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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3d47484 | Genius is a word that is very loosely used nowadays. It is ascribed to persons to whom a more sober judgement would be satisfied to allow talent. Genius and talent are very different things. Many people have talent; it is not rare: genius is. Talent is adroit and dexterous; it can be cultivated; genius is innate, and too often strangely allied to grave defects. But what is genius? | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| e95029a | I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do. | book writer writing | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 16eb3af | His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless ... | reading | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 5bbd410 | he felt a queer little pang of bitterness because reality seemed so different from the ideal | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 6669d73 | It's hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they're disappointed if we can't share their surprise when they have discovered that a hen lays an egg. There's a lot of nonsense in their ranting and raving, but it's not all nonsense. One ought to sympathize with them; one ought to do one's best to understand. One has to remember how much has to.. | youth | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 41a26e4 | Nunca vuelvas a llamarme asi - le espete. - Es mejor que llarmarle <> a alguien, ?no? - Salio por la puerta - Que visita tan estimulante. La recordare mucho tiempo. Aquello ya era suficiente. - ?Sabes que? Tienes toda la razon. Mira que llamarte tarado...Esa es una palabra que no te define bien - le dije sonriendo - <> te pega mas. - Conque <>, ?eh? - repitio - Eres un encanto. Levante el dedo corazon. (pag.20) Eran mas de la una, pero pare.. | katy-and-daemon katy-swartz kitten obsidian | Jennifer L. Armentrout | |
| 1eb8d62 | People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. | death reading writers | Diane Setterfield | |
| daac930 | I reached for the prescription. In a vigorous scrawl, he inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 288ffb3 | It was not the sun, but the moonlight that shimmered in the garden, edging the leaves with silver and touching the outlines of the statuary figures. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 9f23139 | He felt something move in his chest, as though an organ had been removed and something unfamiliar left in its place. A sentiment he had never suspected the existence of bloomed in him. It traveled from his chest along his veins to every limb. It swelled in his head, muffled his ears, stilled his voice, and collected in his feet and fingers. Having no language for it, he remained silent, but felt it root, become permanent. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 32b99c9 | She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was abl.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 3f263eb | on those days when he could not spend half an hour in the company of a good book, he felt deprived. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 1695db4 | We live like latecomers at the theatre; we must catch up as best we can, dividing the beginning from the shape of later events. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 03d8b6a | My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, 'Me next! Go on! My turn!' I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| aaf31c1 | They were collectors of words the same way so many of the gravel diggers were collectors of fossils. They kept an ear constantly alert for them, the rare, the unusual, the unique. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 12c31cc | Todos los ninos mitifican su nacimiento. Es un rasgo universal. ?Quieres conocer a alguien? ?Su corazon, su mente, su alma? Pidele que te hable de cuando nacio. Lo que te cuente no sera la verdad: sera una historia. Y nada es tan revelador como una historia. Vida Winter, Cuentos de cambio y desesperacion. | el-cuento-número-13 | Diane Setterfield | |
| 2bd1bbb | Religion is religion, however you wrap it, and like Quell says, a preoccupation with the next world pretty clearly signals an inability to cope credibly with this one. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 4478338 | You should have heard the boatman who brought me up here from the Glades. Fire in the northern sky, lights in the marshes, a black dog heard barking through the night. Doesn't occur to anyone to wonder how exactly you can tell it's a black dog just from the fucking bark it makes. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 0f940a7 | It was the blue-tinged taste of a regret so deep you could never plumb its depths. It was the victory at Rajal that never came, it was his brother walking away down the long dark wood corridor, it was a life he might have had in Yhelteth if disgust and fury had not sent him away in disgrace instead. It was the slaves he could not free, the screaming women and children of Ennishmin he could not save, the piled-up, silent dead and the smashed.. | regret | Richard K Morgan | |
| 487e407 | Necessity is the motherfucker of invention. | necessity | Christopher Buckley | |
| ac5be09 | Pain did curious things to him. It made him sensitive to the pain of others. | Irving Stone | ||
| fea5e40 | The maximum value of art is that it allows the artist to express himself. | Irving Stone | ||
| 3469038 | Do you know the anecdote about Rubens? He was serving Holland as Ambassador to Spain and used to spend the afternoon in the royal gardens before his easel. One day a jaunty member of the Spanish Court passed and remarked, 'I see that the diplomat amuses himself sometimes with painting,' to which Rubens replied, 'No, the painter amuses himself sometimes with diplomacy! | Irving Stone | ||
| 265c7c2 | In that quietness they were speaking their own language, with their eyes, with the way they stood, with what they put into the air about them, each knowing what the other was saying, and having strength one from the other, for they had been learning through forty years of being together, and their minds were one. | long-marriages marriage minds-as-one-in-marriage oneness-in-marriage | Richard Llewellyn | |
