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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 611d506 | Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. I g.. | bourgeois class-struggle class-warfare communists frequently-misquoted hypocrisy socialism | John Steinbeck | |
| 65ed2b0 | Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, endlessly traveling to Honolulu. | trip | John Steinbeck | |
| 620d823 | Perhaps that might be the way to write this book--to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 92b71a8 | I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught--in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too--in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and.. | humanity love vice virtue | John Steinbeck | |
| 0048982 | You are a little boy. You want the moon to drink from as a golden cup; and so, it is very likely that you will become a great man -- if only you remain a little child. All the world'sgreat have been little boys who wanted the moon; running and climbing, they sometimes catch a firefly. But if one grow to a man's mind, that mind must see that it cannot have the moon and would not want it if it could -- and so, it catches no fireflies.' [Merli.. | coming-of-age great-man great-men maturity want-the-moon | John Steinbeck | |
| a33c749 | Yeah," said George. "I'll come. But listen, Curley. The poor bastard's nuts. Don't shoot 'im. He di'n't know what he was doin'." | John Steinbeck | ||
| 757387d | It was supposed that the pearl buyers were individuals acting alone, bidding against one another for the pearls the fishermen brought in. And once it had been so. But this was a wasteful method, for often, in the excitement of bidding for a fine pearl, too great a price had been paid to the fisherman. This was extravagant and not to be countenanced. Now there was only one pearl buyer with many hands, and the men who sat in their offices and.. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 55d136e | Not long ago, after my last trip to Russia, I had a conversation with an American very eminent in the field of politics. I asked what he read, and he replied that he studied history, sociology, politics and law. "How about fiction - novels, plays poetry?" I asked. "No," he said, "I have never had time for them. There's so much else I have to read." I said, "Sir, I have recently visited Russia for the third time and don't know how well I un.. | american-literature steinbeck | John Steinbeck | |
| 01f3077 | One who was born by the ocean or has associated with it cannot ever be quite content away from it for very long | cortez log love ocean steinbeck travel | John Steinbeck | |
| 235581d | You can boast about anything if it's all you have. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 6375b5a | Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it. | Shirley Hazzard | ||
| fab9bfc | Yet decency nagged at their reluctant hearts; and they acknowledged that, too, in unconscious phrases -- 'I fail to understand...', 'I cannot bring myself to overlook...', 'Tolerance is all very well up to a point...' -- as if they had tried the ways of magnanimity but found them too exigent. | small-mindedness | Shirley Hazzard | |
| 2c05f80 | She was coming to look on men and women as fellow-survivors: well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. but all, involuntarily, became part of some deeper assertion of life. | Shirley Hazzard | ||
| 85cebc8 | solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity, in fact imposes excessive normality, and least in public . . . [p. 7] | Shirley Hazzard | ||
| eabe0da | But that's a way to go on loving--a place, or a person. To miss it. In fact, to go away, to put yourself in the state of missing, is sometimes the simplest way to preserve love. [p. 56] | Shirley Hazzard | ||
| 38f60c8 | Paco!" she announces loudly. "Yeah, I'm talkin' to you," Elena says, pointing to Paco talking to a bunch of girls. "Next time you want to take a dump, do it in someone else's house." | Simone Elkeles | ||
| da6f759 | Como me gustaria poder retroceder al ano pasado y empezar de nuevo. La vida no te permite hacer eso. No es posible borrar el pasado, pero voy a tratar de hacer que otras personas lo olviden. | Simone Elkeles | ||
| 56b51c4 | What's with all those tattoos? Makes you look like a hooligan." "I suspect I am a hooligan." | humour romance young-adult-fiction young-adult-romance | Simone Elkeles | |
| e04e022 | My body urges me to take advantage of the situation, but my brain (the one inside my head) keeps me in check. | Simone Elkeles | ||
| 3561c99 | Uh, Alex," Enrique laughs. "There's a trick-or-treater here to see you." | Simone Elkeles | ||
| badb5ed | You know what your problem is?" I ask him. "Yes. I have a daughter who insists she knows everything." "That's not your problem, Aba. That's your blessing." | Simone Elkeles | ||
