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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9ba6f21 | No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin; and how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother? | George Eliot | ||
| 308c8db | Mrs. Deane was a thin-lipped woman, who made small well-considered speeches on peculiar occasions, repeating them afterwards to her husband, and asking him if she had not spoken very properly. | George Eliot | ||
| 66984fc | Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out - a fence there could serve no purpose. Their work was pointless. Years later, while I was waiting for a boat to take me across the river, I watched two Vietnamese women methodically hitting a discarded truck tire with sticks. They did it for a good long while, and wer.. | meaning uselessness | Tobias Wolff | |
| 6653959 | You felt it as a depth of ease in certain boys, their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world; that is already reserved for them. | Tobias Wolff | ||
| 49a195f | I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story. | nonfiction story writing | Tobias Wolff | |
| 70ee13e | And in my heart I despised the life I led in Seattle. I was sick of it and had no idea how to change it. I thought that in Chinook, away from Taylor and Silver, away from Marian, away from people who had already made up their minds about me, I could be different. I could introduce myself as a scholar-athlete, a boy of dignity and consequence, and without any reason to doubt me people would believe I was that boy, and thus allow me to be tha.. | Tobias Wolff | ||
| 3845a99 | He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else. | Tobias Wolff | ||
| 78429d3 | I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.' 'What it do when it pissed off?' I ast. 'Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.' 'Yeah?' I say. 'Yeah,' she say. 'It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.' 'You mean it want to be loved, j.. | Alice Walker | ||
| d84fb50 | The savage rushing of the river seemed to be inside her head, inside her body. Even when the oarswomen, their guides, were speaking to her, she had the impression she couldn't quite hear them because of the roar. Not of the river that did indeed roar, just behind them, close to the simple shelter they'd made for her, but because of an internal roar as of the sound of a massive accumulation of words, spoken all at once, but collected over a .. | river words | Alice Walker | |
| da1f1eb | subservience of any kind is death to the spirit. | Alice Walker | ||
| 46d2911 | The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries ("museums"), and not yourselves, are full." | materialism oral-tradition spirituality | Alice Walker | |
| 99202e6 | Why you like this, huh? Why you always think you have to do things your own way? I ast your mama bout it one time, while you was in jail. What she say? ast Sofia. She say you think your way as good as anybody else's. Plus, it yours. Sofia laugh. | Alice Walker | ||
| 22a52d7 | Here was this really nice guy who happened to be uber-shy... and with just a little encouragement, he was suddenly smiling and joking and having fun. Really, what had taken them so long? | Melody Carlson | ||
| 6c55b53 | I do not understand what makes mothers think they are walking-talking thermometers.But I think somewhere during the process of giving birth and changing diapers, they actually begin to belive they have this supernatural sense. | mothers supernatural | Melody Carlson | |
| f1c7adc | You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time. | Saul Bellow | ||
| dfce7b5 | It is wrong to turn a man (a subject) into a thing (an object). By means of spiritual dialogue, the I-It relationship becomes an I-Thou relationship. God comes and goes in man's soul. And men come and go in each other's souls. Sometimes they come and go in each other's beds, too. | Saul Bellow | ||
| a8ea28a | It is my childish mind that thinks people are ready to give it just because you need it. | Saul Bellow | ||
| b941cf4 | The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it -- that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 56b31d3 | Everybody pays the heart lip service, of course, but everybody is more familiar with the absence of love than with its presence and gets so used to the feeling of emptiness that it becomes "normal." You don't miss the foundation of feeling until you begin to look for your self and can't find a support in the affects for a self." | Saul Bellow | ||
| 394ff32 | Therefore we didn't talk of genuine things. | Saul Bellow | ||
| c6d5d9c | Not that life should end is so terrible in itself, but that it should end with so many disappointments in the essential. | Saul Bellow | ||
| ba4ef70 | But maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end. So that it shouldn't last forever? There may be something in this. And bliss, just the opposite, is eternal? There is no time in bliss. All the clocks were thrown out of heaven. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 1f4d6b5 | What art thou?' Nothing. That's the answer. Nothing. In the heart of hearts- Nothing! So of course you can't stand that and want to be Something, and you try. But instead of being this Something, the man puts it over on everybody instead. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 2a5eb86 | Well, don't build me up so, and you won't have to tear me down. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 38302c2 | I wish my dead days would quit bothering me and leave me alone. The bad stuff keeps coming back, and it's the worst rhythm there is. The repetition of a man's bad self, that's the worst suffering that's ever been known. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 8dc676d | Ravelstein mentioned that Keynes had married a Russian ballerina. He also explained to me that Uranus had fathered Aphrodite but that she had had no mother. She was conceived by the sea foam. He would say such things not because he thought I was ignorant of them but because he judged that I needed at a given moment to have my thoughts directed toward them. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 535413a | Yes, these business people have great energy. There's a question as to what's burned to produce it and what things we can and can't burn. | Saul Bellow | ||
| ad8dece | The more south we were, the more deep a sky it seemed, till, in the Valley of Mexico, I thought it held back an element too strong for life, and that the flamy brilliance of blue stood off this menace and sometimes, like a sheath or silk membrane, shoed the weight it held in sags. So when later he would fly high over the old craters on the plain, coaly bubbles of the underworld, dangerous red everywhere from the sun, and then coats of snow .. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 7b8d1ed | Disorder and frequent sorrow the mulch for creativity. | Chaim Potok | ||
| d91ac58 | I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book. | Chaim Potok | ||
| 64e8add | The house in which the fourteen sisters of Emilio Montez O'brien lived, radiated femininity. | Oscar Hijuelos | ||
| a70d6f8 | It was still mild when they walked home from the party, and Irene looked up at the spring stars. "How far that little candle throws its beams," she exclaimed. "So shines a good dead in a naughty world." | John Cheever | ||
| 284607e | The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old. | John Cheever | ||
| c7083dc | If the soulmate is absent there is no need for the soul | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| fcfc8ee | To avoid disappointment in art, one mustn't treat it as a career. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| cfd5f6e | i have in all honesty believed that two people with similar names must have similar characters, that an unfamiliar word - be it Turkish or foreign - must be semantically similar to a word spelt like it, that the soul of a dimpled woman must carry something of the soul of another dimpled woman i knew before, that all fat people are the same, that all poor people belong to a fraternity about which i know nothing, that there must be a link bet.. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| 4b5e7c1 | With the engine stalled, we would notice the deep silence reigning in the park around us, in the summer villa before us, in the world everywhere. We would listen enchanted to the whirring of an insect beginning vernal flight before the onset of spring, and we would know what a wondrous thing it was to be alive in a park on a spring day in Istanbul. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| 094f3d8 | Where there's a lot of money to be made, there's also a lot of blood to be spilled. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| e526f15 | Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| b90bd90 | He could sense the darkness inside him looking for an excuse to manifest itself. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| ff3b833 | For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I've spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all Istanbullus) making it my own. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| 11ae9c6 | It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten; as if it were snowing at the end of the world. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| 07eb196 | for a novel need not be full of sorrow just because its heroes are suffering. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| 366fbfc | Es algo sabido que la vida no esta predeterminada y que todas las historias son una cadena de casualidades. Pero incluso los que son conscientes de esa realidad, cuando llega cierto momento de su existencia y miran atras, llegan a la conclusion de que lo que vivieron como casualidades no fueron sino hechos inevitables. | vida | Orhan Pamuk |