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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7305077 | He thought about history, the hidden human anxieties behind momentous events. The tiny trivial things that were probably bothering Einstein or Darwin or Newton as they formulated their theories: arguments with the landlady, maybe, or concern over a blocked fireplace. The pilots who bombed Dresden, fretting over a phrase in a letter from back home: What did she mean by that? Or what about Columbus, when he was sailing toward the New Land ..... | Michel Faber | ||
| 9e3ebb1 | He only wished he'd had the chance to explain more fully how prayer worked. That it wasn't a matter of asking for things and being accepted or rejected, it was a matter of adding one's energy--insignificant in itself--to the vastly greater energy that was God's love. In fact, it was an affirmation of being part of God, an aspect of His spirit temporarily housed inside a body. | Michel Faber | ||
| e3d7053 | People and their dwellings were such a thin dust on the surface of the globe, like invisible specks of bacteria on an orange, and the feeble lights of kebab shops and supermarkets failed utterly to register on the infinities of space above. | globe infinities people space surface | Michel Faber | |
| 57630f4 | Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass. | Michel Faber | ||
| adbdc7e | MERCY. It was a word she'd rarely encountered | Michel Faber | ||
| ad3af35 | Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling - until now - had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, .. | Peter Carey | ||
| 5997f40 | Theophilus Hopkins was a moderately famous man. You can look him up in the 1860 Britannica. There are three full columns about his corals and his corallines, his anemones and starfish. It does not have anything very useful about the man. It does not tell you what he was like. You can read it three times over and never guess that he had any particular attitude to Christmas pudding. | Peter Carey | ||
| 237f294 | My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die. | Peter Carey | ||
| 2d481d5 | What a torture to hear that a life had been available to me that I had not been man enough to live. | Peter Carey | ||
| 58e1fba | My mind was a mess back then as I drove across the country. I was driving to clear my head, and all I could do was obsess on my uncertain future. It's like you're at a crap game, and on your biggest roll, the dice go in slow motion. For months, you watch them spin and roll and bounce around, waiting for them to land so you know if you're a winner or a loser. Total limbo. | Drew Carey | ||
| dbba548 | We might embody those qualities we desire to possess by embracing them, over and over, until the line between seeming and being is no more. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| d8a00f2 | It is passing strange, what a fluid thing is one's own identity. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 81b3976 | You sang the seas calm, and you drove the Dalriada to war, whatever it took. They know that. That's why they adore you. But everyone needs to laugh in the face of death. They're following an anguissette into battle. Give them credit for seeing the absurdity of it. You've been dwelling on it long enough. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| cc233d1 | As often as not, we forge our own chains. And from those, not even Adonai Himself can free us. We must do it ourselves. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 0788fb2 | For every victory," Necthana whispered, her great dark eyes shining with a mother's tears, "there is a price." | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 0cc2927 | They are fools, who reckon Elua a soft god, fit only for the worship of starry-eyed lovers. Let the warriors clamor after gods of blood and thunder; love is hard, harder than steel and thrice as cruel. It is as inexorable as the tides, and life and death alike follow in it's wake. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 928f6da | The night court taught me to serve, and Delauney taught me to think; but from Melisande Shahrizai, I learned how to hate. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 2267aec | Most animals on this planet live in the ocean. And most of them are invertebrates. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 5523976 | Just about every animal," Scott says--not just mammals and birds--"can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy." Once you find the right way to work with an animal, be it an octopus or an anaconda, together, you can accomplish what even Saint Francis might have considered a miracle." | Sy Montgomery | ||
| b39fcc3 | But what is the soul? Some say it is the self, the "I" that inhabits the body; without the soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say others; it is what gives life meaning and purpose. Soul is the fingerprint of God." | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 50a4426 | reverie. To share such a moment of deep tranquility with another being, especially one as different from us as the octopus, is a humbling privilege. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| aa77682 | The idea of universal consciousness suffuses both Western and Eastern thought and philosophy, from the "collective unconscious" of psychologist Carl Jung, to unified field theory, to the investigations of the Institute of Noetic Sciences founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell in 1973. Though some of the Methodist ministers of my youth might be appalled, I feel blessed by the thought of sharing with an octopus what one website (lovean.. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 41b0a02 | What did we ever do before text messaging?' Vi asked... Write notes to each other. On paper' Seems positively archaic now.' Pretty soon we'll just be wired into each other and orject our thoughts back and forth,' Skye said... | Paul Ruditis | ||
| a05e3f4 | If others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream. | William Morris | ||
