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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f24f0c8 | You see, at that juncture in my life I wasn't evolved enough to understand the fluid nature of romantic love (its indifference to human cravings for permanence and certainty); its uncivilized, undomesticated nature (less like a pretty melody than a foxish barking at the moon), or, more importantly perhaps, that it's a privilege to love someone, to truly love them; and while it's paradisiacal if she or he loves you back, it's unfair to deman.. | Tom Robbins | ||
| 91db31c | The lesson was the same: This program is subject to change -- often unexpectedly, sometimes in the batting of an eye. It's the best argument I know against suicide. | Tom Robbins | ||
| 9dfb978 | Morality depends on culture. Culture depends on climate. | morality | Tom Robbins | |
| e1f1f84 | on a number of occasions this book has made reference to magic, and each time you've shaken your head, muttering such criticisms as "What does he mean by 'magic' anyhow? It's embarrassing to find a grown man talking about magic in such a manner. How can anybody take him seriously?" Or, as slightly more gracious readers have objected, "Doesn't the author realize that one can't write about magic? One can create it but not discuss it. It's muc.. | mysticism | Tom Robbins | |
| 67d33fb | At the meeting of our lips, peacocks went into hiding, elephants suffered memory loss, camels developed a maddening thirst, and dinosaurs long thought to be extinct turned up on the evening news. | Tom Robbins | ||
| f3b54d4 | Boomer had asked her once, in a telephone call from Virginia, "Why does this stuff, these hand-painted hallucinations that don't do nothin' but confuse the puddin' out of a perfectly reasonable wall, why does it mean so much to you?" It was a poor connection, but he could have sworn he heard her say, "In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak." | painting | Tom Robbins | |
| dbec5e9 | 'how then does soul differ from spirit?' you're probably asking yourself. although he must have been reasonably sure nobody was. "Well, soul is darker of color, denser of volume, saltier of flavor, rougher of texture, and tends to be more maternalistic than paternalistic: soul is connected to Mother Earth just as spirit is connected to Father Sky. Of course, mothers and fathers are prone to copulation, and in their commingled state, soul an.. | Tom Robbins | ||
| 305f296 | On second thought, it's unlikely that anybody can teach another to excel in bed. Rather, what they might do is awaken in the other her or his predisposition for copulative excellence. | Tom Robbins | ||
| e5ab087 | When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat. | Tom Robbins | ||
| eb59de3 | to perform without a net is ecstasy." Papa Phom had often reminded her, "To perform without focus is fatal. " | Tom Robbins | ||
| 67e5ea5 | Maybe what I admired most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his 45-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower. | Tom Robbins | ||
| 93ccb03 | You don't need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don't even listen, simply wait. Don't even wait. Be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you. To be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet. --Franz Kafka | Tom Robbins | ||
| 40aba94 | Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more extensive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled -- whether by their own propensities or by the.. | Harry G. Frankfurt | ||
| a89cecf | After all, every use of language without exception has some, if not all, of the characteristic features of lies. | Harry G. Frankfurt | ||
| f87efd4 | Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness. | Brené Brown | ||
| e6c89c5 | There's a quote that I share every time I talk about vulnerability and perfectionism. My fixation with these words from Leonard Cohen's song "Anthem" comes from how much comfort and hope they give me as I put "enough" into practice: "There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." | Brené Brown | ||
| 5837ee9 | God is triune, and all reality is structured in terms of Him. A brief definition of the Trinity might be this: One God without division in a plurality of Persons, and three Persons without confusion in a unity of essence. | philosophy the-one-and-the-many trinity | David Chilton | |
| c6d4d94 | But a Broom-stick, perhaps you will say, is an Emblem of a Tree standing on its Head; and pray what is Man but a topsy-turvy Creature? His Animal Faculties perpetually mounted on his Rational; his Head where his Heels should be, groveling on the Earth. | Jonathan Swift | ||
| 78bb261 | And I remember in frequent discourses with my master concerning the nature of manhood, in other parts of the world, having occasion to talk of lying and false representation... For he argued thus; that the use of speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive information of facts; now if any one said the thing which was not, these ends were defeated... ...he leaves me worse than in ignorance, for I am led to believe a thing bl.. | Jonathan Swift | ||
| 390d747 | for they have no conception how a rational creature can be compelled, but only advised, or exhorted; because no person can disobey reason, without giving up his claim to be a rational creature. | Jonathan Swift | ||
| 95cec6c | Books, like men their authors, have no more than one way of coming into the world, but there are ten thousand to go out of it, and return no more. | Jonathan Swift | ||
| 7c7ffd3 | For as to what we have heard you affirm, that there are other kingdoms and states in the world inhabited by human creatures as large as yourself, our philosophers are in much doubt, and would rather conjecture that you dropped from the moon, or one of the stars; because it is certain, that a hundred mortals of your bulk would in a short time destroy all the fruits and cattle of his majesty's dominions: besides, our histories of six thousand.. | Jonathan Swift | ||
