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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7dbf342 | Everything has seemed beckoning and ahead, though I am unsure now if life has not suddenly passed me like a big rumbling semi and left me flattened here by the road. | Richard Ford | ||
| 96b8457 | It was as if they'd discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems only right and expectable for married people. They caught a glimpse of the person they fell in love with, and who sustained life. For some, that vision must never dim - as is true of me. But it was odd that our parents should catch their glimps.. | crime literary marriage | Richard Ford | |
| 04b9bfd | Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other. One can learn from that, he thinks. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| a256a22 | We all lived for money, and that is what we died for. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 240a632 | Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities | japanese noh theater vollmann | William T. Vollmann | |
| 5f539bd | Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?) | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 13e7b84 | a grey wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream | Hilary Mantel | ||
| b1ed225 | Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 095b0ed | The multitude," Cavendish says, "is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down--for the novelty of the thing." | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 9b92b6a | I picked up a snake once. In Italy." "Why did you do that?" "For a bet." "Was it poisonous?" "We didn't know. That was the point of the bet." "Did it bite you?" "Of course." "Why of course?" "It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid?" -- | italy snakes stories thomas-cromwell | Hilary Mantel | |
| 6eb6f7b | There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 082f199 | This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| b28f33e | DANTON: Could you indeed? It's you idealists who make the best tyrants. ROBESPIERRE: It seems a bit late to be having this conversation. I've had to take up violence now, and so much else. We should have discussed it last year. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| d439ac2 | He thinks, if you were born in Putney, you saw the river every day, and imagined it widening out to the sea. Even if you had never seen the ocean you had a picture of it in your head from what you had been told by foreign people who sometimes came upriver. You knew that one day you would go out into a world of marble pavements and peacocks, of hillsides buzzing with heat, the fragrance of crushed herbs rising around you as you walked. You p.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 7e07da1 | The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had ordered three weeks ago. Each day, some further evidence of a task half finished, a scheme incomplete. He found a novel, with her place marked. And this is it. | loss | Hilary Mantel | |
| f63fc4f | Nothing hurts, or perhaps it's that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| e067a1c | By the hairy balls of Jesus | wolf-hall | Hilary Mantel | |
| 2603de2 | You . . . person," he says; and again, "you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer." | Hilary Mantel | ||
| b0bebbd | God knows our hearts. There is no need for an idle formula or an intermediary. No need for language either: God is beyond translation. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| e4a013b | Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 1252247 | Anne's lovers are phantom gentlemen, flitting by night with adulterous intent. They come and go by night, unchallenged. They skim over the river like midges, flicker against the dark, their doublets sewn with diamonds. The moon sees them, peering from her hood of bone, and Thames water reflects them, glimmering like fish, like pearls. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 425c1e6 | There are many churches in my name and in the name of my apostles. The greatest and holiest is named after Peter; it is a place of great splendor in Rome. Nowhere can be found more gold. | gospel jesus rome | Norman Mailer | |
| 82e8b92 | Roth was feeling a gentle warmth as he thought of his son. He was remembering the way his son used to awaken him on Sunday mornings. His wife would put the baby in bed with him, and the child would straddle his stomach and pull feebly at the hairs on Roth's chest, cooing with delight. It gave him a pang of joy to think of it, and then, back of it, a realization that he had never enjoyed his child as much when he had lived with him. He had b.. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 010d3eb | Red had a deep loathing of the night before them. He had been through so much combat, had felt so many kinds of terror, and had seen so many men killed that he no longer had any illusions about the inviolability of his own flesh. He knew he could be killed; it was something he had accepted long ago, and he had grown a shell about that knowledge so that he rarely thought of anything further ahead than the next few minutes... | wwii | Norman Mailer | |
