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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 406133a | In an earlier age, it might have been possible to believe that goodness would prevail over pride, but not anymore. The proud could be proud with impunity, because there was nobody to contradict him in his pride and because narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about, she thought; and we feted these people and fed their vanity. | narcisissism pride vanity | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 94096d1 | It was time for tea as it so often was. | humor | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 9ed676c | It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 3146960 | Out in Saxe-Coburg Street she stood still for a moment and looked at the gardens. He kissed me, she thought. He made the move; I didn't. The thought was an overwhelming one and invested the everyday world about her, the world of the square, of trees, of people walking by, with a curious glow, a chiaroscuro which made everything precious. It was the feeling, she imagined, that one had when one vouchsafed a vision. Everything is changed, beco.. | kiss love | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 077f573 | She felt that she had revealed something to Cat, and with revealing something about oneself there always comes a sense of lightening of the load that we all carry; the load of being ourselves. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| d1bc722 | It's a different sort of love taht puts up with illness. Old love. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 43702b1 | She had to tell somebody, and Matthew would do. He would not be particularly interested, she knew, but she would tell him anyway. She had to share her joy, as Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved emotion, just as sadness and loss, when borne alone, were often doubled. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| e2121bf | because love can come, if you believe in it and behave as if it exists. That was the case, too, with free will; with perhaps, fath of any sort; and love was a sort of faith, was it not? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 6b4b9db | Mma Ramotswe was right: evil repaid with retribution, with punishment, had achieved half its goal; evil repaid with kindness was shown to be what it really was, a small, petty thing, not something frightening at all, but something pitiable, a paltry affair. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 4995603 | I am blessed and being blessed is something more than just having something. It is a state of mind in which the good of the world is illuminated, it's understood. It is as if one is vouchsafed a vision of some sort, a vision of love, of 'agape', of the essential value of each and every living thing. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 607169f | We must not eat dripping any more,' warned Mma Makutsi from behind a healthy living magazine. 'We must give up such things, Mma.' This advice had been accompanied by a stern look in Mma Ramotswe's direction. Mma Ramotswe had not taken that lying down. 'Soon they will be telling us not to eat anything,' she countered. 'They will say that only air is good for you. Air and water.' Mma Makutsi had not approved. 'You cannot fight science, Mma. S.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| d4f6d30 | We do not like those who are completely available, who make themselves over to us entirely. They crowd us out. They make us feel uneasy. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 7647a69 | the real poison within families is not the poison that you put in your food, but the poison that grows up in the heart when people are jealous of one another and cannot speak these feelings and drain out the poison that way. | poison | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| a5bbbba | And the problem was that there was a positive epidemic of narcissism, encouraged by commercial manipulation and by the shallow values of Hollywood films. And interestingly enough, the real growth area was male narcissism. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| b6f6f41 | It was while teaching at this school that Auden experienced the vision that lay at the heart of "A Summer Night." He later wrote about it in these words: One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough but we were certainly not intimate friends, nor had any one of us a sexual interest in another. Incidentally, we had not drunk any alcohol. .. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 0bfe142 | Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 075ec28 | Let me sleep," he said, and shut the door; it clicked in her face and she felt animal terror - this was what she feared most in life: the clicking shut of a man's door in her face. Instantly, she raised her hand to knock, discovered the rock... she banged on the door with the rock, but not loudly, just enough to let him know how desperate she was to get back in, but not enough to bother him if he didn't want to answer. He didn't. No sound, .. | existence maze-of-death nothing nothingness philip-k-dick void | Philip K. Dick | |
| 35cbdd9 | You can't go from people to nonpeople. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 18d9996 | I will always speak the truth to you, Herb Asher," the boy continued. "There is no deceit in God. I want you to live. I made you live once before, when you lay in psychological death. God does not desire any living thing's death; God takes no delight in nonexistence. Do you know what God is, Herb Asher? God is He Who causes to be. Put another way, if you seek the basis of being that underlies everything you will surely find God. You can wor.. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| df23bb3 | What sort of an imaginary voice is that? I asked myself, suppose Columbus had heard an imaginary voice telling him to sail west. And because of it he had discovered the New World and changed human history... We would be hard put to defend the use of the term 'imaginary' then, for that voice, since the consequences of its speaking came to affect us all. Which would have constituted greater reality, an 'imaginary' voice telling him to sail we.. | science-fiction | Philip K. Dick | |
