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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4fa6114 | You should know now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, not by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it. Carlos Castaneda | Michael E. Gerber | ||
| 78cb3e3 | No tienes que hacer nada para caer bien o mal. O te acepta o te tira de lado. | Carlos Castaneda | ||
| 53caca0 | We don't need anyone to teach us sorcery, because there is really nothing to learn. What we need is a teacher to convince us that there is incalculable power at our fingertips. What a strange paradox! | Carlos Castaneda | ||
| 13ec223 | We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The Predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so... I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are he.. | aliens ancient-history anunnaki beliefs cause-and-effect chaos cognitive-dissonance cosmos dreams food human important magic manipulation matrix mind-control occult predator problems religion secrets service shamanism slavery sorcerer sorcery virus | Carlos Castaneda | |
| ac23fb1 | The trick is in what one emphasizes. | Carlos Castaneda | ||
| aef39d8 | That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre. | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein | ||
| 8d6b22d | Thinking is the soul speaking to itself. | medication thinking | Rebecca Goldstein | |
| cddca6f | I am beautiful for a brainy woman, brainy for a beautiful woman, but objectively speaking, neither beautiful nor brainy. | intelligence | Rebecca Goldstein | |
| d513393 | Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off; and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back. | science | Rebecca Goldstein | |
| 0fc96cb | She was struck by the selfish thought that this was not fair to her. That she'd been in the middle of a different story, one that had nothing to do with this. She was a person who was finding her daughter, making things right with her daughter, and there was no room in that story for the idiocy of extreme religion, the violence of men she'd never met. Just as she'd been in the middle of a story about divorce when the towers fell in New York.. | terrorism violence violence-and-humans war | Rebecca Makkai | |
| 893be34 | I'm afraid of what the digital age will do to the world, to the things we think are important... it's almost like people want to believe in some illusion that they're robots and forget altogether that they're real, living people... but everything these days is disposable, even people themselves, and that's why I'm afraid for the world," Mandy confessed, looking depressed and worried. "So am I... but I'll still watch all of it as the world d.. | apocalypse canada cell-phone digital dystopian earth environmental gone grief hopeless horror human lost next-generation nova-scotia robots scary technology | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 96fd4c2 | Just because something isn't good doesn't mean it's bad. | book characters crime depth ethics evil good life literary lonely misunderstood novel sad spooky truth | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 09cfaa4 | He's completely blown through his younger years like his childhood was one big cigarette to smoke carelessly. | child childhood cigarette growing-up kid memory nostalgia smoke wasted-time young | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 9c55337 | Everything has a past, a voice, existed at some point, even things as small and seemingly meaningless as a house in a huge suburb. It's a house like every other house... but at some point a family lived there, made it theirs, made it important. When people forget that history, that somebody at some point thought the house mattered, it just becomes an empty pile of nailed wood and brick and concrete that gets torn down for some strip mall or.. | earth family hope human life material together | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 5ea173a | Alecto, do you think we have fallen from heaven, or do you think we are falling towards it? | falling from heaven hell towards | Rebecca McNutt | |
| d542bc8 | Don't pack your bags just yet, stay awhile, Don't try to run away to higher ground, You're in my twisted clouds of sad misfortune, And you are such an entertaining crowd! (I've never had such cheerful toys to play with...) Forget I said that - just a little natural disaster Humour, Ha-ha-ha. Pull up a rusty lawn chair On the waterfront in New Orleans, And ignore the wind that howls, Things aren't always as they seem. I can smell fear in th.. | dark-poetry hurricane hurricane-katrina natural-disaster poverty southern welfare witch | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 49bef17 | Do you think there's somewhere else, some other place to go after this one?" Mandy blurted out. "You mean when you die, where will you end up?" Alecto asked her. "...I wouldn't know... back to whatever void there is, I suppose." "I've thought about it... every living thing dies alone, it'll be lonely after death," Mandy sighed sadly. "That freaks me out, does it scare you?" "I don't want to be alone," Alecto replied wearily. "We won't be,.. | dead death depression disturbing dying frightened funeral grief grim heaven imagination kill lost misery nirvana nostalgia purgatory sadness scary spooky time truth void | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 9af3712 | Red rain, white-striped towers and a clear blue sky, it was like America's flag exploded everywhere that day. | manhattan new-york patriotism september-11-attacks september-11th september-11th-attacks twin-towers world-trade-center | Rebecca McNutt | |
| e04b958 | There was some simple, radical difference about him. He hoped it was genius, feared it was madness, devoted himself to amiability and inconspicuousness. | John Barth | ||
