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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7513b51 | One shouldn't allow oneself to be intimidated by something that can be picked up and tucked under one's arm. | intimidation | Barbara Hambly | |
| 83daa99 | The music had ceased. Alex walked over to the gramophone, wound it up again, and put on more blues, a woman singing this time, gay and sad at once, like a stranded angel who had traded holiness for humanity but remembered what it used to be like to know God. | fallen-angel music singer singing | Barbara Hambly | |
| b925769 | Dragonsbane, they called him. Slayer of dragons. Or a dragon, anyway. And, he'd later found out, not such a very big one at that. | Barbara Hambly | ||
| 3593770 | Lexington wasn't a great city, like Philadelphia or New York, but around the Courthouse square, and along Main Street and Broadway, brick buildings reared two and three stories tall, and it was possible to buy almost anything: breeze-soft silks from France that came upriver from New Orleans, fine wines and cigars, pearl necklaces, and canes with ivory handles shaped like parrots or dogs'-heads or (in the case of Mary's older friend Cash Cla.. | lexington | Barbara Hambly | |
| 4ae70c6 | How could a woman who was that beautiful, who smelled that good, who had such perfectly lovely teeth and bright eyes, be so thoroughly, completely, entirely, stark raving mad?" ~ Robert Cameron" | Lynn Kurland | ||
| 53d643b | All this very plausible reasoning does not convince me, as it has not convinced the wisest of our Statesmen, that our ancestors erred in laying it down as an axiom of policy that the toleration of Irregularity is incompatible with the safety of the State. | Edwin A. Abbott | ||
| a7c4ec1 | You were mine before you were his. | Lynn Kurland | ||
| 7d06714 | Ruith?" He looked at her with a smile. "Aye, my love?" "Are you sure?" He looked at her, puzzled, for a moment, then apparently he realized what she was asking. "How could you ask?" "Because when a gel wants something very badly, she tends to want to avoid breaking her heart over the false hope of having it." His breath caught. If she hadn't known better, she would have thought he was blinking rapidly from something besides the smoke the pa.. | Lynn Kurland | ||
| 27af146 | Redundancy--inefficient by definition--serves as the antidote to confusion. | James Gleick | ||
| 4931053 | Science was constructed against a lot of nonsense, | James Gleick | ||
| a589c63 | the new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague--force, mass, motion, and even time--and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. | James Gleick | ||
| e549b64 | Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced. --JAMES BALDWIN | Jodi Picoult | ||
| ad2d749 | Nothing is more unbearable, once has it, than freedom. | James Baldwin | ||
| bf42c37 | We live in a nation of pigs and murderers. | racism-in-america | James Baldwin | |
| 4ecb50c | I don't believe there's a white man in this country, baby, who can get his dick hard, without he hear some nigger moan. | police-brutality police-officers racism-in-america | James Baldwin | |
| af06602 | We spend vast amounts of our time an emotional energy in learning how not to be natural and in eluding the trap of our own nature and it therefore becomes very difficult to know exactly what is meant when we speak of the unnatural. It is not possible to have it both ways, to use nature at one time as the final arbiter of human conduct and at another to oppose her as angrily as we do. | James Baldwin | ||
| 77cdf95 | Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the on.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 1b20dd1 | I could not discuss what had happened to me with anyone, I could not even admit it to myself; and, while I never thought about it, it remained, nevertheless, at the bottom of my mind, as still and as awful as a decomposing corpse. And it changed, it thickened, it soured the atmosphere of my mind. | James Baldwin | ||
| 1ace8a8 | he was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time. | James Baldwin | ||
| cb50d21 | On days like this," Cass said, suddenly, "I remember what it was like--I think I remember--to be young, very young." She looked up at him. "When everything, touching and tasting--everything--was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete." | James Baldwin | ||
| 830eb0d | The American idea of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American idea of masculinity. Idea may not be the precise word, for the idea of one's sexuality can only with great violence be divorced or distanced from the idea of the self. Yet something resembling this rupture has certainly occurred (and is occurring) in American life, and violence has been the American daily bread since we have heard of America. This violence, furthermore, is .. | James Baldwin | ||
| a6b7b01 | Yves did not like showers, he preferred long, scalding baths, with newspapers, cigarettes, and whiskey on a chair next to the bathtub, and with Eric nearby to talk to, to shampoo his hair, and to scrub his back. | James Baldwin | ||
| 4dcb241 | I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Savior had met in me. [...] And yet even this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me again--unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality. | James Baldwin | ||