| d8ead39 | So impossible it is for a man who looks no further than the present world to fix himself long in a contemplation where the present world has no part; he has no sure hold, no firm footing; he can never expect to remove the earth he rests upon while he has no support besides for his feet, but wants, like Archimedes, some other place whereon to stand. To talk of bearing pain and grief without any sort of present or future hope cannot be purely.. | Jonathan Swift | ||
| 5640883 | I hope you will be ready to own publicly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect account of my travels, with directions to hire some young gentleman of either university to put them in order, and correct the style, as my cousin Dampier did, by my advice, in his book called "A Voyage round the world." " | Jonathan Swift | ||
| 9c1d52a | Her statue, glorious in majesty, Stood naked, floating on a vasty sea, And from the navel down there were a mass Of green and glittering waves as bright as glass. In her right hand a cithern carried she And on her head, most beautiful to see, A garland of fresh roses, while above There circles round her many a flickering dove. | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| 28fd847 | earn what you can since everything's for sale | desperation opportunity profession vocation | Geoffrey Chaucer | |
| a791592 | It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jetliner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot's seat. - Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 1968 | leadership politics | Mark Kurlansky | |
| 6800638 | Even the name, Celt, is not from their own Indo-European language but from Greek. Keltoi, the name given to them by Greek historians, among them Herodotus, means "one who lives in hiding or under cover." The Romans, finding them less mysterious, called them Galli or Gauls, also coming from a Greek word, used by Egyptians as well, hal, meaning "salt." They were the salt people." | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 7bb86e1 | In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated. Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman empire or Egypt with the last pharaoh abdicating in 1912. For China, the last century has been a period of transition - dramatic change and perpetual revolution. | civilization egypt modernity rome world-history | Mark Kurlansky | |
| 255ef65 | And, you know, you never really summon all of your strength until you know that there's no way back, no way to go but onward. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 5b22da7 | We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| c99ab8e | Beauty is the promise of happiness. And the only happiness is action. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 734507f | Memory is a haunting. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 9f7ebcf | Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| d71cc5f | If you don't act on it, it wasn't a true feeling | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 09a8ec7 | I know." She sighed. "We'll all say that. We'll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it's all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we'll be here, and we'll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 37fbade | None of us know our real names. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| eaa8d1b | When obsessives are given their object of desire, what do they feel? It was hard to say, really. In a sense their lives were ending; yet something else, some other life, had finally, finally begun.... Filled with so many emotions at once, it was impossible not to be confused; it was an interference pattern, some feelings cancelled, others reinforced. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| f096815 | To die, he thought, was to escape passion's grasp, but that was the last thing he wanted. Instead he wished to be seized by passion and pinioned, held in its palm forever--he could not imagine any other existence as embracing any real happiness. | happiness passion | David Guterson | |
| 6e4ae08 | Nearly all of the Nobodies he saw were men. Women, he thought, had so many more ways to connect themselves to the world--children, families, friends. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 37e6ac2 | I don't remember where I was before I was born, why should I be worried about where I go after I die? | Douglas Coupland | ||
| fb339ab | Howard Zinn wrote in 1988, in what now seems like a lost world before so many political upheavals and technological changes arrived, "As this century draws to a close, a century packed with history, what leaps out from that history is its utter unpredictability." | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 280385e | La distinction traditionnelle entre guerres "justes" et guerres "injustes" est desormais obsolete. La cruaute des moyens depasse aujourd'hui tout objectif imaginable. Aucune frontiere nationale, aucune ideologie, aucun "mode de vie" ne peut justifier la disparition de millions de vies que la guerre moderne, nucleaire ou conventionnelle, entraine inevitablement. Les pretextes classiques sont soit trop confus soit trop changeants pour que l'o.. | Howard Zinn | ||
| 35282e4 | in 1851, an aged black woman, who had been born a slave in New York, tall, thin, wearing a gray dress and white turban, listened to some male ministers who had been dominating the discussion. This was Sojourner Truth. She rose to her feet and joined the indignation of her race to the indignation of her sex: That man over there says that woman needs to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches. . . . Nobody ever helps me into carriage.. | Howard Zinn |