| 1c15d8d | they came in search of the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 583ea0e | She watched him recede into the past as he stood...each successive moment of him passing before her eyes and being lost forever. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 85908c7 | This is how people behave when their dailiness is destroyed, when for a few moments they see, plain and unadorned, one of the great shaping forces of life. Calamity fixes them with her mesmeric eye, and they begin to scoop and paw at the rubble of their days, trying to pluck the memory of the quotidian - a toy, a book, a garment, even a photograph - from the garbage heaps of the irretrievable, of their overwhelming loss. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 490421e | Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects. This .. | death history | Salman Rushdie | |
| a798e91 | I'll tell you a secret about fear: it's an absolutist. With fear, it's all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despot's fall, has more or less nothing to do with 'courage'. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the si.. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 414c356 | The black ice of that dark fortress received the sunlight like a mortal wound. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 3314ed6 | When you've fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights? | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 18cff0b | Dokato ne mu gi zadadat, chovek ne znae otgovorite na v'prosite na zhivota. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 8789160 | She says, trying uselessly to console me: 'What are you so long for in your face? Everybody forgets some small things, all the time!' But if small things go, will large things be close behind? | Salman Rushdie | ||
| b680452 | So the film was a kind of lie, because by existing it said: 'Observe the lengths we'll go to for your security. We'll even make you a movie about it.' Style instead of substance, the image instead of the reality | Salman Rushdie | ||
| eaba2ef | In the home of this music, alas, religious fanatics have lately started killing the musicians. They think the music is an insult to god, who gave us voices but does not wish us to sing, who gave us free will, rai, but prefers us not to be free. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| d3526ba | time, in my experience, has been as variable and inconstant as Bombay's electric power supply. Just telephone the speaking clock if you don't believe me - tied to electricity, it's usually a few hours wrong. Unless we're the ones who are wrong . . . no people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.) | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 103b305 | Rage made you the creature of those who enraged you, it gave them too much power. Rage killed the mind, and now more than ever the mind needed to live, to find a way of rising above the mindlessness. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| de1aa65 | The enemy is stupid, he replied. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 6221a0e | They drove past buses that dripped people the way a sponge drips water, and arrived at a thick forest of human beings, a crowd of people sprouting in all directions like leaves on jungle trees. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 18b7759 | In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 67a97ce | So-called Islamic 'fundamentalism' does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed on them from above. Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith, because people respect that language, are reluctant to oppose it. This how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked. But the ramming-down-the-throat p.. | islam revolution | Salman Rushdie | |
| 7dda5d6 | But where should he begin? - Well, then, the trouble with the English was their: Their: In a word, Gibreel solemnly pronounced, their weather. Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion that the moral fuzziness of the English was meteorologically induced. 'When the day is not warmer than the night,' he reasoned, 'when the light is not brighter than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a people will.. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 31603c6 | I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more. | religion | Salman Rushdie | |
| 5376372 | Happy birthday, Nicaragua. I drank a toast in the best rum in the world, Flor de Cana Extra Seco. Mixed with Coke, it was called a Nica-libre, and after a few glasses I was ready to take on the salsa champions and knock them dead. I went outside to dance. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 95088b8 | to admit we do not understand a phenomenon is not to admit the presence of the miraculous but merely, reasonably, to accept the limitations of human knowledge. God was invented to explain what our ancestors couldn't comprehend: the radiant mystery of being. The existence of the incomprehensible, however, is not a proof of god. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| e532503 | Perceptions of the modern masons ranged from their being a group of harmless old men who liked to play dress-up... all the way to an underground cabal of power brokers who ran the world. the truth, no doubt, was somewhere in the middle. | masons | Dan Brown | |
| aa150a8 | For instance, we need to look with our eyes to laugh," he said, "because only when we look at things can we catch the funny edge of the world. On the other hand, when our eyes see, everything is so equal that nothing is funny." | Carlos Castaneda |