1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3007
3008
3009
3010
3011
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 416933f | The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again. You become a dog, a bird, a plant that always leans to the left. Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food in the night it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it. | grief loss love-hurts | Nicole Krauss | |
| 7358a75 | In the days after my heart attack & before I began to write again, all I could think about was dying. I'd been spared again, and only after the danger had passed did I allow my thoughts to unravel to their inevitable end. I imagined all the ways I could go. Blood clot to the brain. Infarction. Thrombosis. Pneumonia. Grand mal obstruction to the vena cava. I saw myself foaming at the mouth, writhing on the floor. I'd wake up in the night, gr.. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| 0856dc4 | The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence. | experiences loneliness misery | Nicole Krauss | |
| cc11421 | I often wonder who will be the last person to see me alive. If I had to bet, it would be on the delivery boy from the Chinese take-out. I order in four nights out of seven. Whenever he comes I make a big production of finding my wallet. He stands in the door holding the greasy bag while I wonder if this is the night I'll finish off my spring roll, climb into bed, and have a heart attack in my sleep. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| 6043a40 | The woman who later became his wife was sleeping in his bed, her face buried in the pillows and her feet crossed on top of each other like a child's. He watched her sleep and struggled to see her as she was, but what he saw instead were her muscles and bones. He saw right through the skin to where her femur connected to her tibia by way of the ligaments, to the hair web of nerves and the delicate forest of her lungs, to the abstract heart p.. | death life | Nicole Krauss | |
| 6a38dc0 | I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| 27f9eb1 | Once my father told me: When a Jew prays, he is asking God a question that has no end. Darkness fell. Rain fell. I never asked: What question? And now it's too late. Because I lost you, Tateh. One day, in the spring of 1938, on a rainy day that gave way to a break in the clouds, I lost you. You'd gone out to collect specimens for a theory you were hatching about rainfall, instinct, and butterflies. And then you were gone. We found you lying.. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| 0132c4f | There's no match for the silence of GOD. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| dd937dc | left to my own devices, I'm content to wake myself with a fart. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| 8dc8cee | You hear a sound and it's truth turning in its grave. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| f895730 | The way Misha tells it, he drove like a blind man, giving the car almost full independence to feel its way along, bumping off things, only giving the wheel a spin with the tips of this fingers when the situation verged on life threatening. | Nicole Krauss | ||
| 0ae08db | Once, at the peak of our shouting, Bird took a deep breath. At the top of his lungs, he shrieked: "I! HAVE NOT! BEEN! UNHAPPY! MY WHOLE! LIFE!" "But you're only seven," I said." | Nicole Krauss | ||
| 7fe02cb | These things are lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone taking the time to write it all down. That Litvinoff had a wife who was so devoted is, to be frank, the only reason anyone knows anything about him at all. | husband loss love wife | Nicole Krauss | |
| bdedddf | Ron Paul is crazy," the guardians of respectable opinion assured us. What they really meant was that Ron Paul defied traditional political categories and advanced positions outside the Clinton-to-Romney continuum. People whose minds have been formed in ideological prison camps for 12 years have learned to confine themselves within an approved range of possibilities. Tax me 35 percent or tax me 40 percent, but don't raise the possibility tha.. | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | ||
| e605049 | An enormous semiofficial drug-smuggling operation was established in order to improve Britain's unfavorable balance of payments with China--the direct result of the British love of tea. | china opium opium-wars tea | Tom Standage | |
| 484e1d6 | The Arabs understandably did everything they could to protect their monopoly. Coffee beans were treated before being shipped to ensure they were sterile and could not be used to seed new coffee plants; foreigners were excluded from coffee-producing areas. First to break the Arab monopoly were the Dutch, who displaced the Portuguese as the dominant European nation in the East Indies during the seventeenth century, gaining control of the spic.. | coffee east-indies monopoly portuguese | Tom Standage | |
| 7498e6b | Every single one of the major traditions--Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms--teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 72c104d | By increasing the amount of Torah (obligatory religious laws) in the world, they were extending His presence in the world and making it more effective. | empowerment law rights | Karen Armstrong | |
