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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c1b6cf6 | The extinction of all reality is a concept no resignation can encompass. Until annihilation comes. And all grand ideas are seen for what they are. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| c34ee36 | You think God looks out for people?...I do. Way the world is. Somebody can wake up and sneeze somewhere in Arkansas or some damn place and before you're done there's wars and ruination and all hell. You don't know what's goin to happen. I'd say He's just about go to. I don't believe we'd make it a day otherwise. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 3e5572d | They rode for days through the rain and they rode through rain and hail and rain again. In that gray storm light they crossed a flooded plain with the footed shapes of the horses reflected in the water among clouds and mountains and the riders slumped forward and rightly skeptic of the shimmering cities on the distant shore of that sea whereon they trod miraculous. They climbed up through rolling grasslands where small birds shied away chit.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| a421205 | And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His .. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 548383c | I've lot a lot of friends over these last few years. Not all of em older than me neither. One of the things you realize about gettin older is that no everbody is goin to get older with you. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| f9c8968 | The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| ccb0bfc | It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond fell away on every side. It's snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 4692476 | Stars were falling across the sky myriad and random, speeding along brief vectors from their origins in night to their destinies in dust and nothingness. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| b506f8b | The sun was just down and to the west lay reefs of bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some great fire at the earth's end. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 382ca7d | Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 9b2d62f | She said that these were things all women knew yet seldom spoke of. Lastly she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all. | why-girls-like-bad-boys women-s-desire-for-protection | Cormac McCarthy | |
| ac4dfac | In my father's last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent. | father government helpless helplessness impotence impotent law letter life responsibility streets willing willingness world | Cormac McCarthy | |
| d02362e | That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 9384833 | Your old man called me. He wanted you to call home. People in hell want ice water. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| f8609fe | When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood's alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 9e796cf | When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 380b7b5 | In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure, death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting. | growing-up life-lessons wishful-thinking | Cormac McCarthy | |
| ca517bb | The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad's pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop. A dextrocardiac, said the smiling doctor. Your heart's in the right place. Weathershrunk and loveless. The skin drawn and split like an overripe fruit. | cellular heart life loveless nature overripe pump warfare | Cormac McCarthy | |
| b53bace | Do you think God knows what's happenin? I expect he does. You think he can stop it? No. I dont. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 8201406 | a bad map is worse than no map at all for it engendered in the traveler a false confidence and might easily cause him to set aside these instincts which would otherwise guide him if he would but place himself in their care. He said that to follow a false map was to invite disaster. He gestured at the sketching in the dirt. As if to invite them to behold its futility. The second man on the bench nodded his agreement in this and said that the.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| d8d034a | That guy in the corner. Never tells the truth, as a matter of principle. Why answer a question, he says, if you can tell a good story instead? | storytelling | Pete McCarthy | |
| 85de538 | We had found nothing, and had been lost several times already in one morning, so this was shaping up into a top travel experience. | travel travel-writing | Pete McCarthy | |
| 448affb | You can't just close your eyes and hope everything turns out all right. That's a fine strategy for jumping out of an airplane, but it's no way to conduct your life. In order to get anywhere you must first know where it is you want to go. Then you can figure out how to get there. | Mike Greenberg | ||
| cb91342 | FAUSTUS. To have fooled the philosopher. MAGUS. One finds, in my profession, sir, the greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection. FAUSTUS. One finds the same in mine. | David Mamet | ||
| 5c8993c | I pray you indulge me for a space, for I am going to set out on a speech which may have some duration, but whose theme may be gleaned from its opening phrase: how dare you. | relationships | David Mamet | |
| d534c2d | How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. -Annie Dillard | habit hygge lives | Louisa Thomsen Brits | |
| f4df69e | We still & always want waking. | Annie Dillard | ||
| dc053f7 | An Eskimo shaman said, "Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls"." | Annie Dillard | ||
| 8091983 | I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the ear.. | death generations mortality time | Annie Dillard | |
| 4fc767e | Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world. | life | Annie Dillard | |
| 60b729b | I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt'ring eye and say, "Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?" The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his.. | beauty belief consciousness creation curiosity disbelief energy enoughness epiphany exploration exultant faith fate fearless fire free freedom gaps god grace growth hallelujah humility illumination intricacy joy joyful joyfulness life-force light living-in-the-present-moment mindfulness multiplicity mystery nature philosopher-s-stone philosophy poem poet poetry power praise prayer prayers praying religion religious-diversity science seeing seeking soul spirit stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it tolerance walking watching wonder | Annie Dillard | |
| 2073057 | The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. | Annie Dillard | ||
| e91ade3 | Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. | memory writing | Annie Dillard | |
| c8fbdb6 | The silence is not suppression; instead, it is all there is. | Annie Dillard | ||
| af334c6 | In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that. | nature | Annie Dillard | |
| 1658adf | You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without god. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials. | religion spirituality | Annie Dillard | |
| 335b23d | It tastes like water spiked with strange. | taste | Mary Roach | |
| ab710c1 | Kinsey wanted Dellenback to film his own staff. There are three ways to read that sentence, all of them true. | Mary Roach | ||
| bc2c05e | Viagra isn't the only drug being prescribed off-label for women with arousal problems. Los Angeles urologist Jennifer Berman told me some doctors are prescribing low doses of Ritalin. Drugs like Ritalin improve a person's focus, so it stands to reason that it would make it easier to stay attuned to subtle changes taking place in one's body. 'It enables a woman to focus o the task at hand,' said Berman, managing, though surely not intending,.. | sex sexuality | Mary Roach | |
| ccc5f53 | I will tell you sincerely and without exaggeration that the best part of lunch today at the NASA Ames cafeteria is the urine. It is clear and sweet, though not in the way mountain streams are said to be clear and sweet. More in the way of Karo syrup. The urine has been desalinated by osmotic pressure. Basically it swapped molecules with a concentrated sugar solution. Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and .. | nasa space-travel urine | Mary Roach | |
| 76f7db1 | US government button specifications run to twenty-two pages. This fact on its own yields a sense of what it is like to design garments for the Army. | humour mary-roach military science | Mary Roach | |
| 50ef344 | The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. | Mary Roach | ||
| 55fc476 | Entomologists have a name for young flies, but it is an ugly name, an insult. Let's not use the word "maggot." Let's use a pretty word. Let's use "hacienda." | Mary Roach | ||
| 995e0df | Had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers. | canary knickers | P.G. Wodehouse |