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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7482287 | Nor did Anders remember seeing a woman leap to her death from the building opposite his own just days after his daughter was born. He did not remember shouting, "Lord have mercy!" He did not remember deliberately crashing his father's car in to a tree, of having his ribs kicked in by three policemen at an anti-war rally, or waking himself up with laughter. He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredo.. | Tobias Wolff | ||
| 3225543 | Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too. | Tobias Wolff | ||
| 21aea56 | Killing Tutsis was a political tradition in postcolonial Rwanda; it brought people together. | Philip Gourevitch | ||
| 98979b4 | Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. 'Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it's written inside of me. I almost hope for the day when I can forget. | Philip Gourevitch | ||
| d0014cf | When I no longer have your heart I will not request your body your presence or even your polite conversation. I will go away to a far country separated from you by the sea -- on which I cannot walk -- and refrain even from sending letters describing my pain. | heartache heartbreak poems poetry relationships | Alice Walker | |
| 6852b46 | And when they spy on us let them discover us loving | love social-justice surveillance surveillance-society surveillance-state | Alice Walker | |
| d3981a7 | Every stitch i sew will be a kiss. | Alice Walker | ||
| d0f7a03 | First time I got the full sight of Shug Avery long black body with it black plum nipples, look like her mouth, I thought I had turned into a man | black black-skin gender lesbian lust race | Alice Walker | |
| 912499b | I have the uncanny feeling that, just at the end of my life, I am beginning to reinhabit completely the body I long ago left. | Alice Walker | ||
| 4f416e7 | Some people think politeness is an invitation to invade. | Alice Walker | ||
| a8d67b2 | First time I think about the world. What the world got to do with anything, I think. Then I see myself sitting there quilting tween Shug Avery and Mr ----. Us three set together gainst Tobias and his fly speck box of chocolate. For the first time in my life, I feel just right. | Alice Walker | ||
| 0f0126b | The Lord don't like ugly, she say. And he ain't stuck on pretty. | Alice Walker | ||
| 150f1b5 | It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how I come to know trees fear man. | abuse-survivor change comfort defence dehumanisation persona tree wood | Alice Walker | |
| 1c5e9a0 | There is so much we don't understand. And so much unhappiness comes because of that. | Alice Walker | ||
| eb957b6 | Without money of one's own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence. | Alice Walker | ||
| e658818 | What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrow.. | courage existence growth life narrow-mindedness open-mindedness perspective society | Alice Walker | |
| 45dbd4a | World wars have been fought and lost; for every war is against the world and every war against the world is lost. | Alice Walker | ||
| ae8c82a | Loving humans means writing poems & songs novels & plays, slogans, chants & protest signs our critics want to stone us for while we think of them as people under different circumstances we might be able to help | Alice Walker | ||
| 50853fe | When Toni Morrison said she writes the kind of books she wants to read, she was acknowledging the fact that in a society in which "accepted literature" is so often sexist and racist and otherwise irrelevant or offensive to so many lives, she must do the work of two. She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself." | Alice Walker | ||
| a7c054f | I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them. | Alice Walker | ||
| 76a20ce | Sometimes we have to let our dreams go in order to allow God to bring them back to us - in his way and his timing. | god-s-timing | Melody Carlson | |
| cba6036 | To rip off a piece of lover's temper was a pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 3b6b2b0 | It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 669c578 | We never learn anything, never in the world, and in spite of all the history books written. They're just the way we plead or ague with ourselves about it, but it's only light from the outside that we're supposed to take inside. If we can. There's a regular warehouse of fine suggestions and if we're not better it isn't because there aren't plenty of marvelous and true ideas to draw on, but because our vanity weighs more than all of them put .. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 9785fe8 | Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don't know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there's a leaf or two it'll be represented. | insects structures | Saul Bellow | |
| 1d18db9 | Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment. | hypocrisy lying rationalization | Saul Bellow | |
| 8e42fe4 | Everyone was like the faces on a playing card, upside down either way. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 87e10ed | How we all love extreme cases and apocalypses, fires, drownings, stranglings, and the rest of it. The bigger our mild, basically ethical, safe middle classes grow the more radical excitement is in demand. Mild or moderate truthfulness or accuracy seems to have no pull at all. | extreme-cases radical-excitement | Saul Bellow | |
| 5413403 | Still, what can thoughtful people and humanists do but struggle toward suitable words? Take me, for instance. I've been writing letters helter-skelter in all directions. More words. I go after reality with language. Perhaps I'd like to change it all into language, to force Madeline and Gersbach to have a Conscience. There's a word for you. I must be trying to keep tight the tensions without which human beings can no longer be called human. .. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 446b93e | You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 6d8de62 | It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much. | innovation | Saul Bellow | |
| be1fe69 | my feelings were big, sad, comfortless, of a thinking animal, my heart acting like an orb filled too big for my chest, not from revulsion, which I have to say I didn't feel, but over-all general misery. | Saul Bellow | ||
| d056fe4 | Some powerful magnificence not human in other words, seemed under me. And it was the same mild pink colour, like the water of a watermelon, that did it. At once I recognised the importance of this, as throughout my life I had known these moments when the dumb begin to speak, when I hear the voices of objects and colours; then the physical universe starts to wrinkle and change and heave and rise and smooth, so it seems even the dogs have to .. | colour hallucinations imagery inspirational revelation vision | Saul Bellow | |
| 5cb26d9 | It was clear that the man was no fool. But what was the use of not being a fool if you acted like this? | Saul Bellow | ||
| 36525cd | Do you know what I don't understand about that ball game? I don't understand why I wanted to kill you. | Chaim Potok | ||
| 4629185 | We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity...a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant...A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically give.. | Chaim Potok | ||
| 918f9c7 | One derives great moral strength from a cup of coffee," I said." | Chaim Potok | ||
| 03a190e | You don't want to make mistakes with people. Sometimes when you make a mistake you lose a human soul. | Chaim Potok | ||
| 3cd8128 | You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you,. | Chaim Potok | ||
| 5c54778 | Love that can't trump intellectual integrity isn't worth the name. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 76ffd68 | and his bones were a cage of ice. | Robert R. McCammon | ||
| 4593fc4 | Johnny James was sitting on the front porch, sipping from a glass of gasoline in the December heat, when the doom-screamer came. | Robert R. McCammon | ||
| 86af6cb | His life was not confined and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape. | John Cheever | ||
| 15c0a59 | She came right up to me and put her snow-white hand on my arm. "You poor boy," she murmured, "you poor boy." I'm not a boy, and I'm not poor, and I wished the hell she would get away. She has a clever face, but I felt in it, that night, the force of a great sadness and great malice. "I see a rope around your neck," she said sadly." | John Cheever |