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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b52aeaf | She says isn't it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named--when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion toward the people who invented the concept of "telling time." How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human." | Miriam Toews | ||
| 8482bca | I couldn't see him but I could hear him snoring softly, humming, like a little airplane lost in the clouds. | Miriam Toews | ||
| f5a3442 | The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death on his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness. | Miriam Toews | ||
| 87e92ca | How much wickedness could you do in the service of good before it turned into pure evil? | Nancy Farmer | ||
| 2c461a6 | She would drink until the trembling stopped. Then she would wilt over the piano like one of Celia's spinaches when Tam Lin forgot to water the garden. | science-fiction-ya the-house-of-the-scorpion young-adult | Nancy Farmer | |
| 4bd3442 | You haven't enough artillery, have you?' 'Against you or the Germans?' said Lymond. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 838bce7 | Moving forward quietly to Jerott's side, Adam Blacklock had heard. 'Don't you understand? The authorities are afraid of them both,' he said gently. 'Why do you supose this cordon is here, which only an unarmed girl was allowed to pass through? Lymond, loyal to Scotland, might be a threat to French power greater than even Gabriel, one of these days--Philippa!' And a wordless shout, like a cry at a cockfight, rose among the stone pillars and .. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| fdeac30 | Jerott's hand increased its grip on her arm. 'He is an island with all its bridges wantonly severed. What hostage to evil,' said Jerott, poetic in his thumping displeasure, 'will this night's business conceive?' 'I don't know. But they're both nice and clean, if that's anything,' said Philippa. And led the way philosophically down. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 3020f68 | Self-knowledge is not sold on the Rialto. And if it were, few people would buy. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| a6498af | O England,' said Kiaya Khatun. Her voice, mellow and strong, held an accent or a mingling of accents Philippa was unable to name. 'O England, the Hell of Horses, the Purgatory of Servants and the Paradise of Women.' She turned her splendid eyes on the soothsayer. 'She will be like Avicenna, and run through all the arts by eighteen. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| f2b9368 | You have only to lift your hand,' Thorkel Fostri said. And after a moment, 'What else were you born for?' 'Why not happiness, like other men?" Thorfinn said. 'You have that,' said his foster-father. 'But if you try to trap it, it will change. Why do you resist? It is your right.' 'I resist because it is no use resisting,' Thorfinn said. 'Do you not think that is unfair? I shall be King because I was King; and I shall die because I did die; .. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 1298478 | Jerott?' said Lymond. 'What are you not saying?' His eyes, as the orderly cavalcade paced through the muddy streets, had not left that forceful aquiline face since they met. And Jerott, Philippa saw with disbelief, flushed. For a moment longer, the strict blue eyes studied him; and then Lymond laughed. 'She's an eighteen-year-old blonde of doubtful virginity? Or more frightful still, an eighteen-year-old blonde of unstained innocence? I sha.. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| c67ada8 | I do admire efficiency,' said Marthe. 'But how tedious it can be in excess. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| eb8836a | Kate won't be troubled. I don't know any gentlemen, anyway.' 'Thank you,' said Lymond. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 31f8019 | I wish to make my fortune with you.' 'Well, you can forget about that, for a start,' said Francis Crawford. 'And if your place in Paradise has been written, then for God's sake hang on to it. Because we're going in the opposite direction. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 0163352 | He can make you want to knock him down, if he feels like it, by simply saying "good morning". He possibly said simply "good morning" to Lord Culter. The difference was that, being his brother, Culter hit him." | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 1acacd9 | when two friends discuss money, the third friend should invariably be asleep. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 15ef175 | Leaving him was less like leaving even the most simple of her friends in Flaw Valleys, and more like losing unfinished a manuscript, beautiful, absorbing and difficult, which she had long wanted to read. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 4117d08 | Speak, she said, as you would write: as if your words were letters of lead, graven there for all time, for which you must take the consequences. And take the consequences. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| ae7e1d3 | And across the water, you would swear you could sniff it all; the cinnamon and the cloves, the frankincense and the honey and the licorice, the nutmeg and citrons, the myrrh and the rosewater from Persia in keg upon keg. You would think you could glimpse, heaped and glimmering, the sapphires and the emeralds and the gauzes woven with gold, the ostrich feathers and the elephant tusks, the gums and the ginger and the coral buttons mynheer Gos.. | description flanders | Dorothy Dunnett | |
| 59a58ad | You might, without my crediting it, fall deeply in love and forever, with some warped hunchback whelped in the gutter. I should equally stop you from taking him. | emotional poignant | Dorothy Dunnett | |