| 52795b8 | Hard it is to suffer through stupid people. They make you feel sorry for them, and if your sorrow is as great as your hurt, you will allow them to go free of punishment, for their eyes are the eyes of dogs that have done wrong and know it, and are afraid. | Richard Llewellyn | ||
| 051fdce | There is a fool you feel when somebody is saying they are sorry for doing something to you. It is worse than if you had done something yourself. So you are having the worst of it twice, start and finish. | Richard Llewellyn | ||
| 8e921b1 | Man was engaged in a mad scramble for power and knowledge, but nowhere is there any hint of what he meant to do with it once he had attained it. He | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| e0e6ff0 | Our people once were warriors. But unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit. If my spirit can survive living with you for eighteen years, then I can survive anything. | maori new-zealand pride | Alan Duff | |
| 3afbe99 | The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing," he said reflectively, "but I'm not sure it will ever figure itself out. Everything else, maybe--from sub-atomic particles to the universe--except itself." | Jack Finney | ||
| 1d23351 | He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist. | intelligence leadership vision | Jack Finney | |
| 40e7964 | Jesus was killed. This is one of those facts that everybody knows, but whose significance is often overlooked. He didn't simply die; he was executed. We as Christians participate in the only major religious tradition whose founder was executed by established authority. And if we ask the historical question, "Why was he killed?" the historical answer is because he was a social prophet and movement initiator, a passionate advocate of God's ju.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 6e4c2ce | A favorite liberal taunt is to accuse conservatives of clinging to an idealized past. Poor, right-wing Americans vaguely sense the world is changing and now they're lashing out. What about the idealized past liberals cling to? They all act as if they were civil rights foot soldiers constantly getting beat up by 500-pound southern sheriffs, while every twenty-year-old Republican today is treated as if he is on Team Bull Connor. At best, the .. | liberalism politics | Ann Coulter | |
| 2f96120 | Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant | Ann Coulter | ||
| 060445c | The theories of the French revolutionaries, as summarized by historian Roger Hancock, were founded on "respect for no humanity except that which they proposed to create. In order to liberate mankind from tradition, the revolutionaries were ready to make him altogether the creature of a new society, to reconstruct his very humanity to meet the demands of the general will." | french-revolution humanity | Ann Coulter | |
| b733a53 | Ann Coulter is living proof that you can't make a silk purse out of a horse's ass | Andrew Breitbart | ||
| 3b49fa5 | A lot of what we "know" about other nations' approach to health care is simply myth." | T.R. Reid | ||
| d558f49 | One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if 'Scottishness' or 'Englishness' were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations - like the United States of America or Australia - from diverse ethnic elements. | Norman Davies | ||
| 281de5a | It's because of my grandfather that I became a Young Avenger. But it's hard sometimes, to be a black kid carrying a name like "Patriot". I remember talking to Captain America about before he died, and he explained what Patriotism meant to him... It wasn't about blindly supporting your government. It was about knowing what your country could be, what it should be... And trying to lead it there through your example. And holding it accountable.. | captain-america comics corruption cover-ups eli elijah-bradley equality heroism non-conformism patriot patriotism race-and-racism-in-america young-avengers | Ed Brubaker | |
| 0a4d320 | I am not partial to folk who are grim and austere. I prefer fanciful folk who make me laugh. | Jack Vance | ||
| 90f4289 | The Brinktown jail is one of the most ingenious ever propounded by civic authorities. It must be remembered that Brinktown occupies the surface of a volcanic butte, overlooking a trackless jungle of quagmire, thorn, eel-vine skiver tussock. A single road leads from city down to jungle; the prisoner is merely locked out of the city. Escape is at his option; he may flee as far through the jungle as he sees fit: the entire continent is at his .. | jail prison | Jack Vance | |
| 2cb3e3c | But even in my life I saw the leaching of spirit. A surfeit of honey cloys the tongue; a surfeit of wine addles the brain; so a surfeit of ease guts a man of strength. Light, warmth, food, water, were free to all men, and gained by a minimum of effort. So the people of Ampridatvir, released from toil, gave increasing attention to faddishness, perversity, and the occult. | Jack Vance | ||
| 82e5f2b | The world is a place of marvels | Jack Vance | ||
| b563225 | Race preservation is a myth ... a myth that you all have lived by--a sordid thing that has arisen out of your social structure. The race ends every day. When a man dies the race ends for him--so far as he's concerned there is no longer any race. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 35a6a68 | Theodore] Roosevelt had long ago discovered that the more provincial the supplicants, the less able were they to understand that their need was not unique: that he was not yearning to travel two thousand miles on bad trains to support the reelection campaign of a county sheriff, or to address the congregation of a new chapel in a landscape with no trees. His refusal, no matter how elaborately apologetic, was received more often in puzzlemen.. | edmund-morris roosevelt teddy-roosevelt-bio theodore-roosevelt | Edmund Morris |