| 7b6548a | Wordsworth had discerned a 'spirit' which was at one and the same time immanent in and distinct from natural phenomena: 'A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all th.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 504491a | Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 3ce315a | Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| a9f5f29 | Some Western Christians read the story as a factual account of the Original Sin that condemned the human race to everlasting perdition. But this is a peculiarly Western Christian interpretation and was introduced controversially by Saint Augustine of Hippo only in the early fifth century. The Eden story has never been understood in this way in either the Jewish or the Orthodox Christian traditions. However, we all tend to see these ancient .. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 0e1c0ff | The worst thing about knowing that Gary Fairchild had been dead for a month was seeing him every day at work. | Barbara Hambly | ||
| 2ccf64d | I don't think you get to be mad at someone unless they come through for you. I don't think you have that luxury. I think you think you can be mad, but really you're just doing something else." "What's that?" "Waiting." | Laura Dave | ||
| a875cb5 | That was what I feared most: that he just wasn't excited about us anymore--that something between us had altered irreversibly. And afterward, I started seeing the evidence everywhere: in the way he didn't sleep facing me anymore, or the way he'd stopped asking me the questions he used to need to know the answers to, the way he stopped needing to tell me things in order for them to count. | Laura Dave | ||
| 6bada4a | Sometimes you don't know it. What you have been waiting your whole life for. You don't know until it is happening. | Laura Dave | ||
| 54c611d | When you're willing to do the work, it's amazing what can be saved. | Laura Dave | ||
| 72c9aa8 | A video elindult, a legeslegelso kep Ricsi, ahogyan belefejel a kameraba, majd rogton azutan elindul a Papa Roach Last Resort cimu dala, es egyszeruen mindenki megorul a felvetelen. Andris es Robi ugral, Kinga voros fejjel ordit, Gabor idegesen csapkod Dave fele, aki a szabad kezevel (amelyikkel nem kamerazik) a fulet pockolgeti. En a padomon ulve olvasok, majd visszadobom az olembe esett szendvicset (?), Virag a szeken ugral (eredetileg eg.. | Laura Leiner | ||
| 8a3da9e | But men can forget. If too much time goes by, they can forget what they have. How much they want what they have. | Laura Dave | ||
| 1091789 | People screw up, you know. You shouldn't hold it against them. You shouldn't expect everyone to know everything you're thinking about or not getting from them. It doesn't mean they don't love you. They screw up." -Bobby" | Laura Dave | ||
| 6a5d1d0 | Maybe that was just childhood? You hurry up, pick the opposite path, try to make childhood end. Then, as an adult, you have no idea why you were running away. What, exactly, you needed so desperately to get away from. | Laura Dave | ||
| b0d3b92 | The only true voyage, the only Fountain of Youth," recited Orphu, "would be found not in traveling to strange lands but in having different eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another person, of a hundred others, and seeing the hundred universes each of them sees, which each of them is." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 2ec1aff | The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 3669534 | The universe deepened at that moment, the music of the spheres grew from a mere chorus to a symphony as triumphant as Beethoven's Ninth, and I knew that I would always be able to hear it when I wished or needed to, always be able to Use it to take the step I needed to see the one I loved, or, failing that, step to the place where I had been with the one I loved, or, failing that, find a place to love for its own beauty and richness. The ene.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| f26da15 | evolution is not progress, that there is no 'goal' or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution 'succeeds' if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 0d8b3fb | Very few conversations with Charles Dickens did not include a laugh from him. I had never met a man so given to laughter. Almost no moment or context was too serious for this author not to find some levity in it, as some of us had discovered to our embarrassment at funerals. | humor | Dan Simmons | |
| a3f97da | Quality wine, Scotch, and coffee had been the three irreplaceable commodities after the death of Old Earth. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 715be34 | sounding now/old songs/deep water/no-Great Voices/no-Shark/old songs/new songs | hyperion | Dan Simmons | |
| b2906ad | The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered. My three local years on Heaven's Gate, almost fifteen hundred standard days, allowed me to see, to feel, to hear - to remember, as if I literally had been born again. Little matter that I had been born again in hell. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 469a481 | Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse? | Dan Simmons | ||
| acd79d3 | I nevertheless understood at that second the ancient obsession of the God-fearing for another kind of fear: the thrill of exorcism, the mindless whirl of Dervish possession, and the almost erotic surrender of seance, speaking in tongues, and Zen Gnostic trance. I realized at that instant just how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis -the God of Abraham. | Dan Simmons | ||
| d0fafe7 | No one wants to pay for a look at another person's angst. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 9fd9444 | In the beginning was the Word. In the end . . . past honor, past life, past caring . . . In the end will be the Word. | Dan Simmons | ||
| d956a8d | There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one's sense of what is real. | Dan Simmons |