -- its DNA -- xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a lef- turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines. In olden times, you'd wander down to Mom's.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e47fe50 | But your way isn't just that set of rules," Cord said. "It's who you are -- you follow that way for bigger reasons. And as long as you stay true to that, the confusion you're talking about will sort itself out eventually." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| d7f6215 | You mentioned . . . one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What . . . is the other?" "The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space?" | question space | Neal Stephenson | |
| 675f713 | It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers. | engineering science | Neal Stephenson | |
| 95aa1da | The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 83b3eb9 | the insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an unforgeable guarantee of freshness. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 593f40b | I had to ride slow because I was taking my guerrilla route, the one I follow when I assume that everyone in a car is out to get me. My nighttime attitude is, anyone can run you down and get away with it. Why give some drunk the chance to plaster me against a car? That's why I don't even own a bike light, or one of those godawful reflective suits. Because if you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to b.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 76b7e69 | I have devoted much effort, during the last decade or so, to the systematic encouragement of subversiveness. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 897f736 | Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8804d72 | The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished, sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e2d4293 | You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin, and our feeble university men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That's how the popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long, they simply say it in Latin. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7c73d09 | It's not about how women are deficient. It's more about how men are deficient. Our social deficiencies, lack of perspective, or whatever you want to call it, is what enables us to study one species of dragonfly for twenty years, or sit in front of a computer for a hundred hours a week writing code. This is not the behavior of a well-balanced and healthy person, but it can obviously lead to great advances in synthetic fibers. Or whatever. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f6e3709 | Velma you says? No Velma heah, brother. No hooch, no gals, no nothing. Jes' the scram, white boy, jes' the scram. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| d7becdb | Pero siempre me gustan los libros equivocados. Y las peliculas equivocadas. Y la gente equivocada. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| a0237cf | I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 91caae0 | He reached for the card without excitement, read it, turned it over and read the back with as much care as the front. There was nothing on the back to read. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 57f6dba | Leave us do the thinking sweetheart. It takes equipment. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 6312bf1 | Hair like steel wool grew far back on his head and gave him a domed brown forehead that might at careless glance seemed a dwelling place for brains. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 5b7785b | Maybe I was tired and irritable. Maybe I felt a little guilty. I could learn to hate this guy without even knowing him. I could just look at him across the width of a cafeteria and want to kick his teeth in. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| ad437da | zmn hmh chyz r pst w fsd w chrwkhydh mykhnd. trjdy zndgy yn nyst khh chyzhy zyb jwn mymyrnd, blkhh yn st khh zndgy anh r pyr w khwr mykhnd. | جوانی مرگ پیری زندگی | Raymond Chandler | |
| 753d03c | It could have been a beautiful friendship," Beifus said with a sigh. "Except for the ice pick, of course." | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 34e8093 | There was nothing to it. The Super Chief was on time, as it almost always is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 57953c2 | Here and now she cannot exist without me. | nicholas-sparks she the-longest-ride | Nicholas Sparks | |
| 79d36f2 | Katie was reminded again that love can sometimes achieve the impossible. | Nicholas Sparks | ||
| 78e87cd | Science, however, is not just a matter of making mistakes, but of making mistakes in public. Making mistakes for all to see, in the hopes of getting the others to help with the corrections. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 84adb85 | There is a species of primate in South America more gregarious than most other mammals, with a curious behavior.The members of this species often gather in groups, large and small, and in the course of their mutual chattering , under a wide variety of circumstances, they are induced to engage in bouts of involuntary, convulsive respiration, a sort of loud, helpless, mutually reinforcing group panting that sometimes is so severe as to incapa.. | humor laughter phenomenology popular-psychology popular-science | Daniel C. Dennett | |
| 0bbd36e | In fact, if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and location are determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability. | free-will indeterminism | Daniel C. Dennett | |
| f09903e | The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a.. | darwinism dennett evidence evolution evolutionary-biology science scientific-theory | Daniel C. Dennett | |
| 4927541 | Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are. | self story | Daniel C. Dennett | |
| 3a8f0b1 | The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Classira pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 5ad9d59 | Eventually, decades later, when the king was dying, the queen gently ushered everybody out into the corridor, closed the door to the royal bedchamber, and got into bed with her husband. She started singing to him. They laughed. He was short of breath, but he could still laugh. They asked each other, Is this silly? Is this...pretentious? But they both knew that everything there was to say had been said already, over and over, across the year.. | death-of-a-loved-one love | Michael Cunningham | |
| 1dc0217 | It's better, really, to go out in a blaze. That's why we love Marilyn, and James Dean. We love the ones who walk right into the fire. | fire | Michael Cunningham | |
| 2465c70 | He knows about damage the way a woman does. He knows, the way a woman knows, how to carry on as if nothing's wrong. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 7df57c8 | He is still, at times, astonished by her. She may be the most intelligent woman in England, he thinks. Her books may be read for centuries. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 05d2141 | You don't necessarily meet a lot of people in this world. Not when you let yourself get distracted by music and the passing of hours. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| b9b98b7 | Any other vexations to report?" he asks. "I love the word 'vexations.'" "It's the 'x.' Nice to jump off a 'v' and bite into an 'x' like that." "Just the usual ones," she says. "How was the weekend?" "Vexing. Not really, I just wanted to say it. You?" | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 7aa31bd | The song is an unvarnished love shout, an implorement tinged with...anger? Something like anger, but the anger of a philosoher, the anger of a pot. An anger directed at the transience of the world, at its heartbreaking beauty that collides constantly with our awareness of the fact that everything gets taken away, that we're being shown marvels but reminded always that they don't belong to us. They're sultans' treasures; we're lucky, we're e.. | life life-and-death mortality preciousness | Michael Cunningham | |
| 44076de | That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 856e01a | The people of this world make a god for themselves in their own image, and in doing so they make God far, far, far, too small. | Ted Dekker | ||
| a52d78c | Austin cleared his throat. Given the choice between being with books or people, he'd always choose books. You could always tell what a book thought without needing to have a confrontation. People, on the other hand, defensively clung to their need to be right no matter how flawed their thinking. | Ted Dekker |