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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6147d50 | The Void Which Binds] actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit. | philosophical satirical science-fiction | Dan Simmons | |
| a069c81 | They made love then. Kassad, at twenty-three standard years, had been in love once and had enjoyed sex many times. He thought he knew the way and the why of it. There was nothing in his experience to that moment which he could not have described with a phrase and a laugh to his squadmates in the hold of a troop transport. With the calm, sure cynicism of a twenty-three-year-old veteran he was sure that he would experience anything that cou.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 26dc732 | There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 3cb32a5 | Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings. Example: the Chinese pictogram for 'integrity' is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late English word 'honesty' mean? Or 'Mo.. | honesty language meaning | Dan Simmons | |
| 8fb6dbf | I will not try to describe the beauty of life in a Swarm - their zero-gravity globe cities and comet farms and thrust clusters, their micro-orbital forests and migrating rivers and the ten thousand colors and textures of life at Rendezvous Week. Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved. While we live in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of Old Earth life, the Ous.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 1314415 | She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ... | compass love meaning | Dan Simmons | |
| ddec96c | loved him beyond reason, but then, all love is beyond reason. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| f8adfbf | She thanked me again and then said, ''Some people say 'God is in the details.' Others say it's the Devil.'' Margaret replied, 'Maybe it depends on who's reporting the details. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| 83eca3a | Because way down deep they know that civilized people have to preserve rare birds. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| 95d67eb | Branwell told a cruel lie in silence. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| 679b494 | Jake knew that his mother had a tendency to mistake rules, her rules, for principles. She did not bend because she did not have enough confidence to know when or how far. She did not listen well because one ear was always otherwise engaged - either listening to what she herself had just said or what she would say next. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| 146fabd | Friendship is a combination of art and craft. The craft part is in knowing how to give and how to take. The art part is in knowing when, and the whole process only works when no one is keeping track. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| 6f4abc6 | Oh, well,' Mrs. Zender continued, 'Mother always said that Mr. Zender had other talents. He was good looking, and I think Mother put looking good right up there with the harpsichord, an instrument that has limited performance time and requires a great deal of maintenance. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| 47e5bec | Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library. | fiction movies writing | Michael Chabon | |
| 84f1673 | It was the pleasure that a liar takes in his lie as it enters the world wearing the accent and raiment of the truth, sounding so right and plausible that--if he is any kind of liar at all--he begins, himself, to believe it. It was the pleasure that a maker of golems takes as the force of his words, the rhythm and accuracy of his alphabetical spells, blow life into the cold clay nostrils, and the great stony hand unclenches and reaches for h.. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 4234ccc | The leaves of this enormous tree, those are the million places where life lives and things happen and creatures come and go. | Michael Chabon | ||
| a5697d0 | The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward | Michael Chabon | ||
| 069bfaf | He was never unfaithful to Bina. But there is no doubt that what broke the marriage was Landsman's lack of faith. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 50df592 | Bina and Landsman were twisted together, a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery flaw. And now? Now each of them pretends not to see the other and looks away. Landsman looks away. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 225ee8f | But the boy had a gift. And it was in the nature of a gift that it be endlessly given. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 3f30ba6 | Every hour that passes, another hundredweight of sand is poured in through a tiny hole in Landsman's soul. After his eyes are closed, what happens is never quite sleep, and the thoughts that plague him, though atrocious, are never quite dreams. | Michael Chabon | ||
| e25f8d8 | This was the writer's true doppelganger, I thought; not some invisible imp of the perverse who watched you from the shadows, periodically appearing, dressed in your clothes and carrying your house keys, to set fire to your life; but rather the typical protagonist of your work -- Roderick Usher, Eric Waldensee, Francis Macomber, Dick Diver -- whose narratives at first reflected but in time came to determine your life's very course. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 4687293 | Combing her thoughts, yanking them into a pigtail. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 1e9589b | Airplane Dream #13' told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying in a pink seaplane to an island inhabited by sentient lemurs. There seemed to be a lot more to it -- there was a kind of graphic "sound track" constructed around images relating to Peter Tchaikovsky and his works, and of course abundant food imagery -- but this was, a.. | art | Michael Chabon | |
| 5f7c8f2 | A bitter, disappointed, and jealous man kills the man he believes to be his wife's lover, this you consider to be unlikely. A murderous Nazi spy with orders to abduct a parrot, on the other hand-- | Michael Chabon | ||
| 6c2844b | My dear son, It is a puzzle worthy of the best psychiatrist that a human life can be so utterly void and at the same time filled to bursting with | Michael Chabon | ||
| 6555b22 | I didn't want to be left alone with Timothy, not because I was afraid of him but because I was afraid that somebody would come into the office and see us sitting there, two matching rejects in matching orange chairs. | Michael Chabon | ||
| b31a452 | He reached up and out with both arms to shoot his cuffs, and for an instant he might have served to illustrate the crucial step in a manual on the seizing of days. He had already seized this particular day once, but he was prepared, if need be, to go ahead and seize the motherfucker all over again. | Michael Chabon | ||
| be7bff1 | Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual words; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random happenings of your life with the machinations of a plot. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 442b992 | For me the act of marriage has proven, like most of the other disastrous acts of my life, little more than a hedge against any future lack of good material. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 485b792 | A high point in a life lived at sea level, prone to flooding. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 61f2f23 | My story and my stories are all, in one or another, the same, tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and the inevitability of defeat. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 2a41c7c | And then he had trained them, those lupine eyes, on her. The hunger in them so startled her that she took a step backward, striking her head against an iron pillar with such force that she later found crumbs of dried blood in her hair. It was a purely impersonal hunger, if such a thing there was - and here her report to Mr. Panicker faltered under the burden of his disapproval for her "romantic nature" - a hunger devoid of prurience, appeti.. | old sherlock-holmes | Michael Chabon | |
| cd649a2 | If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it's too late! | Michael Chabon | ||
| f8fe193 | I thought you seemed like someone who might enjoy backgammon," said the kid, gravely mistaken." | Michael Chabon | ||
| 0c19c49 | It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him. | Michael Chabon | ||
| d11a619 | All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. | violence war | Michael Chabon | |
| 993a1eb | Sammy felt...that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving. He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel. | Michael Chabon | ||
| a1c0b0c | His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse. | luck | Michael Chabon | |
| 1f500fd | She reaches down into her bulging tote bag and pulls out a small plastic box with a hinged lid. It contains a round pill box with a threaded lid from which she tips out a vitamin pill, a fish-oil pill, and the enzyme tablet that lets her stomach digest milk. Inside the hinged plastic box she also carries packets of salt, pepper, horseradish, and hand-wipes, a doll size bottle of Tabasco sauce, chlorine pills for treating drinking water, Pep.. | humor lists purses | Michael Chabon | |
| b84b281 | He's kinda shy. Maybe I should ask him out." "I think it's more traditional for you to trick him into asking you out. That way he feels more manly." | Pete Hautman | ||
| 1a34190 | He's a guy. He has built in testosterone issues. | Pete Hautman | ||
| e54f2f7 | God has given us peace in our pain. He covers us all the time. Even when we are out of control, he is still there. | Max Lucado | ||
| f1f1d52 | Want to know the coolest thing about the coming? Not that the One who played marbles with the stars gave it up to play marbles with marbles. Or that the One who hung the galaxies gave it up to hang doorjambs to the displeasure of a cranky client who wanted everything yesterday but couldn't pay until tomorrow. Not that he, in an instant, went from needing nothing to needing air, food, a tub of hot water and salts for his tired feet, and, mo.. | god-s-love jesus | Max Lucado |