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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bfe8976 | Make your own recovery the first priority in your life. ROBIN NORWOOD | Julia Cameron | ||
| 29ba178 | Prohibition may be the greatest gift any government ever gave its citizens. A barrel of beer cost $4 to make and sold for $55. A case of spiritous liquor cost $20 to produce and earned $90--and all this without taxes. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4312859 | I want adventure in the great wide somewhere | Walt Disney Company | ||
| f5c2459 | We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 43e101b | I was playing it existential, and maybe a bit stupid, but it was the only way I knew how to play it. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 8d7feef | May one plead, Your Honor, postmodernism as an involuntary condition? | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| cbfaaaa | The cars rushing below knew nothing. People in cars weren't New Yorkers anyway, they'd suffered some basic misunderstanding. The two boys on the walkway, apparently standing still they were moving faster than the cars. Nineteen seventy-five. | driving | Jonathan Lethem | |
| edf2e39 | The revving heart of my hopefulness, kicked into gear anew, is the most precious thing about me, I refuse to vilify it. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 795f79d | Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detective stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| c21d2f0 | The stumbling block will turn out to be the traditional one for students of consciousness: the flashlight is incapable of shining on itself, so we can't trust what its light reveals. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| f9d6ebc | The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time *isn't*. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 22bbea5 | The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my wooden desk. | sci-fi | Jonathan Lethem | |
| a65ac4b | Hugo felt the world was hostile to his writing, he felt not only all its human inhabitants but its noises and diversions and ordinary clutter were linked against him, maliciously, purposefully, diabolically thwarting and maiming him and keeping him from his work. And I, whose business it was to throw myself between him and the world, was failing to do so, by choice perhaps as much as ineptitude for the job. I did not believe in him. I had n.. | Alice Munro | ||
| 3046e49 | They spoke like caricatures, it was unbearable. | Alice Munro | ||
| 5648d09 | He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one's mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, think of anything but him. | Alice Munro | ||
| 0229d1a | When two human beings divided by hostility are both, at the same time, mystified--no, frightened--by the same apparition, there is a bond that springs up between them, and they find themselves united in the most unexpected way. United in their humanity--that is the only way I can describe it. We parted almost as friends. | Alice Munro | ||
| 362aebd | It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto at least for a little while. | Alice Munro | ||
| cd9b456 | Love is a christian word. Love is a christian thought, a christian ideal. We have no word for 'love' as I understand you to mean it. Duty, loyalty, honor, respect, desire, those words and thoughts are what we have, all that we need. | James Clavell | ||
| 929ffaa | Damn what you like, Pieterzoon. But don't damn liquor. It's the stuff of life! | James Clavell | ||
| 7fb9f48 | I'll thank you to remember that not so many years ago men were burned at the stake just for saying the earth went round the sun! | James Clavell | ||
| 6164a28 | I'm saying that some men are saints. Some are happy being meek and humble and unambitious. Some men are born content to be second-best. | James Clavell | ||
| fac9d90 | Sometimes it's wiser to give a quarry extra line -- that's how to catch a fish, neh? | James Clavell | ||
| 60e7a9e | Always remember, child,' her first teacher had impressed on her, 'that to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. | James Clavell | ||
| 51154fa | Men don't apologize to ladies. Whatever they do is correct. | James Clavell | ||
| d9f7ddd | Karma es el principio del conocimiento. Despues, esta la paciencia. La paciencia es muy importante. Los pacientes son fuertes, Anjin-san. Paciencia significa dominar nuestra inclinacion hacia las siete emociones: odio, adoracion, gozo, ansiedad, irritacion, dolor y miedo. Si las resistes, eres paciente, y pronto comprenderas todas las cosas y estaras en armonia con la Eternidad.>> | James Clavell | ||
| 7019150 | You are off on a winding and difficult road, which you conceive to be wide and straight, an Autobahn you can travel at your ease. Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion? I don't know whether you'll listen, or ignore it. You only want to know about your path, your Autobahn. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| e3702d2 | No language meant no chance of co-opting them in to what their round and flaxen invaders were calling Salvation. | dodo invasion | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 255e447 | Japanese staff who claim not to know a word of English beyond "awesome" and "sucks", which for a vast range of human endeavour, actually, is more than enough..." | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| dbb6c1b | Don't forget the real business of the war is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 91562e3 | She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| d5787fc | Not if you've been where we have. Forty years ago, in Sudwest, we were nearly exterminated. There was no reason. Can you understand that? No reason. We couldn't even find comfort in the Will of God Theory. These were Germans with names and service records, men in blue uniforms who killed clumsily and not without guilt. Search-and-destroy missions, every day. It went on for two years. The orders came down from a human being, a scrupulous but.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| d7e047d | film and calculus, both pornographies of flight. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 6e33e3c | consider," replies the geomancer, "--adam and eve ate fruit from a tree, and were enlighten'd. the buddha sat beneath a tree, and he was enlighten'd. newton, also sitting beneath a tree, was hit by a falling apple,--and was enlighten'd. a quick overview would suggest trees produce enlightenment. trees are not the problem. the forest is not an agent of darkness. but it may be your visto is." | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 8f287aa | Once the solar parallax is known,' they told me, 'once the necessary Degrees are measur'd, and the size and weight and shape of the Earth are calculated inescapably at last, all this will vanish. We will have to seek another Space.' No one explain'd what that meant, however ...? 'Perhaps some of us will try living upon thy own Surface. I am not sure that everyone can adjust from a concave space to a convex one. Here have we been sheltered, .. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 263e3a9 | To rule forever," continues the Chinaman, later, "it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call...Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,-- to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,-- 'tis the first stroke.-- All else will follow as if predestin'd, unto War and Devastat.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 9d9fb9a | If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?" | computers science science-fiction | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 545116d | He is suddenly, dodderer and ass, taken by an ache in his skin, a simple love for them both that asks nothing but their safety, and he'll always manage to describe as something else--'concern,' you know, 'fondness... | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 369b008 | In some circumstances, a focus on extrinsic rewards (money) can actually diminish effort. Most (or at least many) teachers enter their profession not because of the money but because of their love for children and their dedication to teaching. The best teachers could have earned far higher incomes if they had gone to banking. It is almost insulting to assume that they are not doing what they can to help their students learn, and that by pay.. | extrinsic-rewards inequality money teachers | Joseph E. Stiglitz | |
| ae8eb34 | The facts shouldn't get in the way of a pleasant fantasy. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 4f9cd1d | The U.S. incarceration rate is the world's highest and some nine to ten times that of many European countries. Almost 1 in 100 American adults is behind bars.61 Some U.S. states spend as much on their prisons as they do on their universities. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 72ad892 | Far in the future, Hannah will have a boyfriend named Mike with whom she'll talk about her father. She'll say she isn't sorry about her upbringing before the divorce, that she thinks in a lot of ways it was useful. Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you, which, in Hannah's observation, is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into adulthood. It makes you rea.. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 47d3227 | I decided that I wanted to say to Sin-Jun, I like your skirt. But sometimes speaking is so hard! It's like standing still, then sprinting. I kept rehearsing the sentence in my head, examining it for flaws. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 569a5ad | I think my mother found her mother-in-law entertaining, and in a person who entertains us, there is much we forgive. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 8a11851 | I take it you don't believe in love at first sight." "Does anyone over the age of thirteen? Do you?" "I don't, no," Darcy said. "But I don't rule out for others what I haven't experienced firsthand." | Curtis Sittenfeld |