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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d4fa053 | Without knowing it he drew a very pleasant picture of an affectionate, happy family who lived unpretentiously in circumstances of moderate affluence at peace with themselves and the world and undisturbed by any fear that anything might happen to affect their security. The life he described lacked neither grace nor dignity; it was healthy and normal, and through its intellectual interests not entirely material; the persons who led it were si.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| c325f28 | Can there be anything more stupendous than the [Hindu] conception that the universe has no beginning and no end, but passes everlastingly from growth to equilibrium, from equilibrium to decline, from decline to dissolution, from dissolution to growth, and so on to all eternity?" "Which presupposes belief in the transmigration of souls." "It's a belief held by two thirds of the human race." "The fact that a great many people believe somethin.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| fc3041d | He was left a good deal to himself. He had been inclined to talkativeness, but gradually he became silent. He began to think of the difference between himself and others. | introvert ostracization | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| b3d410d | The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. | lake life meaning razor-s-edge ripple river stone surface water | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 0f1b6e6 | The idealist withdrew himself, because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, and since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself with despising his fellows. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| c55a98d | For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 186684d | Then he looked beyond the ever-shifting alteration to study the stillness of her expression. He knew his camera could not capture this - that some things were only truly seen by the human eye. This was one of the images of his lifetime. He simply exposed his retina and let love burn her flickering, shimmering, absorbed face onto his soul. | love | Diane Setterfield | |
| f0ef9e2 | In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, Virginia Vidaura said, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| e8d84ad | Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 862c485 | Is it a wolf I hear, Howling his lonely communion With the unpiloted stars, Or merely the self importance and servitude In the bark of a dog? How many millenia did it take, Twisting and torturing The pride from the one To make a tool, The other? And how do we measure the distance from spirit to spirit? And who do we find to blame? | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 6e1e59a | Nothing raises the national temperature more than a VACANCY sign hanging from the colonnaded front of the Supreme Court. | supreme temperature | Christopher Buckley | |
| c68a141 | How can a young person learn whether he chose the correct way? He thinks he has a special idea, and then he discovers that he is completely inappropriate for it. | Irving Stone | ||
| 3e52f8a | Money makes the man a beast. | Irving Stone | ||
| f944c8b | No artist is normal. Who happen to be normal cannot be an artist. | Irving Stone | ||
| ef38a7f | There is beautiful you are." "No," said Marged, between a sigh and a sob. "Yes," said Owen. "No," said Marged, not so certain. "Behold," Owen said, from Solomon. "thou art fair. Thou hast dove's eyes." "Dove's eyes are small." Marged said. "Yours are so big they are my whole world," said Owen." -- | fair romance | Richard Llewellyn | |
| 537f593 | Pain is a good cleanser of the mind and therefore of the sight. Matters which seem to mean the world, in health, are found to be of no import when pain is hard upon you. | mind pain sight thinking | Richard Llewellyn | |
| a345aec | It's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it was on your side and not theirs. | wit | John Brunner | |
| 2a7ece2 | As Einstein himself pointed out. He said we're like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can't see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it's there. | Jack Finney | ||
| 2a71e8c | When somebody says to me, "I don't believe in God," my first response is, "Tell me about the God you don't believe in." Almost always, it's the God of supernatural theism." | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 08706a4 | Our images of God matter. Just as how we conceptualize God affects what we think the Christian life is about, so do our images of God. | conceptualizing god image life | Marcus J. Borg | |
| ba0e54f | But Christian illiteracy is only the first part of the crisis. Even more seriously, even for those who think they speak "Christian" fluently, the faith itself is often misunderstood and distorted by many to whom it is seemingly very familiar. They think they are speaking the language as it has always been understood, but what they mean by the words and concepts is so different from what these things have meant historically, that they would .. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| d730f94 | Long before there was discrimination against blacks, there was discrimination against white southerners. When large numbers of these country people moved north during World War II, they were aggressively excluded from neighborhoods, jobs, and homes - not because of their skin color, but their accents. | politics southerners | Ann Coulter | |
| 26e6bba | It is the responsiblity of every human to know their actions and the consequences of their actions and to ask questions and to question things when they are wrong. | Michael Francis Moore | ||
| 001f33c | The symbologist made a cryptic sign. "That remains to be seen, as the cat said who voided into the sugar bowl." | naked-lunch what-lies-beneath | Jack Vance | |
| 216c2d4 | The dead man's companions at the counter started to their feet, but halted as Voynod with great aplomb turned to face them. "Take care, you dunghill cocks! Notice the fate of your fellow! He died by the power of my magic blade, which is of inexorable metal and cuts rock and steel like butter. Behold!" And Voynod struck out at a pillar. The blade, striking an iron bracket, broke into a dozen pieces. Voynod stood non-plussed, but the bravo's .. | Jack Vance | ||
