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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 28a0491 | It was if we all sensed we'd be gone someday soon in a sudden instant--often it happened in the middle of the night--and didn't want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now. | friends | Richard Ford | |
| f557d39 | If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough. | Richard Ford | ||
| def6bca | Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home - when your personal clouds don't move but hang - can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know. | Richard Ford | ||
| 49e0ac2 | The things you'll never do don't get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can't see the dim light at either end. | Richard Ford | ||
| dc0d221 | But how could he explain anything to them, when they understood good but not goodness, strong but not strength, black but not blackness? Give us bread! the Savages cried. Heal us! They were frightened by the consecrated wine, believing that the Black-Gowns drank human blood. This is the blood of JESUS, said Pere Masse. Was that a man? they asked. He was the SON OF GOD, but He became a man to die for us. In memory of his sacrifice, we dri.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| d10c79e | But where corpses were buried secretly, there the grass grows thick; such signs (and there are ever so many others!) may be read by those to whom truth is more important than beauty. | death secrets signs truth | William T. Vollmann | |
| f7314b6 | So then, in a pleading tone, he whispers: Why did you make me? I never wanted to be made... For propaganda, of course. It's all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to? | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 471548b | Slow down,' he said, 'so I can see how you do it,' but she'd laughed and said, 'I can't slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn't do it at all. | tudors | Hilary Mantel | |
| c3e3c7c | I was bound to step out of line, if only because I did not know where the line was: if only because I did not know anything. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| d048244 | The English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 1f05906 | The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| c852c79 | How many men can say, as I must, 'I am a man whose only friend is the King of England'? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away, and I have nothing. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| feba701 | Robespierre has never forgiven his friends the injuries he has done them, nor the kindnesses he has received from them, nor the talents some of them possess that he doesn't. | truth | Hilary Mantel | |
| 589bce6 | So now get up.' Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now. | henry-viii thomas-cromwell | Hilary Mantel | |
| a12f831 | He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves. | memory threads | Hilary Mantel | |
| 8e80e94 | Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters. | hunger monsters | Hilary Mantel | |
| b448650 | If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems. | history practicality tudors | Hilary Mantel | |
| 66e90b6 | Men who work at Time have a life expectancy which is not long said the young man from Newsweek | time time-magazine | Norman Mailer | |
| 64d1ad8 | The book was sloppily written in many parts (the words came too quickly and too easily) and there was hardly a noun in any sentence that was not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly available adjective -- scalding coffee and tremulous fear are the sorts of thing you will find throughout. Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing. | Norman Mailer | ||
| d61b51e | Everything was damp and rife and hot as though the jungle were an immense collection of oily rags growing hotter and hotter under the dark stifling vaults of a huge warehouse. Heat licked at everything, and the foliage, responding, grew to prodigious sizes. In the depths, in the heat and the moisture, it was never silent. The birds cawed, the small animals and occasional snakes rustled and squealed, and beneath it all was a hush, almost pal.. | Norman Mailer | ||
| d2fbcd9 | The best they could? I don't think so." He paused as if to edit his woes and select the most telling ones. "Did you notice how they treated the officers? They slept in staterooms when we were jammed in the hold like pigs. It's to make them feel superior, a chosen group. That's the same device Hitler uses when he makes the Germans think they're superior." Roth felt as if he were on the edge of something profound." | Norman Mailer | ||
| 7dafe5d | The feeling of joy came up in me again the way the lyric of a song might remind a man on the edge of insanity that soon he will be insane again and there is a world there more interesting than his own. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 23b10cf | The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 40338c1 | and dread came back like a hoot from a bully on the street outside. | Norman Mailer | ||
| fd65350 | Every time I move I squash something said Loathesome. | self-deprecation self-esteem | Norman Mailer | |
| 4bc803f | I could not begin to mourn Deborah or my mind would ride off with me. There was nothing so delicate in all the world as one's last touch of control. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 1a13536 | I wonder, said the Lord I wonder if I know the answer any more. | god jesus jesus-christ lord | Norman Mailer | |
| 3d04bf2 | So long as you use a knife, there's some love left. | love stab stabbing | Norman Mailer | |
| 1039861 | As Alan Paton said, 'Ah but your fucking land is beautiful'. | south-africa | André Brink | |
| 47b116d | I do this not because I am courageous and honest, but because it is the only way to end the conflict of my deepest soul. | Alan Paton | ||
| 7645c57 | It used to bother me, that I didn't know who I was or where I came from, just that my mother was a runaway with a fake name. But when I met you none of that mattered because I figured out who I was- the man who was born to love you. | Erin McCarthyCarthy | ||
| 9b7f463 | If this were a musical, this would signal the start of a dance number. Angry girls sexy danse in unison around the bull pen. Men stride up and grab a partner to a choreographed tango." Nolan held his hand out. "Give me your man card. You have never sounded more like a girl than right now." | Erin McCarthy | ||
| da88a7e | He was willing to pay her to hang around his house and paint Piper's fingernails? It sounded as easy as Britney Spears. | britney-spears easy job | Erin McCarthy | |
| 38f3575 | Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit..." Suzanne" -- | Erin McCarthy | ||
| 238d1fa | Then he was forming letters again, one at a time on her back, while Laurel clung to him, full of heart and body, still joined to him intimately. Wanting his words, needing them, moved profoundly by them. I love you. One letter after the other, until they were all there, telling her everything she needed to know here in the dark. | russ | Erin McCarthy | |
| fbeba2a | I still wasn't convinced that tossing a shoe didn't mean you harbored an anger-management problem, but I did understand love now. How it wrapped around you and made you more aware of the prickles on your skin, the roots of your hair, the intensity of every touch and every inch of you. It was like life on hi-def. Everything was sharper. | Erin McCarthy | ||
| 00bd066 | When she quieted the jet engine buzz of worries assaulting her brain, when she stopped thinking altogether and just felt, she knew this was right. Feeling the silence of peace and conviction was so foreign to her she wasn't even sure what to do with it. | feeling inspirational mccarthy | Erin McCarthy | |
| 6d29e35 | The events of the world can have no separate life from the world. And yet the world itself can have no temporal view of things. It can have no cause to favor certain enterprises over others. The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one. There is no favoring, you see. How could there be? At whose behest? This man did not cease to believe in God. Nor did he come to have some modern view of God. There was God and there .. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 94f5246 | Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 1df6761 | His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 32c903e | You might think you could run away and change your name and I don't know what all. Start over. And then one mornin' you wake up and look at the ceilin' and guess who's layin' there? | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 3048b48 | Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast and endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that maze is itself an enslavement for it voids.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 25e9c11 | A man was coming down the road driving a donkey piled high with firewood. In the distance the churchbells had begun. The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of the claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transiencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 003efa6 | Those who cannot see must rely upon what has gone before. If I do not wish to appear so foolish as to drink from an empty glass I must remember whether I have drained it or not. | Cormac McCarthy |