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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2a5a816 | It is the contention of Mr Norrell of Hanover-square that everything belonging to John Uskglass must be shaken out of modern magic, as one would shake moths and dust out of an old coat. What does he imagine he will have left? If you get rid of John Uskglass you will be left holding the empty air. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 093da30 | Beware Stephen! There will probably be a magical combat of some sort. I daresay I shall have to take on different forms - cockatrice, raw head and bloody bones, rains of fire, etc., etc. You may wish to stand back a little! | magic transformation | Susanna Clarke | |
| 8276251 | perhaps mortals are not formed for fairy bliss? | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 608623f | Well, Henry, you can cease frowning at me. If I am a magician, I am a very indifferent one. Other adepts summon up fairy-spirits and long-dead kings. I appear to have conjured the spirit of a banker. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 4a67095 | He thought he stood upon an English hillside. Rain was falling; it twisted in the air like grey ghosts. Rain fell upon him and he grew thin as rain. Rain washed away thought, washed away memory, all the good and the bad. He no longer knew his name. Everything was washed away like mud from a stone. Rain filled him up with thoughts and memories of its own. Silver lines of water covered the hillside, like intricate lace, like the veins of an a.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 64483b1 | It seemed off that anyone could live behind such a high hedge of thorns, and he began to think it would be no great surprize to discover that Mr. Wyvern had been asleep for a hundred years or so. 'Well, I shall not mind that so much,' he thought, 'so long as I am not expected to kiss him. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 6df4e9d | Mr. Honeyfoot did not propose going quite so far --indeed he did not wish to go far at all because it was winter and the roads where very shocking. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| b95bc32 | How is a magician to exist without books? Let someone explain to me. It is like asking a politician to achieve high office without the benefit of bribes or patronage. | 2004 books bribery corruption jonathan-strange magic patronage politicians | Susanna Clarke | |
| 9ecdce4 | I have no cause to love Mr. Norrell- far from it. But I know this about him: he is a magician first and everything else second- and Jonathan is the same. Books and magic are all either of them really care about. | magic reading | Susanna Clarke | |
| 1bffb20 | And I hope that all my readers are acquainted with an old English Cathedral town or I fear the significance of Mr Norrell's chusing that particular place will be lost upon them. They must understand that in an old Cathedral town the great old church is not one building among many; it is the building - different from all others in scale, beauty, and solemnity. Even in modern times when an old Cathedral town may have provided itself with all .. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 980b3c9 | Fit in where you don't: make your own space..be different..don't give in. Exist somewhere you're not suppose to, or where you don't want to. Be your own men; do what you want, and don't hurt anybdoy | Rick Bass | ||
| 8679e8e | At the Sound of the Gunshot, Leave A Message That's what my friend spoke into his grim machine the winter he first went mad as we both did in our thirties with still no hope of revenue, gravely inking our poems on pages held fast by gyres the color of lead. Godless, our minds did monster us, left us bobbing as in a swamp until we sank. His eyes were burn holes in a swollen face. His breath was a venom he drank deep of. He called his .. | Mary Karr | ||
| 8e5cab3 | A pool game mixes ritual with geometry. | Mary Karr | ||
| 0fc007c | Your mother rolls her eyes at the cat lapping grapefruit juice, says, "Everything that comes into this house is crazy - whether we choose them for that or they get that way, I don't know." | Mary Karr | ||
| 704aabd | None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one. | Mary Karr | ||
| 5f26581 | Real You is all you have, and all other paths are false. And in the best case, Real You is so happy to finally be recognized, it rewards you with Originality. | Mary Karr | ||
| d1a5f85 | One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. | Mary Karr | ||
| d4aa65c | I wish you always the joyous summer you deserve and blame you not for fleeing the stark winter you saw in me. -Stanton Horne, Lord Wyndham (in his letter to Lady Alicia) | Celeste Bradley | ||
| 2d89e4f | I read once that despair... is when you are no longer able to sustain, even for the briefest moment, the notion that all will be well in the end. | Celeste Bradley | ||
| 3c9a8fb | Without the heavy set aristocratic man snoring away on his side of the bed, without the fresh-eyed child whose hair ribbon needs retying; without the conversation at meals and the hearty appetites and getting dressed for church on time; without the tears of laughter or the worry about making both ends meet, the unpaid bills, the layoffs, both seasonal and unexpected; without the toys that have to picked up lest somebody trip over them, and .. | William Maxwell | ||
| 378b2dc | What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory - meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion - is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. | William Maxwell | ||