| 1542435 | No, but why is Croft that way? Oh there are The Answers. He is that way because of the-corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because he is having problems of adjustment. It is because he is a Texan. It is because he has renounced God. He is that way because he was born that way, or because the Devil has claimed him for one of his own, or because the only woman he ever loved was untrue to him. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 8b92c04 | I cannot bear that chirpy Bobby Kennedy, always building his beaver's nest with a few more facts. He needs to look into the abyss. | beaver bobby-kennedy chirpy | Norman Mailer | |
| 62b8763 | We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 2b9ff69 | The jeep would round the bend, be hit by a dozen bullets at once, and that would be the end of his petty history of unfocused groping and unimportant dissatisfactions. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 898f119 | Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away | ennui pin pins poems poetry pride sadism sadist writing | Norman Mailer | |
| 1f2f980 | But perhaps when you were too obedient, and did not do openly what others did, and were quiet in church and hard-working at school, then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand. | Alan Paton | ||
| f5f9e5a | But to punish and not to restore, that is the greatest of all offences. | offence offences punish punishment restoration restore | Alan Paton | |
| 903e338 | Promise me if I don't make you happy, you'll toss me aside, no matter how much pressure I put on you. Because even though I can be selfish, all I really want is for you to be happy. | Erin McCarthy | ||
| 1705a68 | I was born without the flirt gene. It's truly awful for me." That was no exaggeration. " I mean, look at how I screwed up last night with Ty. He was flirting and tossing off sexual innuendos, and I just looked at him and said I would not have anal sex with him." "You what?" Suzanne shrieked so loud that Imogen saw half a dozen other fitness patrons swivel their heads to look at them. "Did he ask you to? At the party?" "No, of course not." W.. | Erin McCarthy | ||
| 168b084 | Once upon a time she had liked to dance. When she had been about the same age as the little brunette out there who kept lifting her dress up over her head. Now that was living. Just lift your dress if you wanted to get down and don't worry what anyone thought. | dance humor inspirational living | Erin McCarthy | |
| 13814aa | Can I get you anything? A drink? A fresh change of clothes? A membership card to Hypocrites International? | humor | Erin McCarthy | |
| ba9b7b6 | I want to be IMPORTANT to you. Special. He shook his head and gave a soft laugh. Do You know how stupid I feel saying that? I think my balls just dropped to the floor. | Erin McCarthy | ||
| cb4f69d | I mean, it's okay if you're the one with the low sex drive. We'll just have to adjust and learn to accommodate that. | Erin McCarthy | ||
| cb87265 | Suzanne had totally forgotten about their court date since she'd been a little busy having tons of condom-free sex with Ryder, planning Nikki's wedding, and forming a placenta. | sex | Erin McCarthy | |
| 3cb68d7 | When they had arranged their blankets the boy lowered the lamp and stepped into the yard and pulled the door shut behind, leaving them in profound and absolute darkness. No one moved. In that cold stable the shutting of the door may have evoked in some hearts other hostels and not of their choosing. The mare sniffed uneasily and the young colt stepped about. Then one by one they began to divest themselves of their outer clothes, the hide s.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| f2ed98d | A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| e0aece6 | Suttree surfaced from these fevered deeps to hear a maudlin voice chant latin by his bedside, what medieval ghost come to usurp his fallen corporeality. An oiled thumball redolent of lime and sage pondered his shuttered lids. Miserere mei, Deus ... His ears anointed, his lips ... omnis maligna discordia ... Bechrismed with scented oils he lay boneless in a cold euphoria. Japheth when you left your father's house the birds had flown. You wer.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 459af11 | There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground. | life-and-death | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 0c28c28 | She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| a637eca | He saw an idiot in a yard in a leather harness chained to a clothesline and it leaned and swayed drooling and looked out upon the alley with eyes that fed the most rudimentary brain and yet seemed possessed of news in the universe denied right forms, like perhaps the eyes of squid whose simian depths seem to harbor some horrible intelligence. All down past the hedges a gibbering and howling in a hoarse frog's voice, word perhaps of things k.. | Cormac McCarthy |