| 865f740 | It's like coming home," said Webster and he wasn't talking to the dog. "It's like you've been away for a long, long time and then you come home again. And it's so long you don't recognize the place. Don't know the furniture, don't recognize the floor plan. But you know by the feel of it that it's an old familiar place and you are glad you came." "I like it here," said. Ebenezer and he meant Webster's lap, but the man misunderstood. "Of cour.. | dogs home | Clifford D. Simak | |
| 6141bfb | From this", says Schrodinger, "I learned many things, but not religion." His favourite question was, "Sir, do you really believe that?" | John Gribbin | ||
| a40180c | And it came to me that these trees had been hardly smaller when I was yet unborn, and had stood as they stood now when I was a child playing among the cypresses and peaceful tombs of our necropolis, and that they would stand yet, drinking in the last light of the dying sun, even as now, when I had been dead as long as those who rested there. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| a32da56 | She was staring at the low ceiling, and I had the feeling that there was another Severian there, the kind and even noble Severian who existed only in Dorcas's mind. All of us, I suppose, when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| a7d7396 | We talk of strong personalities, and they are strong, until the not-every-day when we see them as we might see one woman alone in a desert, and know that all the strength we thought we knew was only courage, only her lone song echoing among the stones; and then at last when we have understood this and made up our minds to hear the song and admire its courage and its sweetness, we wait for the next note and it does not come. The last word, w.. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 1ca28c1 | It is beyond value, which means it is worthless. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| dde181a | If I had seen one miracle fail, I had witnessed another; and even a seemingly purposeless miracle is an inexhaustible source of hope, because it proves to us that since we do not understand everything, our defeats--so much more numerous than our few and empty victories--may be equally specious. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| d76faf6 | And it came to me that these trees had been hardly smaller when I was yet unborn, and had stood as they stood now when I was a child playing among the cypresses and peaceful tombs of our necropolis, and that they would stand yet, drinking in the light of the dying sun, even as now, when I had been dead as long as those who rested there. I saw how little it weighed on the scale of things whether I lived or died, though my life was precious t.. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| f2f9137 | As for human contact, I'd lost all appetite for it. Mankind has, as you may have noticed, become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid talking to each other and I'd been taking full advantage of the most recent ones. I would always send a text message rather than speak to someone on the phone. Rather than meeting with any of my friends, I would post cheerful, ironically worded status updates on Facebook, to show them al.. | human-contact | Jonathan Coe | |
| 0175981 | A woman who dreams of a good home with a man who holds for her only a poor love is putting a $50 saddle on a $20 horse. She'd be far better off single than riding with him. | Nancy E. Turner | ||
| ed77b57 | To give you an idea of my state of mind I can not do better than compare it to one of those rooms we see nowadays in which are collected and mingled the furniture of all times and countries. Our age has no impress of its own. We have impressed the seal of our time neither on our houses nor our gardens, nor on anything that is ours. On the street may be seen men who have their beards trimmed as in the time of Henry III, others who are clean-.. | Alfred De Musset | ||
| 5cc2036 | Sophie, you saw Alice's transformation." I nodded. "And the murder of my great-grandfather. Weird it showed me that when I've had so many other awful things happen directly to me," I said, beginning to tick them off on my fingers. "Elodie getting killed, having to kill Alice, escaping a burning building with the help of a ghost..." And then, because both my parents looked so deflated, I added, "Oh, and this really heinous pageboy haircut in.. | Rachel Hawkins | ||
| 9f1693d | You don't bother to memorise the literature--you learn to read and keep a shelf of books. | John Brunner | ||
| e17f2f9 | If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing. | human-rights humanity | John Brunner | |
| 4e8a1e7 | Could one have a time-release epiphany, an epiphany without realizing it had happened? Or were they always trumpeted by angels and preceded by temporary blindness, Patrick wondered, as he walked down the corridor in the wrong direction. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| 0a42d12 | If you were madly in love, you'd want me to win,' said Katherine. "'I'm not sure that's true,' said Sam. 'I think love is about equality: both of us equally happy with either result. One-sided self-sacrifice is only enabling someone else's egoism. Altruists always end up riddled with resentment, or if they make that last superhuman effort, with spiritual pride.' "'Oh,' said Katherine, 'you mean you're not going to enable my egoism.' "'Okay,.. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| d767ed0 | After less than a year together they now slept in separate rooms because Victor's snoring, and nothing else about him, kept her awake at night. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| 560dc4b | Sometimes, when he was lying in bed, a single word like 'fear' or 'infinity' flicked the roof off the house and sucked him into the night, past the stars that had been bent into bears and ploughs, and into a pure darkness where everything was annihilated except the feeling of annihilation. As the little capsule of his intelligence disintegrated, he went on feeling its burning edges, its fragmenting hull, and when the capsule flew apart he w.. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| 0c6712c | In bed by herself: adorable condition. | Elizabeth von Arnim |