| 94096dc | All this was only, in my father's estimation, a means; the end was the Earthly Paradise, the translation of William Morris's 'News from Nowhere' into 'News from Somewhere.' Then Whitman's sense of abounding joy in his own and all creation's sensuality would sweep away the paltry backwaters of bourgeois morality; the horrors of industrial ugliness which Ruskin so eloquently denounced would dissolve, and die forgotten as a dream (phrases from.. | Malcolm Muggeridge | ||
| 73ad86c | Let tomorrow cross its own rivers. | William Morris | ||
| 510bfeb | Let some word reach my ears and touch my heart, | William Morris | ||
| 161b40b | Morris tried to keep the books in some sort of order, but they always mixed themselves up. The tragedies needed cheering up and would visit with the comedies. The encyclopedias, weary of facts, would relax with the comic books and fictions. All in all it was an agreeable jumble. | libraries william-joyce | William Joyce | |
| 1afcb0b | Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it." -- W. Somerset Maugham" | Penny Reid | ||
| 725f1df | Perhaps that is the wisdom of life, to tread in your father's steps, and look neither to the right nor to the left. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| a9549e2 | What on earth did you want with an early Christian sarcophagus, Elliot?" "To put myself in it, my dear fellow. It was of very good design, and I thought it would balance the font on the other side of the entrance, but those early Christians were stumpy little fellows and I shouldn't have fitted in. I wasn't going to lie there till the Last Trump with my knees doubled up to my chin like a foetus. Most uncomfortable." | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 91e0acd | Is that what we come into the world for, to hurry to an office, and work hour after hour till night, then hurry home and dine and go to a theatre? Is that how I must spend my youth? Youth lasts so short a time, Bateman. And when I am old, what have I to look forward to? To hurry from my home in the morning to my office and work hour after hour after hour till night, and then hurry home again, and dine and go to a theatre? That may be worthw.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 6f3c9ee | Then this must be my answer: We know that the attributes of God are infinite and it has always seemed strange to me that men have never given Him credit for common sense. It is hard to believe that He would have created so beautiful a world if He had not decided men to enjoy it. Would He have given the stars their glory, the birds their sweet song, and the flowers, their fragrance if He had not wished us to delight in them? I shave sinned b.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| db92089 | I had not then acquired the technique that I flatter myself now enables me to deal competently with the works of modern artist. If this were the place I could write a very neat little guide to enable the amateur of pictures to deal to the satisfaction of their painters with the most diverse manifestations of the creative instinct. There is the intense 'By God!' that acknowledges the power of the ruthless realist, the 'It's so awfully sincer.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 55ead84 | He had violent passions, and on occasion desire seized his body so that he was driven to an orgy of lust, but he hated the instincts that robbed him of his self-possession. I think, even, he hated the inevitable partner in his debauchery. When he had regained command over himself, he shuddered at the sight of the woman he had enjoyed. His thoughts floated then serenely in the empyrean, and he felt towards her the horror that perhaps the pai.. | lust sex | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 748de98 | It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 509e943 | Oh, my dear, it's rather hard to take quite literally the things a man says when he's in love with you." "Didn't you mean them?" "At the moment." -- | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 9144eaa | Ye cannot find out the depth of the heart of man, neither can ye perceive the things that he thinketh; then how can ye search out God, that hath made all these things, and know His mind, or comprehend His purpose? | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| e843f36 | You see, you and I are the only people here who walk quite quietly and peaceably on solid ground. The nuns walk in heaven and your husband -- in darkness. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 7c25bbd | Her happiness, sometimes almost more than she could bear, renewed her beauty. Just before she married, beginning to lose her first freshness, she had looked tired and drawn. The uncharitable said that she was going off. But there is all the difference between a girl of twenty-five and a married woman of that age. | W Somerset Maugham | ||
| 5cb7c95 | A man thinks it quite natural that he should fall out of love with a woman, but it never strikes him for a moment that a woman can do anything so unnatural as to fall out of love with him. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| ddc9d2c | Happily men don't realise how stupid they are, or half the world would commit suicide. Knowledge is a will-of-the-wisp, fluttering ever out of the traveller's reach; and a weary journey must be endured before it is even seen. It is only when a man knows a good deal that he discovers how unfathomable is his ignorance. The man who knows nothing is satisfied that there is nothing to know, consequently that he knows everything; and you may more.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 264682d | It is always distressing when outraged morality does not possess the strength of arm to administer direct chastisement on the sinner. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| a8e785f | My native gifts are not remarkable, but I have a certain force of character which has enabled me in a measure to supplement my deficiencies. I have common-sense. Most people cannot see anything, but I can see what is in the front of my nose with extreme clearness; the greatest writers can see through a brick wall. My vision is not so penetrating. For many years I have been described as a cynic; I told the truth. I wish no one to take me for.. | W. Somerset Maugham |