| d63dc34 | Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling had one all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years a Barrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty a Soldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! All Roads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more than another, so that with one Life to spend I am a Man bare-bumm'd at Taylors with Cash for but one pair of Breeches, or a Scholar at Brookstalls with Money for a single Book:.. | john-barth vocation | John Barth | |
| d794748 | No soul or locale is too humble to be the site of entertaining and instructive fiction. Indeed, all other things being equal, the rich and glamorous are less fertile ground than the poor and | John Updike | ||
| 236dbfc | I warned you, he says, I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless. | John Updike | ||
| 2a90479 | Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart. | pastry-cart pigs | John Updike | |
| dae5920 | On being conscious of being a writer: As soon as one is aware of being "somebody," to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. [...] Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the "successfu.. | self-consciousness self-importance writing | John Updike | |
| 084ddb5 | Evening Concert, Sainte-Chapelle" The celebrated windows flamed with light directly pouring north across the Seine; we rustled into place. Then violins vaunting Vivaldi's strident strength, then Brahms, seemed to suck with their passionate sweetness, bit by bit, the vigor from the red, the blazing blue, so that the listening eye saw suddenly the thick black lines, in shapes of shield and cross and strut and brace, that held the holy glowin.. | John Updike | ||
| 96a27f1 | They've not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him. | reputation | John Updike | |
| 8822f7c | Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward. | rape | John Updike | |
| 82e2118 | Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know. | John Updike | ||
| 824fb71 | Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. | John Updike | ||
| 70f370d | Part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace. | John Updike | ||
| 4c8d46b | That's a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their right mind would point at this thing and say, 'I'm going to fly in my Model-A1'. | amnesia androids apocalypse carrack cityisle cityspire count damnation death desolate dreams emily-dickinson empty fedora ghosts gothic greek-mythology haunting haunts horace-walpole jazz life magic magick mannequins masquerade music phillip-k-dick piano poems puddles rain reflections romance sacrifice science-fiction sex shakespeare ships songs specters spectre storms tempest waking water | Nathan Reese Maher | |
| 899de9e | A bystander often sees more of the game than those that play | Horace Walpole | ||
| 7bcffb6 | The spark of life is not gain. Nor is it luxury. The spark of life is movement. Color. Love. And furthermore...if you really want to enjoy life, you must work quietly and humbly to realize your delusions of grandeur. | Mark Helprin | ||
| f80fdca | In a thousand years," Alessandro said, "this incident will be remembered. By then, of course, we will have become angels, devils, or a dragon that breathes fire...but we have given this rock a story that will be passed on." "What good is that?" "It isn't to our advantage, if that's what you mean. However, it's pleasurable to cast a line into the future, no matter how tenuously. You never know, the line may be unbroken all the way to the las.. | Mark Helprin | ||
| 17dd456 | Watching the children, he noticed two things especially. A girl of about five, and her sister, who was no more than three, wanted to drink from the pebbled concrete fountain at the playground's edge, but it was too high for either of them, so the five-year-old...jumped up and, resting her stomach on the edge and grasping the sides, began to drink. But she was neither strong enough nor oblivious enough of the pain to hand on, and she began t.. | Mark Helprin | ||
| f60a68b | Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light. | nature-as-church numinous our-place-in-the-universe revelation spirituality stars | Mark Helprin | |
| abf6c76 | When you die, you know, you hear the insistent pounding that defines all things, whether of matter or energy, since there is nothing in the universe, really, but proportion. | Mark Helprin | ||
| 07a349e | In living, one muddles through the years for the sake of those one or two moments which are indisputably great. | Mark Helprin | ||
| fec4802 | All these things were shaken about within Peter Lake like pots and pans banging against the side of a peddler's swaybacked horse. It was hard to bear the weight of partial revelations which refused to venture past the tip of his tongue. | Mark Helprin | ||
| 6c25184 | The best thing in the world is the truth. You find it out anyway, in the end, or sooner. | Mark Helprin | ||
| e987059 | The greatest blizzards start with the finest snow. | Mark Helprin | ||
| 31179d1 | She could hear in the traffic a white sound that threw veils across the present and allowed her to hold the scene to her the way that she held her own children--fighting time, conquered by it, ravished by it. For she believed that only through love can one feel the terrible pain of time, and then make it completely still. | Mark Helprin | ||
| 9e47cd0 | Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! That which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For.. | Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) | ||
| a4b7d06 | And so we place the burden of remaining pure on lesser shoulders? ... Do you really believe the Jedi should be the tools of such frail [government] institutions?" - Jacen Solo" | Troy Denning |