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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2d8285b | But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief. | grief love | Miriam Toews | |
| 9b6e842 | But there is a kindness here, a complicated kindness. You can see it sometimes in the eyes of people when they look at you and don't know what to say. | Miriam Toews | ||
| ad79dc8 | Just say no to pillaging. | Nancy Farmer | ||
| a61746b | Don't be angry," the Bard said. "Most people live inside a cage of their own expectations. It makes them feel safe. The world's a frightening place full of glory and wonder and, as we've both discovered, danger. Flying isn't for everyone." | Nancy Farmer | ||
| 352c303 | Jerott's eyes and Philippa's met. 'When I meet my friend,' said Jerott Blyth carefully, 'there is likely to be a detonation which will take the snow off Mont Blanc. I advise you to seek other auspices. Philippa, I think we should go down below.' 'To swim?' said that unprepossessing child guilelessly. 'I can stand on my head.' 'Oh, Christ,' said Jerott morosely. 'Why in hell did you come?' The brown eyes within the damp, dun-coloured hair .. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| a0de6f5 | So: 'Why did you laugh?' demanded Philippa, and shook Jerott's hand off her arm. 'Oh, that?' said Lymond. 'But, my dear child, the picture was irresistible. Daddy, afflicted but purposeful, ransacking the souks of the Levant for one of his bastards, with an unchaperoned North Country schoolgirl aged--what? twelve? thirteen?--to help change its napkins when the happy meeting takes place.... A gallant thought, Philippa,' said Lymond kindly, .. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| aa3ffc0 | To pass over grief, they say, the Italian sleeps; the Frenchman sings; the German drinks; the Spaniard laments, and the Englishman goes to plays. What then does the Scot?' To Jerott's mind sprang, unbidden, a picture of the sword Archie Abernethy was trying to clean at this moment below. 'This one,' he said, 'kills. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 99fbebe | I don't like this war. I don't like the cold-blooded scheming at the beginning and the carnage at the end and the grumbling and the jealousies and the pettishness in the middle. I hate the lack of gallantry and grace; the self-seeking; the destruction of valuable people and things. I believe in danger and endeavor as a form of tempering but I reject it if this is the only shape it can take. | danger endeavor gallantry grace war | Dorothy Dunnett | |
| 09a4bc3 | The progress of Sybilla though a market was the progress of worker bee through a bower of intently propagating blossoms. Everything stuck. From the toy stall she bought two ivory dolls, a hen whistle, a rattle and a charming set of miniature bells for a child's skirts: all were heroically received and borne by Tom, henceforth marked by a faint, distracted jingling. From the spice booth, set with delicious traps for the fat purse, she took c.. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| cdaab67 | Kate slid to her knees, pulling the child's head to her breast, her mouth in its hair. "Pippa. Pippa, we're awful fools. What Father means is that truly nothing we have ever done can harm us, and Mr. Crawford has mixed us up with someone else. But you know what unstable-looking parents you have. He doesn't believe us, but he says he'll believe you. It's not very flattering," said Kate, looking at her daughter with bright eyes, "but you seem.. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| c01abd2 | I could see you drop dead this minute from paralysis of the brain cells and burst into uninhibited applause. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 9f0ba79 | What does anyone want out of life? What kind of freak do you suppose I am? I miss books and good verse and decent talk. I miss women, to speak to, not to rape; and children, and men creating things instead of destroying them. And from the time I wake until the time I find I can't go to sleep there is the void--the bloody void where there was no music today and none yesterday and no prospect of any tomorrow, or tomorrow, or next God-damned y.. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 141ffff | But I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands. | despised fate scotland | Dorothy Dunnett | |
| 0f93917 | but I am running to and you are running from, and there's a world of difference there. | George R.R. Martin | ||
| f83aef9 | One of my favourite things to do when I write is to bring a sense of wonder to a normal everyday setting... Yes, there are magical elements, but there are also very down-to-earth elements and often what shines through isn't the magic, but the lanterns that the characters light against the dark... If you substitute the words "fairy tale" or "myth" for "fantasy," the reason I use these elements in my own work is that they create resonances th.. | fairy-tales fantasy magic myth writing | Charles de Lint | |
| 8d47f66 | Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand. | beatnik growing-up poet turtlenecks | Charles de Lint | |
| c6586bd | She wanted to tell him what happened wasn't really his fault, but she knew that wasn't the way this kind of guilt worked. Intellectually, he already knew that. It was his emotions that were tripping him up. The tangle of love and memory and what might have been. | Charles de Lint | ||
| 8e5394f | Could it be that we don't want to think badly of Woodrow Wilson? We seem to feel that a person like Helen Keller can be an inspiration only so long as she remains uncontroversial, one-dimensional. We don't want complicated icons. "People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions," Helen Keller pointed out. "Conclusions are not always pleasant."41 Most of us automatically shy away from conflict, and understandably so. W.. | James W. Loewen | ||
| 7781ed3 | Ironically, Adolf Hitler displayed more knowledge of how we treated Native Americans than American high schoolers today who rely on their textbooks. Hitler admired our concentration camps for American Indians in the west and according to John Toland, his biographer, "often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination--by starvation and uneven combat" as the model for his extermination of Jews and Gypsies (Rom people.. | James W. Loewen | ||
