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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 92b0f89 | But there are no men here," said Mrs. Wilkins, "so how can it be improper? Have you noticed," she inquired of Mrs. Fisher, who endeavoured to pretend she did not hear, "How difficult it is to be improper without men?" | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| 582af08 | He had no idea that he never went out of the house without her blessing going with him too, hovering, like a little echo of finished love, round that once dear head | love prayer silent-love | Elizabeth von Arnim | |
| aa26bdd | Always being there was the essential secret for a wife. | wife wifely-duty | Elizabeth von Arnim | |
| 6a905c4 | For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die. | escape fear hope london loneliness solitude soul spirit | Elizabeth von Arnim | |
| 233dc72 | In heaven's name be a man, sir! Your pitiful whining sickens me! | Alan Moore | ||
| 1104cd2 | It wasn't so much all the sex that robbed me of my moral bearings, but all the narcotics. I must say, there's something about opium that goes very well with lesbianism. | sex | Alan Moore | |
| c7e7953 | Some things are hard to imagine. Can you conceive of excessive contentment, for example? Or an over pleasant evening? Too much happiness? | happiness pessimism | Alan Moore | |
| 2da89c2 | The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V. | Alan Moore | ||
| c4108e5 | Okay. There it is. I dressed up. As an owl. And fought crime. Perhaps you begin to see why I half expect this summary of my career to raise more laughs than poor cuckolded Moe Vernon with his foam teats and his Wagner could ever hoped to have done. | Alan Moore | ||
| 0cd8941 | Invoke not reason. In the end it is too small a deity. | Alan Moore | ||
| 1902602 | Not thou alone, but all humanity doth in its progress fable emulate. Whence came thy rocket-ships and submarine if not from Nautilus, from Cavorite? Your trustiest companions since the cave, we apparitions guided mankind's tread, our planet, unseen counterpart to thine, as permanent, as ven'rable, as true. On dream's foundation matter's mudyards rest. Two sketching hands, each one the other draws: the fantasies thou've fashioned fashion the.. | Alan Moore | ||
| 12b396f | Don't tell me they didn't have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers... and all of a sudden, nobody can think of anything to say. | Alan Moore | ||
| 59e3b38 | Bond believes we are his pawns. He thinks no-one observes his game. But I am No-One. I observe everything, and to play with Nemo is to play games with Destruction. | Alan Moore | ||
| a09f27b | Mit was fur Blodsinn sich grosse Menschen beschaftigen. | kinder | Astrid Lindgren | |
| b205f87 | Namiram, che mama e mnogo chudnovata, deto iska da si liagame vecher, kogato sme s'vsem budni, a sutrin, kogato spim, iska da stavame. | Astrid Lindgren | ||
| 222932f | Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventu.. | life | Julian Barnes | |
| a3d9b4e | poets seem able to turn bad love - selfish, shitty love - into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 4e1e5a8 | When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later ... later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more back-tracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. It's a bit like the black box .. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 15e4bed | Quantas vezes contamos a historia da nossa vida? Quantas vezes adaptamos, embelezamos, fazemos cortes matreiros? E, quanto mais a vida avanca, menos sao os que a nossa volta desafiam o nosso relato, para nos lembrar que a nossa vida nao e a nossa vida, e so a historia que contamos sobre a nossa vida. Que contamos aos outros mas -- principalmente -- a nos proprios. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 1365e9b | It is important to understand that in the modern world we prefer the replica to the original because it gives us the greater frisson. I leave that word in French because I think you understand it well that way. | Julian Barnes | ||
| a9bdc3c | Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 5378479 | I've never written a book, except my first, without at some point considering that I might die before it was completed. This is all part of the superstition, the folklore, the mania of the business, the fetishistic fuss.....Dying in the middle of a wo(rd), or three-fifths of the way through a nov(el). My friend the nov(el)ist Brian Moore used to fear this as well, though for an extra reason: "Because some bastard will come along and finish .. | Julian Barnes | ||
| ff3ab8a | Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical. | time | Julian Barnes | |
| ac85351 | If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing. | seventies sixties | Julian Barnes | |