| 90a90cc | The sons of the masters were roaming the world, looking for arms to hold them. And the arms that might have held them--could not forgive. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8e9ea3e | He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness. | James Baldwin | ||
| 97e27bc | The real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road--and the road has a trick of being the most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright--and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden. | James Baldwin | ||
| 7cc794a | James Baldwin's words haunt: "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." Are we a nation of monsters?" -- | Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | ||
| 1db7818 | We don't know enough about ourselves. I think it's better to know that you don't know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that's why so many people are so lost. | James Baldwin | ||
| 001a502 | Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him. The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight. | James Baldwin | ||
| c854d27 | We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and th spectacle we presented, two grown men, jostling each other on the wide sidewalk, and aiming the cherry-pips, as though they were spitballs, into each other's facesm must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it spra.. | love lovers paris | James Baldwin | |
| a55910f | We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body. | love romance | James Baldwin | |
| 93ca279 | The root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he does not so much had the white man as simply as want the out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children's way. The root of the white man's hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. | politics race racism | James Baldwin | |
| 6649ef2 | For, you see, he had found his center, his own center, inside him: and it showed. He wasn't anybody's nigger. And that's a crime, in this fucking free country. You're suppose to be somebody's nigger. And if you're nobody's nigger, you're a bad nigger: and that's what the cops decided when Fonny moved downtown. | James Baldwin | ||
| 902a0d1 | You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You are not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. | black-in-america history | James Baldwin | |
| bba56a6 | And I was alone, had been for a while, and might be for a while, but it no longer frightened me the way it had. I was discovering something terrifyingly simple: there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I was discovering this in the way, I suppose, that everybody does, but having tried, endlessly, to do something about it. You attach yourself to someone, or you allow someone to attach themselves to you. This person is not for you, a.. | James Baldwin | ||
| b2338ad | I remember what it was like...to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete. James Baldwin | James Baldwin | ||
| 18d1a45 | When he ran, he even loved the pain, the hurt of the running, the burning in his lungs and the spasms that sometimes gripped his calves. He loved it because he knew he could endure the pain, and even go beyond it. He had never pushed himself to the limit but he felt all this reserve strength inside of him: more than strength actually--determination. And it sang in him as he ran, his heart pumping blood joyfully through his body. | Robert Cormier | ||
| 86582ad | A: Funny about my mother. All my life, from the time I was just a little kid, I thought of her as a sad person. I mean, the way some people are tall or fat or skinny. My father always seemed the stronger one. As if he was a bright color and she was a faded color. I know it sounds crazy. T: Not at all. A: But later, when I learned the truth about our lives, I found she was still sad. But strong, too. Not faded at all. It wasn't sadness so mu.. | Robert Cormier | ||
| 58f2c95 | Sometimes I wake up at night in a panic. Wondering: What will my life be like? And sometimes I even wonder: Who am I? What am I doing here, on this planet, in this city, in this house? And it gives me the shivers, makes me panic. | Robert Cormier | ||
| 8f5c4ed | What have I done, Obie?" Obie flung his hand in the air, the gesture encompassing all the rotten things that had occur under Archie's command, at Archie's direction. The ruined kids, the capsized hopes. Renault last fall and poor Tubs Casper and all the others including even the faculty. Like Brother Eugene. "You know what you've done, Archie. I don't need to draw up a list-" "You blame me for everything, right, Obie? You and Carter and all.. | Robert Cormier | ||
| 0c94656 | Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty. | novels writing writing-philosophy | Ralph Ellison | |
| d7917f3 | It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, empha.. | propaganda | Howard Zinn | |
| 3bcaefe | I believe sometimes medical issues just happen--they're not cosmic tests; they're not retribution for all the naughty things you've done over a lifetime. It's not some moral righting of the universe. It's just something going wonky with the wiring...And I think God cries when we're in pain; he cries with us and he supports us. But I also believe he stands back and lets us sort things out. Lets the doctors do their work. Lets your body heal .. | Kate Jacobs | ||
| cf028b2 | Women do amazing, creative, wonderful things. | Kate Jacobs |