| f78b955 | adult life is full of hardship, childhood should be free of it. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 61767ce | Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 440c21f | You," he continued, grabbing my wrist. "All of you, from the safe world, with your air bags and your tamper-proof packaging and your fat-free diets. You are the superstitious ones. You convince yourself you can cheat death, and you are absolutely offended when you learn that you can't. You sat in your nice little flat all through our war and watched us, bleeding all over the TV news. And you thought, 'How awful!' and then you got up and mad.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 5c396ab | It is natural to want to forget, Anna, when everyday is a brimful of sadness. But those souls also forgot those that they had loved. You do not want that, surely? I have heard some preach that God wants us to forget the dead, but I cannot believe so. I think He gives us precious recollections so that we may not be parted entirely from those He has given us to love. You must cherish your memories of your babes, Anna, until you see them again.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| bb6e950 | No wonder simple men have always had their gods dwell in the high places. For as soon as a man lets his eye drop from the heavens to the horizon, he risks setting it on some scene of desolation. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 1ee7c55 | Winds shook me apart piecemeal, flung a bone here, a bone there. My eyes became snow, my hair turned to ice; I heard it chime against my shoulders like wind-blown glass. If I spoke, words would fall from me like snow, pour out of me like black wind. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 4d33158 | Nature admits no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance. | Stephen Fry | ||
| fc5d26e | What are the thorns really telling her? It's why she won't let us see them, why she clings to them--or they cling to her--as though she got herself buried in a bramble thicket and she can't get out and we can't get in to free her. | tangled thorns words | Patricia A. McKillip | |
| 1be27e5 | There was the gaudy patch of sunflowers beside the west gate of the palace of the Prince of Ombria, that did nothing all day long but turn their golden-haired, thousand-eyed faces to follow the sun. | enchanted-heart imagery page-15 | Patricia A. McKillip | |
| 26d2f3c | Never underestimate the power of the human mind to believe what it wants to believe, no matter the conflicting evidence. | Brian Herbert | ||
| a7547bb | Look inside yourself and you can see the universe. | Brian Herbert | ||
| 0c1eb6c | Bradley is one of the few basketball players who have ever been appreciatively cheered by a disinterested away-from-home crowd while warming up. This curious event occurred last March, just before Princeton eliminated the Virginia Military Institute, the year's Southern Conference champion, from the NCAA championships. The game was played in Philadelphia and was the last of a tripleheader. The people there were worn out, because most of the.. | hard-work practice | John McPhee | |
| 526be76 | Any school for free citizens must begin by teaching distrust, not trust. It must teach questioning, not acceptance of stock answers. | teaching | Brian Herbert | |
| ee7e5cb | Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power . . . all mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is "Thou shalt not question!" But we do anyway. We break that commandment as a matter of course. The work.. | Brian Herbert | ||
| b6c541c | Court games aren't fair. They don't judge men by their worth, and they aren't about what's just. Guilty men can hold power their whole lives and be wept for when they pass. Innocent men can be spent like coins because it's convenient. You don't have to have sinned for them to ruin you. If your destruction is useful to them, you'll be destroyed. | justice morality politics | Daniel Abraham | |
| 912db6f | Every nation ends and every empire. Every baby born was going to die, given enough time. If being fated for destruction were enough to take the joy out of things, we'd slaughter children fresh from the womb. But we don't. We wrap them in warm cloth and we sing to them and feed them milk as if it might all go on forever. | Daniel Abraham | ||
| 5dce732 | Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese -toasted, mostly | cheese marooned pirates | Robert Louis Stevenson | |
| a6c3323 | she can remember everyone admiring a rare kind of evening they spoke of as something they ought to save from oblivion to describe to their children later. And that for her part she would have had it hidden, had that late summer evening buried and burned to ashes. | Marguerite Duras | ||
| 76018e7 | Je sais que ce ne sont pas les vetements qui font les femmes plus ou moins belles ni les soins de beaute, ni les prix des onguents, ni la rarete, le prix des atours. Je sais que le probleme est ailleurs. Je ne sais pas ou il est. | Marguerite Duras | ||
| 7027b0b | Il faudrait prevenir les gens de ces choses-la. Leur apprendre que l'immortalite est mortelle, qu'elle peut mourir, que c'est arrive, que cela arrive encore. | Marguerite Duras | ||
| 009a4d8 | Nunca he escrito, creyendo hacerlo, nunca he amado, creyendo amar, nunca he hecho nada salvo esperar delante de la puerta cerrada. | Marguerite Duras | ||
| 1f21f49 | Que la vida es inmortal mientras se vive, mientras se esta con vida. Que la inmortalidad no es una cuestion de mas o menos tiempo, que no es una cuestion de inmortalidad, que es una cuestion de otra cosa que permanece ignorada. Que es tan falso decir que carece de principio y de fin como decir que empieza y termina en la vida del alma desde el momento en que participa del alma y de la prosecucion del viento. Mirad las arenas muertas del des.. | life-lessons | Marguerite Duras | |
| b03b6ff | You always know what to do, you always know exactly what to do, you always do exactly what's right for you, and the rest of the world can go hang.. | William Goldman | ||
| 9b1d838 | He nodded, took a step away. "I'll send for you soon. Believe me." "Would my Westley ever lie?" He took another step. "I'm late. I must go. I hate it but I must. The ship sails soon and London is far." "I understand." He reached out with his right hand. Buttercup found it very hard to breathe. "Good-by." She managed to raise her right hand to his. They shook. "Good-by," he said again. She made a little nod. He took a third step, not turning.. | William Goldman | ||
| 05f3c5b | This was not before doctors, but in Turkey they hadn't gotten around to claiming the bone business yet; milkmen still were in charge of bones, the logic being that since milk was so good for bones, who would know more about borken bones than a milkman? | William Goldman |