| fd9877c | Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death. | death life | Julian Barnes | |
| 233f952 | Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck one another | sex | Julian Barnes | |
| a323fae | Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven't. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven't. Later still--at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky)--it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven't. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 88fa0c9 | Things, once gone, can't be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can't be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can't be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothing said; we may claim to forget it all; but our innermost core doesn't forget, because we have been changed forever. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 97722ae | They say time finds you out, don't they? | Julian Barnes | ||
| 8d89662 | I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. | Julian Barnes | ||
| fd0282f | and who's to say what would have been for the best? You only found out afterwards, when it was too late. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 350656b | I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life. | regret suicide | Julian Barnes | |
| 51120d2 | Am I to be a king, or just a pig?' Gustave writes in his . At nineteen, it always looks as simple as this. There is the life, and then there is the not-life; the life of ambition served, or the life of porcine failure. ... What did he learn instead? Instead he learned that life is not a choice between murdering your way to the throne or slopping back in a sty; that there are swinish kings and regal hogs; that the king may envy the pig; and.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| db15841 | First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 6ef977a | If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul. | sarcasm | Julian Barnes | |
| 2a90b8c | The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes. | movies | Pauline Kael | |
| 164aefa | Gentlemanly behavior isn't just opening doors: to make an impression, you have to be concerned over a lady's needs at least as much as your own. | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| ec37969 | I would die again for you, Lucinda," he murmured. "I don't want you to die for me. I want you to live." Pulling his face down, she kissed him. Again and again, until he kissed her back with growing passion and until his body stopped shuddering. "I love you," she whispered against his mouth, knowing he wouldn't--couldn't--say it, himself. And then he surprised her. "I love you, Lucinda," he whispered back. "I wish I could be what you want.".. | love | Suzanne Enoch | |
| b1a43d3 | Reg: Speaking of blunt, dinner is on my bill tonight, mes amis. Alex: What's the occasion? Augustus: Lady Caroline's agreed to venture out on a picnic with out intrepid hero. Kit: I don't know why you keep insisting she's smitten with me. I've barely spoken five sentences to her. Augustus: It's very simple. Reg has thrown his entire being into pleasing Caroline. She knows every nuance of his thought and character. You, however, are a myste.. | romance | Suzanne Enoch | |
| 69de3a5 | You've gone mad. What's driven you to this nonsense?" "You have," he snarled. "You, with your pretty gray eyes and your smile and the way you speak your mind. The sound of your laugh, your tears when something makes you sad." He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to imagine anyone else who had ever made him feel the way he did when he was with her. Emptiness looked back at him. There wasn't anyone else. "You're the only woman I've ever..... | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| 22ed5b0 | None of it is real, though, because reality lies in a different, more evanescent realm. These are only the names of some of the places in the archipelago of dreams. The true reality is the one you perceive around you, or that which you are fortunate enough to imagine for yourself. | reality | Christopher Priest | |
| c3abcbf | Por que le tanto ? (...) - Olhe-me e diga o que ve. O rapaz olhou-o com suspeita - Isto e algum truque ? Vejo voce. Tyrion Lannister Tyrion suspirou. - Voce e notavelmente gentil para um bastardo, Snow. O que ve e um anao. Voce tem o que ? Doze anos ? - Catorze - disse o rapaz. - Catorze, e e mais alto que alguma vez serei. Minhas pernas sao curtas e tortas, e caminho com dificuldade. Necessito de uma sela especial para nao cair do cav.. | George R.R. Martin | ||
| c076391 | but it is one thing to be clever and another to be wise. | George R.R. Martin | ||
| 495a1df | Black and white and grey, all the shades of truth. | George R.R. Martin |