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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b03314f | The bell still rings for all who truly believe | christmas | Chris Van Allsburg | |
| 97a081e | Of course,' I said, 'you know her so much better than I ever did.' In some ways,' he said gloomily, and I knew he was thinking of the very ways in which I had known her the best. | Graham Greene | ||
| 77ccbd6 | I am late,' she said, 'I know that I am late. So many little things have to be done when you are alone, and I am not yet accustomed to being alone,' she added with a pretty little sob which reminded me of a cut-glass Victorian tear-bottle. She took off thick winter gloves with a wringing gesture which made me think of handkerchiefs wet with grief, and her hands looked suddenly small and useless and vulnerable. | Graham Greene | ||
| 78b89ae | I was an only child. It's a great disadvantage being an only child. | Graham Greene | ||
| c504c82 | Life goes on. It doesn't go on. Yes, yes, I know, all we want in the end, we living, breathing creatures (am I still one of them?) is life. All we want to believe in is the persistence and vitality of life. Faced with the choice between death and the merest hint of life, what scrap, what token wouldn't we cling to in order to keep that belief? A leaf? A single moist, green leaf? That will do, that will be enough. | Graham Swift | ||
| 4610992 | It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too. | pride | Graham Greene | |
| 3414688 | She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there. | existentialism fear-of-death fiction play psychology script | Graham Greene | |
| a675ab9 | The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them rather than be saved alone? | Graham Greene | ||
| 3115186 | Politics in Turkey are taken more seriously than they are at home. It was only quite recently that they executed a Prime Minister. We dream of it, but they act. | Graham Greene | ||
| d7ad7c8 | Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men. | don-quixote flying travel | Graham Greene | |
| 650511d | The pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of a disappointing life. | Graham Greene | ||
| f0090cf | Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures. | sex | Graham Greene | |
| bb5b3c7 | What I've done is far worse than murder - that's an act, a blow, a stab, a shot: it's over and done, but I'm carrying my corruption around with me. It's the coating of my stomach.' He threw her wrists aside like seeds towards the stony floor. 'Never pretend I haven't shown my love. | Graham Greene | ||
| d1794e8 | It seemed after all that one never really missed a thing. To be a human being one had to drink the cup. If one were lucky on one day, or cowardly on another, it was presented on a third occasion. | Graham Greene | ||
| e982d7d | That was the worst period of all: it is my profession to imagine, to think in images: fifty times through the day, and immediately I woke during the night, a curtain would rise and the play would begin: always the same play, Sarah making love, Sarah with X, doing the same things that we had done together, Sarah kissing in her own particular way, arching herself in the act of sex and uttering that cry like pain, Sarah in abandonment. I would.. | love | Graham Greene | |
| 7df145d | Everyone gets so worried about the people who are still living when the people who are really hurting are the dead ones. People like Grandma and Graham.They don't exist anymore. There is nothing worse than that | hurting living | Matthew Green | |
| 17f6581 | They had the comfort of not learning from experience. | Graham Greene | ||
| fca1444 | What are others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being? | sneering | Graham Greene | |
| 85b617a | I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of love. Wouldn't he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn't he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even suc.. | Graham Greene | ||
| f98276e | I wouldn't like to be cremated', she said. 'You'd prefer worms?' 'Yes, I would. | Graham Greene | ||
| 0ad71d4 | A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who -- when he has been seriously noted at all -- has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, .. | Graham Greene | ||
| b696016 | I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest. | Graham Greene | ||
| 3f0a2d5 | it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress. | Graham Greene | ||
| 0caff4b | You'd taken my disbelief into Your love, keeping them to show me later, so that we could both laugh. | Graham Greene | ||
| d72b6e6 | There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks. | Graham Greene | ||
| 92565c9 | The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. | Graham Greene | ||
| 1e4b7c1 | He put his mouth on her and kissed her on the cheek; he was afraid of the mouth-thoughts travel too easily from lip to lip. | Graham Greene | ||
| edc00ab | Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God. | Graham Greene | ||
| 9516d52 | The Emperor tells us that civilization will only achieve perfection when the last stone of the last church falls upon the last priest. | Graham McNeill | ||
| b995b22 | That's because they don't know,' said Tyburn. 'It's like economics. Everybody's got a theory, and some people make it their religion. | religion | Ben Aaronovitch | |
| 660b0c3 | As Conan the Barbarian famously said, "That which does not kill us does not kill us." | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 3a4e787 | In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| df95f2b | When the Treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812, the British, in time-honoured fashion, abandoned their allies. Who were subsequently wiped out by the Americans along with any other tribes that happened to be in the same general vicinity - even those that had actually been allied with the US government during the war. It's exactly this sort of thing, of course, which gives colonialism a bad name. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| ec5e578 | Five hundred years ago the notoriously savvy Henry VIII discovered an elegant way to solve both his theological problems and his personal liquidity crisis - he dissolved the monasteries and nicked all their land. Since the principle of any rich person who wants to stay rich is, never give anything away unless you absolutely have to, the land has stayed with Crown ever since. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 1880df8 | If you overdo it, there are consequences. What kind of consequences? Strokes, brain hemorrhages, aneurysms... How do you know when you have overdone it? When you have a stroke, brain hemorrhage or an aneurysm. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 1011f58 | A major investigation, once it gets underway, is as exciting as watching reruns of Big Brother, although possibly involving less sex and violence. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| a5f7236 | I think you're going to find Marcus Aurelius particularly useful.' 'For what?' I asked. Nightingale hesitated. 'Quoting, mainly,' he said. 'And thus maintaining an air of erudition and authority. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 26a8f3d | There's science and there's science, is all I'm saying. Where humans are the subjects, it's mostly not science | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 2e4e5b9 | In 2004, Jacques Derrida said that a change was under way. Torture damages the inflicter as well as the inflicted. It's no coincidence that one of the Abu Ghraib torturers came to the military directly from a job as a chicken processor. It might be slow, Derrida said, but eventually the spectacle of our abuse of animals will be intolerable to our sense of who we are. | abuse-of-animals damage jacques-derrida sense-of-being torture | Karen Joy Fowler | |
| 0369d35 | My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 609169a | who knows you better than your own brother? | family siblings | Karen Joy Fowler | |
| b1c691e | Dean coughed helpfully. Somewhere in the cough was the word "persuasion." He was throwing Mo a lifeline. Mo preferred to go down. "I haven't actually read any Austen. I'm more into mysteries, crime fiction, courtroom stuff." This was disappointing, but not damning. On the other hand it was a failing; on the other, manfully owned up to. If only Mo had stopped there. "I don't read much women's stuff. I like a good plot," he said. Prudie finis.. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 099f5d3 | Life is all arrivals and departures. | departures life | Karen Joy Fowler | |
| e4b4cdc | So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came. | meaning time | Iris Murdoch |