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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f600c35 | Ian Fleming The CBC Interview, 1953 He doesn't use Anglo-Saxon four-letter words, "I don't like seeing them on the page." When asked why his novels are so popular in light of the dirtiness of the trade (of espionage), Fleming said, "The books have pace and plenty of action. And espionage is not regarded by the majority of the public as a dirty trade. They regard it as a rather sort of ah, ah very romantic affair... Spying has always been re.. | Ian Fleming | ||
| 0f4ab8c | What's your name?" "Bond. James Bond. What's yours?" She reflected "Rider." "What Rider?" "Honeychile." Bond smiled." | Ian Fleming | ||
| b8efa1b | Why not make it for always? | Ian Fleming | ||
| d821720 | Bond had taken her to the station and had kissed her once hard on the lips and had gone away. It hadn't been love, but a quotation had come into Bond's mind as his cab moved out of Pennsylvania station: 'Some love is fire, some love is rust. But the finest, cleanest love is lust. | lust | Ian Fleming | |
| 962db57 | These blithering women who thought they could do a man's work. Why the hell couldn't they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men's work to the men. | Ian Fleming | ||
| 6f8589b | Bond liked fast cars and he liked driving them. Most American cars bored him. ... All the fun of driving had been taken out of them with the abolition of a gear-change... All effort had been smoothed away and all of that close contact with the machine and the road that extracts skill and nerve from the European driver. | Ian Fleming | ||
| 0ddf610 | I'm getting very sorry for the Devil and his disciples such as the good Le Chiffre. The devil has a rotten time and I always like to be on the side of the underdog. We don't give the poor chap a chance...the Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography. | james-bond | Ian Fleming | |
| bec6610 | It is never so difficult to congratulate a friend on her good fortune than when that fortune appears undeserved. | P.D. James | ||
| 8091ae0 | It is doubtful whether Mrs Bennet missed the company of her second daughter, but her husband certainly did. Elizabeth had always been his favourite child. | P.D. James | ||
| ade2114 | If the screams of all earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. | P.D. James | ||
| f9572e3 | The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted. | trust | P.D. James | |
| e2116c9 | Our parents' generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best. | past remembrance | P.D. James | |
| 41c7315 | Taste your lies, Nina. | E.K. Blair | ||
| 0ae8fb4 | To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky. My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| 65ef072 | Once upon a time a boy loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering. | nicole krauss | ||
| 2bfa2dc | Put even a fool in front of the window and you'll get a Spinoza; in the end life makes window watchers of us all | Nicole Krauss | ||
| 59c906e | It took almost an hour to get to Bernard's house. Somewhere in Long Island. Beautiful trees. I'd never seen such beautiful trees. Out in the driveway, one of Bernard's nephews had slit his pants legs to the knee and was running up and down in the sunlight, watching how they caught the breeze. Inside the house, people stood around a table piled with food talking about Isaac. I knew I didn't belong there. I felt like a fool and an imposter. I.. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| b64913e | Having begun to feel, people's desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions. | feelings life | Nicole Krauss | |
| e940797 | In the months after the relationship ends, a person can seem to grow at a lightning rate, like in a nature documentary where weeks of footage is run at high speed to show a plant unfurling in seconds, but in reality the person has been growing all along, under the surface, and it is only in their new freedom, in their hair-raising aloneness, that the person can allow for these underground things to break through and unfurl themselves in the.. | self-knowledge | Nicole Krauss | |
| 8c017b2 | The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be. | humor humour travel | Bill Bryson | |
| dee6135 | The Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing that word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no--though that was the original plan. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 263e53c | Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal. | walking | Bill Bryson | |
| f0e65c0 | I HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It's where I'm from, after all. There's baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don't obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective. Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 933a802 | I remember reading once how some Stone Age Indians from the Brazilian rain forest with no knowledge or expectation of a world beyond the jungle were taken to Sao Paulo or Rio, and when they saw what it contained-the buildings, the cars, the passing airplanes-and how thoroughly at variance it was with their own simple lives, they wet themselves, lavishly and in unison. I believe I had some idea how they felt. It is such a strange contrast. W.. | modernity nature | Bill Bryson | |
