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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5da2501 | Bram Stoker] wrote in his diary: "Must be President some day. A man you can't cajole, can't frighten, can't buy." | Edmund Morris | ||
| 69b4bf6 | Just when I despaired -- she was there, filling me as a melody fills a cottage. I was with her, running beside the Acis when we were a child. I knew the ancient villa moated by a dark lake, the view through the dusty windows of the belvedere, and the secret space in the odd angle between two rooms where we sat at noon to read by candlelight. I knew the life of the Autarch's court, where poison waited in a diamond cup. I learned what it was .. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 062097e | Master Palaemon's hand, dry and wrinkled as a mummy's, groped until it found mine. "Among the initiates of religion it is said, 'You are an epopt always.' The reference is not only to knowledge but to their chrism, whose mark, being invisible, is ineradicable. You know our chrism." I nodded again. "Less even than theirs can it be washed away. Should you leave now, men will only say, 'He was nurtured by the torturers.' But when you have been.. | education past | Gene Wolfe | |
| 96eb13c | Each of us finds his way, his place; we rattle around the universe until everything fits; this is life; this is science, or something better than science. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| c4ac77c | Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| bd8fe12 | Seeing him brought in, has, I think, saved me from losing my mind; for that I do not thank him-sanity, after all is only reason applied to human affairs, and when this reason, applied over years, has resulted in disaster, destruction, despair, misery, starvation, and rot, the mind is correct to abandon it. This decision to discard reason, I see now, is not the last but the first reasonable act; and this insanity we are taught to fear consis.. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 07dc88d | These pieces, he already realised, were merely stepping stones at the start of a journey towards something - some grand artefact, either musical, or literary, or filmic, or perhaps a combination of all three - towards which he knew he was advancing, slowly but with a steady, inexorable tread. Something which would enshrine his feelings for Cicely, and which she would perhaps hear, or read, or see in ten or twenty years' time, and suddenly r.. | Jonathan Coe | ||
| cecf992 | Me gusta la lluvia antes de caer. Ya se que no existe. Por eso es mi favorita. Porque no hace falta que algo sea de verdad para hacerte feliz, ?no?. | jonathan-coe lluvia | Jonathan Coe | |
| cebf6db | Next, the stalled cars had their windows opaqued with a cheap commercial compound used for etching glass, and slogans were painted on their doors. Some were long: THIS VEHICLE IS A DANGER TO LIFE AND LIMB. Many were short: IT STINKS! But the commonest of all was the universally known catchphrase: STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME! | John Brunner | ||
| c959809 | The killers are the people who are ruining the world to line their pockets, poisoning us, burying us under garbage! | garbage profits | John Brunner | |
| 68fb8ba | as though, capable themselves of suffering, they granted no reality to the suffering of others. 'The subject exhibited a pain response.' But not, under any circumstances, . | pain scientists suffering | John Brunner | |
| fc9f459 | After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy. | social-injustice | John Brunner | |
| ae7d617 | We know a lot nowadays about how to extrapolate from rats to people, but we don't only have to rely on that. In a sense we've made ourselves into experimental animals. There are too many of us, too crowded, in an environment we've poisoned with our own-uh-byproducts. Now when this happens to a wild species, or to rats in a lab, the next generation turns out weaker and slower and more timid. This is a defense mechanism. | experimentation nature | John Brunner | |
| ca184c5 | I felt like a kid at Santa Claus's funeral. | David Gerrold | ||
| e48e78c | The fifties are a peaceful time, a quiet sleeping time between two noisy bursts of years, a blue and white time filled with sweet yellow days, music and bright smelling memories. | childhood-memory good reminiscence the-fifties | David Gerrold | |
| 1702e85 | If you want to be taken care and not to worry that's fine; you can join the rest of the cattle. Cattle are comfortable, that's how you recognize them. Just don't complain when they ship you off to the packing plant. They've bought and paid for the privilege. Now if you want to be free, then get this: freedom is not about being comfortable. It's about seizing and using opportunities, and using them responsibly. Freedom is not comfort. It's c.. | David Gerrold | ||
| e987ef1 | Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed. [David Gerrold - Afterword] | Harlan Ellison | ||
| aaeed38 | Que son los siglos, comparados a ese instante en que dos seres se adivinan y se acercan? | Friedrich Hölderlin | ||
| fb4e971 | Above all, she was a baby, not a 'big baby' like so many adults, but a small baby perfectly preserved in the pickling jar of money, alcohol and fantasy. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| 63788a9 | Nobody ever died of a feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they had gone through the formality of materializing them into bullets and bottles and tumours. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| 3659743 | Old enough to remember the arrival of 'Have a nice day', Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of 'Have a great one'. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? 'You have a profound and meaningful day now. | humor | Edward St. Aubyn | |