| 26d19bf | I hold the biscuits in front of his face and he stands up. "What do I have to do?" he says. "Nothing," I say. "They're for you." "Are they poisoned?" he says. "No," I say. "Eat one," he says. So I do. "Probably the others are poisoned," he says. "Eat a fraction of each." I eat a corner off each biscuit. He looks at the reminders suspiciously, then sniffs them. "I'm not sure it's worth it," he says. "How I wish you'd never come. Perhaps you'.. | doubt humor paranoia poisoning | George Saunders | |
| cb146db | His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his cu.. | George Saunders | ||
| d67d656 | Kissing him last night at the pep rally had been like kissing an underpass. | humor similes | George Saunders | |
| 03d001f | Don't think of yourself as a surrogate mule, think of yourself as an entrepreneur of the physical. | labour page-129 | George Saunders | |
| c7ff9f8 | The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imaging the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of .. | George Saunders | ||
| af20037 | A bad thing happened to you kids, Dad said. But it could have been worse. So much worse, Mom said. But because of you kids, Dad said, it wasn't. You did so good, Mom said. Did beautiful, Dad said. | children trauma | George Saunders | |
| 0c37669 | She was a large, boneless woman who draped herself like an old blanket over the chairs of the apartment, staring for hours with her gray eyes at ghosts, figments, recollections, and dust caught in oblique sunbeams, her arms streaked and pocked like relief maps of vast planets, her massive calves stuffed like forcemeat into lung-colored support hose. She was quixotically vain about her appearance and spent an hour each morning making up her .. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 485cac3 | Fate always gives you two choices, Scorpio George once said: the one you should take, and the one you do. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 86e321c | If you could be happy, really happy, for just a while, but you knew from the start that it would end in sadness, and bring pain afterwards, would you choose to have that happiness or would you avoid it? | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| f4e529d | Fanaticism is the opposite of love,' I said, recalling one of Khaderbhai's lectures. A wise man once told me--he's a Muslim, by the way--that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a rational, rea.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| c9165a7 | What dream, what hope, what despair drives us to the things we do, just to desert us when the deed is done? What hollow things are they, motive and reason, born at night to fade so quickly in the sunlight of consequence? What we do in life lives on inside us, long after ambition and fear lie frosted and opaqued on forgotten shores. What we do in life, more than what we think or say, is what we are. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| ab2c50a | If you get in tune with the tendency field, through expanding and exploring the set of positive characteristics within yourself, the tendency field responds with constant energy, and affirmations. If you work against the tendency field, by being negative, unfair, unloving, and unconscious of the truth, you weaken your connection to the tendency field, and you experience existential dread, no matter how rich or famous or powerful you are. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| e6f9247 | The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| d298f85 | Time, too, will die, just as we do, when the universe dies, and is born again. Time's a living thing, just as we are, with birth, longevity, and extinction. Time has a heartbeat, but it isn't ours, no matter how much of ourselves we sacrifice to it. We don't need Time. Time needs us. Even Time loves company. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 5423668 | There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor. -- Abdullah | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 575bfd4 | I know how hard it is to find the line between helping someone out, and helping someone in. I know that all suffer and die inside, again and again, from the addiction of one. And I know that sometimes, if love doesn't harden itself, love doesn't survive at all. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 54cd6d5 | Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share. But the past for every one of us is a desert island. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| ee4a4c1 | Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| b5a4bed | Every human heartbeat, he's said many times, is a universe of possibilities. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| f305635 | Love the truth that you find in the hearts of others. Always listen to the voice of love in your own heart | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 0bf90a5 | The wonder isn't that love finds us, as strange and fated and mystical as that is. The wonder is that even when we never find it, even when love waits in the wings of dream too long, even when love doesn't knock on the door, or leave messages, or put flowers in our hands, so many of us never stop believing in love. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 72d68bf | Mumbai is the sweet, sweaty smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. It's the smell of Gods, demons, empires, and civilizations in resurrection and decay. Its the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the island city, and the blood metal smell of machines. It smells of the stir and sleep and the waste of sixty million animals, more than half of t.. | beautiful city colour empire hate hope human love mumbai shantaram sleep smell-sea sweat sweet | Gregory David Roberts | |
| 372c7aa | I'd lost the mark on the psychic map that says 'You Are Here'. | Gregory David Roberts |