| 604c484 | Whereas the food debris of the Neanderthals shows a wide variety of animal bones, suggesting that they took whatever they could find, archaeological remnants from Homo sapiens show that they sought out particular kinds of game and tracked animals seasonally. All of this strongly suggests that they possessed a linguistic system sufficiently sophisticated to deal with concepts such as: "Today let's kill some red deer. You take some big sticks.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 3fe93c8 | I stood in a Burger King and studied, with absorption, the photographs of the manager and his executive crew (reflecting on the curious fact that people who go into hamburger management always look as if their mother slept with Goofy), | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2cc8596 | Salamanders are interesting, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. | Bill Bryson | ||
| a4f7327 | Every day in every way I am getting better and better."*" | Bill Bryson | ||
| e165f4a | In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: "This Door Is Locked for No Reason." | Bill Bryson | ||
| f7e1dfe | It is often said that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work - every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career - is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language. remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few could.. | dedications enchanting four-hundred-years goodness-knows human-behavior human-behaviour joyous-possibilities plays poems possibilities power-of-language shakespeare the-soul transfixing verbal-expression william-shakespeare workings-of-the-soul | Bill Bryson | |
| e9f37d3 | The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was , written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage: Then owls and bats Cowls and twats Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods, Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry! Browning had apparently somewhere come .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 106b428 | More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is." (We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless, nonelective institution. It is an arresting fact of British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted status because .. | english humor politics | Bill Bryson | |
| 07e7327 | Victorian rigidities were such that ladies were not even allowed to blow out candles in mixed company, as that required them to pucker their lips suggestively. They could not say that they were going "to bed"--that planted too stimulating an image--but merely that they were "retiring." It became effectively impossible to discuss clothing in even a clinical sense without resort to euphemisms. Trousers became "nether integuments" or simply "i.. | modesty underwear victorian-era | Bill Bryson | |
| c6bef55 | Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, "Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings." But in fact that never occurs to them. They.. | historic-preservation travel | Bill Bryson | |
| 86ca884 | If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4df10b4 | Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so | Bill Bryson | ||
| eebf637 | Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble a.. | humor language swearing | Bill Bryson | |
| 11f4e68 | They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July. | clouds iowa july midwest skies storms weather west | Bill Bryson | |
| eb91312 | Behavior that Christians would never support in any other context suddenly becomes perfectly acceptable, even praiseworthy, simply because the state has declared that a war is under way. (That's what Voltaire meant when he said, "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.")" -- | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | ||
| 4e4ae9e | In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident. As one who speaks on religion, I constantly hear how cruel and aggressive it has been, a view that, eerily, is expressed in the same way almost every time: "Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history." I have heard this sentence recited like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and O.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 6e0a9b4 | Pascal's scientific achievements, therefore, did not give him much confidence in the human condition. When he contemplated the immensity of the universe, he was scared stiff: 'When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him wh.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 915171c | The Taliban's discrimination against women is completely opposed to the practice of the Prophet and the conduct of the first ummah. The Taliban are typically fundamentalist, however, in their highly selective vision of religion (which reflects their narrow education in some of the madrasahs of Pakistan), which perverts the faith and turns it in the opposite direction of what was intended. Like all the major faiths, Muslim fundamentalists, i.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| ae8c7d7 | It is always tempting to try to shut out the suffering that is an inescapable part of the human condition, but once it has broken through the cautionary barricades we have erected against it, we can never see the world in the same way again. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| a315aab | We have seen that, like the weather, religion "does lots of different things." To claim that it has a single, unchanging, and inherently violent essence is not accurate. Identical religious beliefs and practices have inspired diametrically opposed courses of action." | Karen Armstrong |