| be31119 | Well. On which aspect of our ill-advised doings are we about to lecture each other? I have very little to say. As I recall, I exhausted the matter on several other occasions. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 67ecd6a | I hope the string and clapper arrangement he calls a mind has been permanently put out of action. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 4f9ff10 | Only common mortals like the Somervilles have good old rotten hates, dear,' said her mother. 'Sir Graham manages to love everybody and wouldn't know what you're talking about. Have a bun.' 'He doesn't love the Turks,' said Philippa. 'He kills them.' 'That isn't hate,' said Kate Somerville. 'That's simply hoeing among one's principles to keep them healthy and neat. I'm sure he would tell you he bears them no personal grudge; and they think.. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 0c4cb3c | Verily, God hath eighteen thousand worlds; and verily, your world is one of them, and this its bright axle-tree. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 1253c50 | We are one. Man, horse, lance, we are one beast of blood and wood and iron. | horse iron lance man word | George R.R. Martin | |
| 37d06a1 | But if I could just get som ehint, some sign..." Conchita smiles, without humor, but with great affection. "That's the point behind faith," she says. "It's not something you can prove....I know you hate to hear this, but you either have it, or you don't." | trust | Charles de Lint | |
| 6c0aed5 | There's nothing wrong with a youthful prospective. Don't forget- no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories you have to tell. | Charles de Lint | ||
| b5bcb4d | If everybody really and truly treated each other the way they'd want to be treated, all the problems of the world would be solved. Nobody would starve, because nobody'd want to go hungry themselves. Nobody would steal, or kill, or hurt each other, because they wouldn't want that to happen to themselves. | Charles de Lint | ||
| 9cf0247 | The more she tried to recapture the impulse that had set her wanting to put pen to paper, the less it seemed to have ever existed in the first place. | writing | Charles de Lint | |
| 129064a | If all the darkness each of us carries within us, all our angers and unhappiness and bad moments were pulled out of us and given shape, we would all create monsters. | Charles de Lint | ||
| fb3e493 | There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time. The forest primeval, remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth- through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in eve.. | forest myth mythic spirit trees | Charles de Lint | |
| 7b8693d | The lonesome dark. That's what Jack called a night like this. When you were distanced from everything and everybody. Out on your own and there was nobody to care if you were happy or sad. If you lived or died. The lonesome dark hadn't existed in the old days. That was something people invented. Like time. Parcel up the days, parcel up the seasons. Add a minute here, a day there when it doesn't quite fit. Trim the square peg so that you coul.. | outside round-hole square-peg time | Charles de Lint | |
| 36eea47 | living in an environment I can't control doesn't scare me. I'm partial to the surprises. | Charles de Lint | ||
| c55bb84 | She shrugged. Everybody makes the same mistake. Fortune-telling doesn't reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so that you can get a good look at it. | Charles de Lint | ||
| 8a5ab4f | They have alls these laws and social boundaries to keep the worst of them in check. The problem is, villains and bullies just ignore that kind of thing. | Charles de Lint | ||
| 5666556 | I like listening to music, but only the kind you play, completely unreserved music, the kind that makes you feel that a man is shaking heaven and hell. I believe I love that kind of music because it is amoral. Everything else is so moral that I'm looking for something that isn't. Morality has always seemed to me insufferable. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| c57aab4 | Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee of man's character, the other its nadir. An yet, to me the two sit side by side on the circle of life, removed from each other by the merest degree of arc. (MARCH - Chapter 11 - page 168) | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| d542d27 | She was loved by a man as a woman is meant to be loved. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 96c7667 | She was quick of mind and swift of tongue, always ready to answer a set down with the kind of witty rebuke most of us can think of only long after the moment of insult has passed. | witty-rebuke | Geraldine Brooks | |
| aac2974 | He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words--sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were strange to us, because they had not been in England. We named the things of this place in reference to things that were not of this place--cat briar for the thickets of vine whose thorns were narrow and claw-like; lambskill for the low-growing .. | names nature | Geraldine Brooks | |
| fc6cf67 | I held it out and Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands. He made me smile, opening it upside down and back to front, but he touched the pages with the utmost care, as if gentling some fragile-boned wild thing. The godliest among us did not touch the Bible with such reverence as he showed to that small book. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 354f7a1 | the surfeit of loss in my life has convinced me it will be easier to be grieved for than to grieve." Bethia as an old woman about to die p 257" | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 5c70733 | The two most sacred documents known to man are the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. Better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by violent death than a word of either should be violated in this country. | Geraldine Brooks |