1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3165
3166
3167
3168
3169
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| db2acf5 | One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn't wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is he with? | Graham Greene | ||
| 79e4703 | But what a horrible world 'society' is. | Elizabeth Bowen | ||
| b0e757d | Oh, it's not done,' I said, 'but neither is adultery or theft or running away from the enemy's fire. The not done things are done every day, Henry. It's part of modern life. I've done most of them myself. | Graham Greene | ||
| f269af7 | There's nothing discreditable about jealousy, Mr Bendrix. I always salute it as the mark of true love. | Graham Greene | ||
| 4a0ca11 | If I were writing a novel I would end it here: a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I'm beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story.. | life realism | Graham Greene | |
| eba3d83 | I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable. | primitive travel | Graham Greene | |
| cc20c5a | It was nearly lunch-time before Blackie had finished and went in search of T. Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china, the dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators - and destruction after all is a form of crea.. | destruction vision | Graham Greene | |
| 6cb330c | I had come into this affair with my eyes open, knowing that one day this must end, and yet, when the sense of insecurity, the logical belief in the hopeless future descended like melancholia, I would badger her and badger her, as though I wanted to bring the future in now at the door, an unwanted and premature guest. | Graham Greene | ||
| a074617 | disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible; | hope love | Graham Greene | |
| 47a4a6e | In Gower Street they were sweeping up glass, and a building smoked into the new day like a candle which some late reveler had forgotten to snuff. | Graham Greene | ||
| dc1753d | the rich meadow-grass seemed that morning of a freshness and a greenness unsurpassable. Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading. | Kenneth Grahame | ||
| 93fd472 | Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust. | Graham Greene | ||
| 66a5222 | Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could.. | Graham Greene | ||
| 3c5928f | Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what it is in our minds already; as in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back. But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the .. | Graham Greene | ||
| ca6c65e | The Lord is my shepherd." But if we are sheep why in heaven's name should we trust our shepherd? He's going to guard us from the wolves all right, oh yes, but only so that he can sell us later to the butcher." | religion-christianity sheep shepherd | Graham Greene | |
| e3b66a3 | That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape--anywhere--for anyone? It was worth murdering a world. | Graham Greene | ||
| f892f28 | Ten years ago he would have followed her, but middle-age is the period of sad caution. | Graham Greene | ||
| d5efdbb | In mockery are the seeds of impiety sown. | Graham McNeill | ||
| 5bbd705 | I was there the day that Horus fell. | Graham McNeill | ||
| b28c942 | one of the first rules of police work is that trouble will always come looking for you, so there's no point looking for it. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 2e467e8 | This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework. | mothers | Ben Aaronovitch | |
| 3a1ae6f | Ghosts, I was thinking, memories - I wasn't sure there was a difference. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| c240a15 | The kitchen was the kind of brushed steel monstrosity that looks more like it's designed to weaponise viruses than cook dinner. | kitchen-design | Ben Aaronovitch | |
| 1c7957c | The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse [...] stuck in my mind because of the subject's flagrant health and safety violation. As any competent practitioner will tell you, you always complete your protective circle *before* you start your workings. | magic urban-fantasy | Ben Aaronovitch | |
| 0c0226e | She had the startled-rabbit look that civilians get after five minutes of helping the police with their inquiries. If they stay calm for too long it's a sign that they're professional villains or foreign or just plain stupid. All of which can get you locked up if you're not careful. If you find yourself talking to the police, my advice is to stay calm but look guilty; it's your safest bet. | police | Ben Aaronovitch | |
| 0e31a4b | The principal advantages of living in your station's section house is that it is cheap, close to work and it's not your parents' flat. The disadvantages are that you're sharing your accommodation with people too weakly socialised to live with normal human beings, and who habitually wear heavy boots. The weak socialisation makes opening the fridge an exciting adventure in microbiology, and the boots mean that every shift change sounds like a.. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 0cbde6c | The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated -- that's the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you don't get a lot of practical experience. | yobs | Ben Aaronovitch | |
| 41327f2 | The evening was still warm enough for shirtsleeves, and the city was clinging to summer like a wannabe trophy wife to a promising center forward. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 795750e | Bollocks, I thought, or testiculi or possibly testiculos if we were using the accusative. | bollocks peter-grant testivuli | Ben Aaronovitch | |
| b1bc6d8 | Carnivorous unicorns, I thought. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 8e60916 | The designer had probably been going for Turkish Bath but had hit Czech Porn Shoot instead. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 029c976 | There was no point in telling my father. He'd never let me quit after only one day. He couldn't help me and he'd make some terrible blunder if he tried. Parents are too innocent for the Boschian landscapes of middle school. | parents | Karen Joy Fowler | |
| 50a5d40 | There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author's back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing up just in time to deliver the next bit of dialogue with an innocent face. | character | Karen Joy Fowler | |
| f4b6ebd | Here is my objection to submarines and space travel: not enough windows. What difference does it make if you're in outer space or underwater, or wherever, if you can't feel, or hear, or see or smell it? | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| d6d0238 | the happening and the telling are very different things. This doesn't mean that the story isn't true, only that I honestly don't know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 6c6f9c2 | Without our listening, all the stories are the same story. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 83d943f | An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| ec55527 | Poor Elinor! Willoughby on one side, Brandon on the other. She is quite entre deux feux." Prudie had a bit of lipstick on her teeth, or else it was wine. Jocelyn wanted to lean across and wipe it off with a napkin, the way she did when Sahara needed tidying. But she restrained herself; Prudie didn't belong to her. The fire sculpted Prudie's face, left the hollows of her cheeks hollow, brightened her deep-set eyes. She wasn't pretty like All.. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 48e85fd | Do unto others' is an unnatural, inhuman behavior. You can understand why so many churches and churchgoers say it but so few achieve it. It goes against something fundamental in our natures. And this, then, is the human tragedy--that the common humanity we share is fundamentally based on the denial of a common shared humanity. | human-tragedy | Karen Joy Fowler | |
| cf05f59 | It was one of those subjects to which everything that slithers across your brain seems relevant. I find this to be true of most topics. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| fb2babc | Kate wondered for a moment how it was that eyes conveyed such an immense amount of information about their owners. They were, after all, merely spheres of white gristle. They hardly changed as they got older, apart from getting a bit redder and a bit runnier. The iris opened and closed a bit, but that was all. Where did this flood of information come from? | Douglas Adams | ||
| 40064db | In 1996 I began an investigation into the life of John Rabe and eventually unearthed thousands of pages of diaries that he and other Nazis kept during the Rape. These diaries led me to conclude that John Rabe was "the Oskar Schindler of China." | Iris Chang | ||
| ab00856 | It was not simply that I frenziedly desired what I could not have. That was but a blunt and unrefined kind of suffering. I was condemned to be with her even in her very rejection of me. And how long and how slow and how long-drawn-out that rejection would be. Still temptation would follow where she was. Endlessly she would give herself to others taking me with her. Like an obscene puny familiar I would sit in the corners of bedrooms where s.. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 3c0ed82 | But one must do something about the past. It doesn't just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing. | past | Iris Murdoch |