| fd9bce8 | A man is an angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright thought. Once they - all of them - had been genuine angels, and at that time they had had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy, easy being an angel. And then something happened. Something went wrong or broke down or failed. And they had become faced with the necessity of choosing not good or evil but the lesser of two evils, and so that had unhinged them and now each was a.. | good-and-evil lesser-evil man | Philip K. Dick | |
| 9c8060e | A person's authentic nature is a series of shifting, variegated planes that establish themselves as he relates to different people; it is created by and appears within the framework of his interpersonal relationships. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 228c5ce | It was the mob that swept him into office. However, it's unlikely that when more sober elements prevail they'll want to support a cripple and demagogue who depends on inflaming the mass with his lies and spellbinding. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| e4e17ad | Metal is from the earth, he thought as he scrutinized. From below: from that realm which is the lowest, the most dense. Land of trolls and caves, dank, always dark. Yin world, in its most melancholy aspect. World of corpses, decay and collapse. Of feces. All that has died, slipping and disintegrating back down layer by layer. The daemonic world of the immutable; the time-that-was. And yet, in the sunlight, the silver triangle glittered. It .. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| f6f4116 | It's all a big racket; they're playing it on themselves. I mean, a gun goes through a famous battle, like the Meuse-Argonne, and it's the same as if it hadn't, unless you know. It's in here.' He tapped his head. 'In the mind, not the gun. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 30b2015 | Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts.... | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 3e508b6 | That I am in direct mind-to-mind touch with extraterrestrial intelligence systems has been obvious to me for some time, but what this means is not in any way obvious. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 4a05b19 | If you are wise, Matson said to himself grimly, you never take one-way trips. Anywhere. Even to Boise, Idaho...even across the street. Be certain, when you start, that you can scramble back. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 84de8d6 | So you want to have gone to Mars. Very good. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 06b5105 | That's what it means to die, to not be able to stop looking at whatever's in front of you. Some darn thing placed directly there, with nothing you can do about it... | life-and-death living | Philip K. Dick | |
| d240ce3 | That is not how you do it; you do not solve one problem with another, greater problem. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| c871fa9 | Random, and yet rooted in the moment in which he lived, in which his life was bound up with all other lives and particles in the universe. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 896e43e | It's amazing the limitation of the human anatomy, the fact that food and air must share a common passage. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 53b6d2b | No one, it appeared to Barney, had anything to do now; the weight of empty time hung over them all. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| a736c0f | This guy--Joe whatever--hasn't even got the right expression on his face; he should have that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| f6b5210 | Is it a loss?" Rachael repeated. "I don't really know; I have no way to tell. How does it feel to have a child? How does it feel to be born, for that matter? We're not born; we don't grow up; instead of dying from illness or old age, we wear out like ants. Ants again; that's what we are. Not you; I mean me. Chitinous reflex-machines who aren't really alive." She twisted her head to one side, said loudly, "I'm not alive!" -- | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 30bf125 | Ubik ... Safe when taken as directed. | disclaimer | Philip K. Dick | |
| 81e6d0d | Consciousness of unconsciousness | flow-my-tears-the-policeman-said philip-k-dick pkd unconsciousness | Philip K. Dick | |
| 90c19c7 | Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can't feel grief unless you've had love before it - grief is the final outcome of love, because it's love lost. You do understand; I know you do. But you just don't want to think about it. It's the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Jason, grief is awareness that you will have to be alone, and there .. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 8cec6b3 | Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| fb752db | My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression, | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 0a5b9d5 | I think," Dr. Stone said, "that when you tried to kill yourself you got in touch with reality for the first time." | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 1b2cb00 | Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn't worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty an.. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| b9d5bdb | Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small... and you will escape the jealousy of the great. | resignation subjugation | Philip K. Dick |