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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2b3e78f | Passing through the utility section she considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee anyway and stepped into the Farm. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6456936 | The Police Minister's toilet chided him | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b55df7a | I apologize if my limbic system has misinterpreted your gesture of emotional support. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3beb64b | The cat, morbidly obese from eating virtually all of Isaac's meals, fell off the table like a four-legged haggis, and trudged away. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 495ce34 | Lawrence concluded that Alan's penis scheme must have finally found a taker. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 80d0d35 | Call me Sunset. I'm always moving west. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| c565bb4 | Maybe it's the TV commercials. They make you hate everything they try to sell. God, they must think the public is a halfwit. Every time some jerk in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck holds up some toothpaste or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer or a mouthwash or a jar of shampoo or a little box of something that makes a fat wrestler smell like mountain lilac I always make note never to buy any. Hell, I wouldn't .. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 38a1da8 | The living room was still dark, because of the heavy growth of the shrubbery the owner had allowed to mask the windows. I put a lamp on and mooched a cigarette. I lit it. I stared down at him. I rumpled my hair which was already rumpled. I put the old tired grin on my face. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 757d326 | No visible scars. Hair dark brown, some gray. Eyes brown. Height six feet, one half inch. Weight about one ninety. Name Philip Marlowe. Occupation private detective. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 4888198 | Sooner or later I may figure out why you like being a kept poodle. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| cdabd26 | The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law." ( , 1949)" | mysteries solution technique writing | Raymond Chandler | |
| 2f09598 | That's the difference between a champ and a knife thrower. The champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, he can't be sure. But when he can no longer throw the high hard one, he throws his heart instead. He throws something. He doesn't just walk off the mound and weep. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 087f547 | I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot dangling. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 32e8391 | After a moment I pushed my chair back and went over to the french windows. I opened the screens and stepped out on to the porch. The night was all around, soft and quiet. The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don't find. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 3001b37 | She was staring after me with an expression she probably would have said was thoughtful. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 34f7124 | He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country. | police politics | Raymond Chandler | |
| 175d669 | Personally I like the English style better. It is not quite so brittle, and the people as a rule, just wear clothes and drink drinks. There is more sense of background, as if Cheesecake Manor really existed all around and not just the part the camera sees; there are more long walks over the Downs and the characters don't all try to behave as if they had just been tested by MGM. The English may not always be the best writers in the world, bu.. | fiction-writing murder-mysteries | Raymond Chandler | |
| ea579e5 | It was a nice face, a face you get to like. Pretty, but not so pretty that you would have to wear brass knuckles every time you took it out. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 300bba0 | Go on home and knit socks, darling, | Raymond Chandler | ||
| aa11dc3 | In every interview I'm asked what's the most important quality a novelist has to have. It's pretty obvious: talent. Now matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist. This is more of a prerequisite than a necessary quality. If you don't have any fuel, even the best car won't run.The problem with talent, though, is that in most cases the person involved c.. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 5efc27c | The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective." (Letter, April 19, 1951)" | private-detective realism writing | Raymond Chandler | |
| 2342a4d | I looked at the ornaments on the desk. Everything standard and all copper. A copper lamp, pen set and pencil tray, a glass and copper ashtray with a copper elephant on the rim, a copper letter opener, a copper thermos bottle on a copper tray, copper corners on the blotter holder. There was a spray of almost copper-colored sweet peas in a copper vase. It seemed like a lot of copper. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 51900b5 | Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| b56f65a | Thick cunning played on her face, had no fun there and went somewhere else. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| ba6aab7 | You can live a long time in Hollywood and never see the part they use in pictures... | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 144b469 | She's a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge's second term, I'll eat my spare tire, rim and all. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 4a36079 | Fix that hair! Close that mind! Repeat after me! Page me the second the old man croaks it! Now, are you boys ready? A Seabrook boy is always ready. Ready to work. Ready to play. Ready to listen to his teachers, especially the greatest educator of them all, Jesus. as Jesus said to me once, Greg, what's your secret? And I said, Jesus--study your notes! Get to class! Shave that beard! You show up to your first day on the job dressed like a hip.. | Paul Murray | ||
| 7fe260f | Out here the sunsets were like Italian operas, torrid, emotional affairs that went on for three hours or more, hanging in the sky like burning castles. | Paul Murray | ||
| ab5f10c | Never frown even when ur sad, coz u never know whose falling in love with ur smile! | Paul Murray | ||
| f005a1b | To believe in explanations is good, because it means you may believe also that beneath the chaotic, mindless jumble of everything, beneath the horrible disjunction you feel at every moment between you and all you are not, there dwells in the universe a secret harmony, a coherence and rightness like a balanced equation that's out of reach for now but some day will reveal itself in its entirety. | Paul Murray | ||
| e4388db | A good library has all the good books. A great library has all the books. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 914972d | We tend to quarrel most bitterly with those who most nearly resemble ourselves. | Timothy Ferris | ||
| 1fad04b | The implication of this particular tale is: Trust strangers. Believe in magic. | tale | Michael Cunningham | |
| 4c7e5e0 | We worship numberless gods or idols, but we all need to be the grandest possible versions of ourselves, we need to walk across the face of the earth with as much grace and beauty as we can muster before we're wrapped in our winding sheets, and returned. | life-lessons living purpose purposeful-living wisdom | Michael Cunningham | |
| 0d7927d | Peter glances out at the falling snow. Oh, little man. You have brought down your house not through passion but by neglect. You who dared to think of yourself as dangerous. You are guilty not of the epic transgressions but the tiny crimes. You have failed in the most base and human of ways - you have not imagined the lives of others. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 0058dc7 | It's impossible to imagine, isn't it? Most men probably go through the same motions, more or less, but what's in their minds, what agitates their blood? What could be more mortifyingly personal, what veers closer to the depths, than whatever it is that makes us come? If we knew, if we could see what's in the cartoon balloons over other guy's heads as they jerk off, would we be moved, or repelled? | Michael Cunningham | ||
| e4de6eb | He feels, as he sometimes does, as most people must, a presence in the room, what he can only think of as his and Rebecca's living ghosts, the amalgamation of their dreams and their breathing, their smells. He does not believe in ghosts, but he believes in...something. Something viable, something living, that's surprised when he wakes at this hour, that's neither glad nor sorry to see him awake but that recognizes the fact, because it has b.. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| aead2e9 | She has failed. She wishes she didn't mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her. | life sadness | Michael Cunningham | |
| 320ac14 | There's no comfort, it seems, in the world of objects. | alienation life melancholy | Michael Cunningham | |
| 5ca0b22 | Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 7a97f39 | The book worm, the foreign-looking one with the dark, close set eyes an the Roman nose, who had never been sought after or cherished; who had always been left alone, to read. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 8f63aad | She lays the book face down on her chest. Already her bedroom (no, their bedroom) feels more densely inhabited, more actual, because a character named Mrs. Dalloway is on her way to buy flowers. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 8535810 | What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around the pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows. That was the moment. There has been no other. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 65cf85a | A sensation rose in him, a high tingling of his blood. There came a wave, a wind that recognized him, that did not love him or hate him. He felt what he knew as the rising of his self, the shifting innerness that yearned and feared, that was more familiar to him than anything could ever be. He knew that an answering substance gathered around him, emanating from the trees and the stars. He stood staring at the constellations. Walt had sent h.. | Michael Cunningham |