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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f68f9a7 | Where most people live, most of us, imagining it to be the real sunlit world when it is only a cave lit by the flickering fires of illusion. | E.L. Doctorow | ||
| ca529a8 | I was appalled that so meaningless a person would dare such effrontery. | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| 812d037 | I want that Easter Ham. Where's my Thanksgiving Turkey?" Miss Trixie snarled" | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| bf2f191 | Mother doesn't cook, Ignatius said dogmatically, She burns. | humor motherhood womanhood | John Kennedy Toole | |
| 36736bc | Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the death penalty. I doubt whether you would know that St. Cassian of Imola was stabbed to death by his students with their styli. His death, a martyr's honorable one, made him a patron saint of teachers. Pray to him, you deluded fool, you "anyone for tennis?" golf-playing, cocktail-quaffing pseudo-pedant, for you do indeed need a heavenly patron. Although your days are numbered.. | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| cc56933 | In other words, you want to become totally bourgeois. You people have all been brainwashed. I imagine that you'd like to become a success or something equally vile. | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| 66fe6b3 | Don't let not knowing what to do prevent you from doing anything at all | Victoria Alexander | ||
| 07b676b | They say the dead can't speak, but they can! The people in this book died over sixty years ago, in the middle of the ocean, with no one around them for miles, but they still speak to you. They still send us messages--about love and courage and death! That's what history is, and science, and art. That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about l.. | Connie Willis | ||
| 7e31165 | It is a temporal universal that people never appreciate their own time, especially transportation. Twentieth-Century contemps complained about cancelled flights and gasoline prices, Eighteenth-Century contemps complained about muddy roads and highwaymen. No doubt Professor Peddick's Greeks complained about recalcitrant horses and chariot wheels falling off. | Connie Willis | ||
| 51c2b9b | The language should be accorded just the same dignity and respect as those other standards that science was then also defining. | Simon Winchester | ||
| 01f00c3 | His life was merely a slow-moving tragedy, an act of steady dying conducted before everyone's eyes. | Simon Winchester | ||
| faccd7a | One newcomer, asked why he had killed his wife and children, told the superintendent: "I don't know why I am telling you all of this. It's none of your business As a matter of fact it was none of the judge's business either. It was a purely family affair." | Simon Winchester | ||
| b886e1d | In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life...Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination - making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish." (161)" | Thomas Cahill | ||
| eb29e03 | There are, no doubt, lessons here for the contemporary reader. The changing character of the native population, brought about through unremarked pressures on porous borders; the creation of an increasingly unwieldy and rigid bureaucracy, whose own survival becomes its overriding goal; the despising of the military and the avoidance of its service by established families, while its offices present unprecedented opportunity for marginal men t.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| a83b152 | The Irish innovation was to make all confession a completely private affair between penitent and priest - and to make it as repeatable as necessary. (In fact, repetition was encouraged on the theory that, oh well, everyone pretty much sinned just about all the time.) | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 95d4fbc | It's said that 'power corrupts,' but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable. | David Brin | ||
| 01785f1 | Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as 'enlightenment. | enlightenment | David Brin | |
| b4cca1f | Information is not like money or any other commodity. The cracks that it can slip through are almost infinitely small, and it can be duplicated at almost zero cost. Soon information will be like air, like the weather, and as easy to control. | David Brin | ||
| cfba782 | I'd urge you to try German Riesling because it's delicious, but I fear you'll be more impressed if I tell you it's cutting-edge. That, after all, is what we want to know-- what's now and happening. (Do you really think clunky square-toed shoes make your feet look better than those with slimming, tapered toes? You just wear them because that's what fashion dictates, you slut.) | humor wine | Jay McInerney | |
| 5143ff1 | You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn't much time left over for emotion recollected in tranquillity. | literature writing | Jay McInerney | |
| 5f7bd6f | One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief. | Colum McCann | ||
| d411ff7 | There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it's the last we'll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times. | Colum McCann | ||
| 02fd029 | And there are moments that I would like to know what might have happened if it hadn't happened, and why it happened the way it did, and what it might have taken to prevent it from happening. | what-if | Colum McCann | |
| b92ebaf | The tightrope walk was an act of creation that seemed to stand in direct defiance to the act of destruction twenty-seven years later. About Let the Great World Spin | Colum McCann | ||
| b528ad7 | Goodness is more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. | Colum McCann | ||
| 11d6d1a | She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried. | Colum McCann | ||
| b59320d | The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth. The person we know at first, [she thinks] is not the one we know at last. | Colum McCann | ||
| 9a3ae88 | Some days he wishes that he could simply empty the chambers of the men, fill the halls instead with women: the short sharp shock of three thousand two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son's bed sheets by hand. The ones who kept an extra teacup at the end of the table, in case of miracles. The elegant ones, the angry ones, the clever.. | Colum McCann | ||
| 870e5eb | Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar. | conclusions food red-wine | Colum McCann | |
| e29d828 | A single man, he said he loved women but preferred engines. | Colum McCann | ||
| 4c5550d | The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly. | Colum McCann | ||
| e9c1692 | Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get. | Colum McCann | ||
| 53eda94 | Childhood does not exist to serve the national economy. In a healthy nation, it should be the other way around. | Jonathan Kozol | ||
| 2d22f2a | Still, I think it grieves the heart of God when human beings created in His image treat other human beings like filthy rags. | Jonathan Kozol | ||
| d6bdbb8 | Jesus commanded his followers to clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, and care for the sick. Making health care available to all seems like a no-brainer, Jesus-wise, among the most Christian projects a president, or a nation, could possible undertake. | Dan Savage | ||
| 9a454f0 | I've missed pancakes. But I'll miss being married to you more. | Molly McAdams | ||
| 1de7a8c | I felt like Elena from Vampire Diaries. She has two insanely hot men who are in love with her and would do anything for her. One of which, she would give almost everything to be with, and the other she continues to push away, even though she can't ever actually stay away, so she won't have to admit she was in love with him too. At least my guys weren't brothers. | Molly McAdams | ||
| 543894a | Perhaps the price of comfort is that life passes more rapidly. But for anyone who has lived in uneasiness, even for a short, memorable duration, it's a trade-off that will gladly be made. | life | Arthur Nersesian | |
| e081c43 | How the hell did I get myself involved with this broad? It's like I'm Lassie, she's Timmy, and every day is a new well. | Sandra Balzo | ||
| 7483e25 | As the components of your life are stripped away, after all the ambitions and hopes vaporize, you reach a self-reflective starkness-- the repetitious plucking of a single overwound string. | Arthur Nersesian | ||
| 096f5a9 | Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit. | Alexandra Robbins | ||
| 3c09c85 | When a child sees herself through the prism of her peer group, the resulting self image can be distorted. | peer-pressure popularity | Alexandra Robbins | |
| e3f4b28 | Conformity is not an admirable trait. Conformity is a copout. It threatens self-awareness. It can lead groups to enforce rigid and arbitrary rules. | Alexandra Robbins | ||
| 8faad93 | You and I are so much the same... You have so many layers, that you can peel away a few, and everyone's so shocked or impressed that you're baring your soul, while to you it's nothing, because you know you've twenty more layers to go... ... But we're the ones that are most scared, and need the most love. | Craig Thompson |