| e8ad552 | experience of love is that you get excited thinking that someone can mend your broken heart, and then you get angry when you realize that they can't. A certain economy creeps into the process and the jewelled daggers that used to pierce one's heart are replaced by ever-blunter penknives. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| 27ec9af | so I took it out with me into the garden, because the dullest book takes on a certain saving grace if read out of doors, just as bread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing-room, is ambrosia eaten under a tree. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| 4441efb | There is nothing so absolutely bracing for the soul as the frequent turning of one's back on duties. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| b7bf878 | This was the simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| 080c4ad | Worse than jokes in the morning did she hate the idea of a husband. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| dd2def8 | The very feel of her hand, even through its glove, was reassuring; it was the sort of hand, he thought, that children would like to hold in the dark. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| dcabe5d | She made him think of his mother, of his nurse, of all things kind and comforting, besides having the attraction of not being his mother or his nurse. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| 8ce32a0 | One went on and on, never dreaming of the sudden dreadful day when the coverings were going to be dropped and one would see it was death after all, that it had been death all the time, death pretending, death waiting | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| f9e07ba | There's no safety in love. You risk the whole of life. But the great thing is to risk -to believe, and to risk everything for your belief. | love risk safety | Elizabeth von Arnim | |
| d539179 | all forms of needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one for keeping the foolish from applying their hearts to wisdom. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| f8a2901 | What fun it had been, having an admirer even for that little while. No wonder people liked admirers. They seemed, in some strange way, to make one come alive. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| 7c2ab8b | Happy? Poor, ordinary, everyday word. But what could one say, how could one describe it? It was as though she could hardly stay inside herself, it was as though she were too small to hold so much of joy, it was as though she were washed through with light. And how astonishing to feel this sheer bliss, for here she was, not doing and not going to do a single unselfish thing, not going to do a thing she didn't want to do. ... Now she had take.. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| eae7200 | Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world. | metafiction writing | Alan Moore | |
| 8495cf1 | It's raining in Washington tonight. Plump, warm summer rain that covers the sidewalks with leopard spots. Downtown, elderly ladies carry their houseplants out to set them on the fire-escapes, as if they were infirm relatives or Boy Kings. I like that. | Alan Moore | ||
| f65d7a0 | Fiction and fact: only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them. | Alan Moore | ||
| b6e9723 | Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all that we really have. It is the very last inch of us. But within that inch, we are free... An inch; it is small, and it is fragile, and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away; we must never let them take it from us. | Alan Moore | ||
| 6ab1891 | Is it possible, I wonder, to study a bird so closely, to observe and catalogue its peculiarities in such minute detail, that it becomes invisible? Is it possible that while fastidiously calibrating the span of its wings or the length of its tarsus, we somehow lose sight of its poetry? That in our pedestrian descriptions of a marbled or vermiculated plumage we forfeit a glimpse of living canvases, cascades of carefully toned browns and golds.. | inspirational science | Alan Moore | |
| b225754 | There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as "the art". I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to.. | Alan Moore | ||
| b559530 | z zmny khh tmdn bh wjwd wmd, yh sry Zlm khntrl wZyfy z zndgy m rw bh `hdh grftn khh m byd khwdmwn khntrlshwnw bh `hdh mygrftym b yn khr wn qdrtw z m grftn b dst rwy dst gdhshtn `mlan wgdhrsh khrdym | Alan Moore | ||
| fd34437 | For to be human is not enough...when gods cry war amidst the thunder. | Alan Moore | ||
| 744aa49 | The photograph is in my hand. It is the photograph of a man and a woman. They are at an amusement park, in 1959. In twelve seconds time, I drop the photograph to the sand at my feet, walking away. It's already lying there, twelve seconds into the future. Ten seconds now. The photograph is in my hand. I found it in a derelict bar at the gila flats test base, twenty-seven hours ago. It's still there, twenty-seven hours into the past, in its f.. | old star time | Alan Moore | |
| 73ad21f | Kalle denkt--trotz der kostbaren Zeit--nach. Manchmal aber lohnt es sich, ein wenig Zeit fur das Nachdenken zu opfern. | zeit | Astrid Lindgren | |
| b1c1ec4 | Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve? | history mellow memory merit nostalgia personality philosophy time | Julian Barnes |