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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7d673b2 | Great paintings--people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they're reproduced endlessly on coffee mugs and mouse pads and anything-you-like. And, I count myself in the following, you can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don't think, 'oh, I.. | fate painting | Donna Tartt | |
| a17c766 | Her photographs, lining the hall outside my bedroom-- many different Pippas, at many different ages-- were a daily torment, always expected, always new; but though I tried to keep my eyes away always it seemed I was glancing up by mistake and there she was, laughing at someone else's joke or smiling at someone who wasn't me, always a fresh pain, a blow straight to the heart. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 14e0120 | no matter how hard I tried to wish him out of the picture--for there he always was, in my hands and my voice and my walk... | Donna Tartt | ||
| d3e6f27 | There's a pattern and we're a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you'd ever looked at or thought of as light. | Donna Tartt | ||
| b219d70 | Even Proust--there's a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she's sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so--the whole novel is in some ways.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| f33d41a | In a town in Calabria, a long time ago, there lived an old lady everyone called Strega Nona, which meant "Grandma Witch"." -- | potions witch | Tomie dePaola | |
| c6fa9ce | It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffiness of expectancy. It is only at certain times that they weaken, letting imagination in. That's the time to get them. ("The Disinheritors")" | imagination rationality reality unreality | Richard Matheson | |
| f7f1620 | It's horrible," she said. He looked at her in surprise. Horrible? Wasn't that odd? He hadn't thought that for years. For him the word "horror" had become obsolete. A surfeiting of terror made terror a cliche. To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact. It had no adjectives." | legend normalcy terror | Richard Matheson | |
| cd50bb9 | Patience, he told himself. Get yourself at least one virtue, anyway. | Richard Matheson | ||
| bdbcaeb | She sounded angry. That was the way she'd been as long as he'd known her. If she became ill, it irritated her. She was annoyed by sickness. She seemed to regard it as a personal affront. | illness irritation sickness | Richard Matheson | |
| a9887f4 | It was a high ceilinged room with tall, large-panes windows. Apart from the doorway was the desk where book had been checked out in days when books were still being checked out. He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishi.. | apocalypse books dead death decay empty library metaphor zombies | Richard Matheson | |
| a8227a8 | Death is a fascinating lure to men who can stand aside and watch it operate on someone else. (from "The Conqueror")" | Richard Matheson | ||
| 8c4b220 | What would a Mohammedan vampire do if faced with a cross? The | Richard Matheson | ||
| d3c1db3 | Staring down at the brook, I remembered a stream near Mammoth Lake. We'd parked the camper just above it and, all night, listened to it splashing across rocks and stones; a lovely sound. | Richard Matheson | ||
| 9a888e7 | The cross. He held one in his hand, gold and shiny in the morning sun. This, too, drove the vampires away. Why? Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism? | Richard Matheson | ||
| 5ddc8cd | Again he shook his head. The world's gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it. The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough! | change corpses dead death humour normality undead usual zombies | Richard Matheson | |
| f0f5108 | There had been something gentle in her, a pool of magic, not a running stream that had washed away all the ordinary parts of her life. | magic mythology-fiction | Naomi Novik | |
| 503bb26 | And so does pity lead straight to disaster. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 65bafc9 | He settled for writing a letter, in a quiet corner, while Temeraire dictated his own: "Gentlemen, I am very happy to accept your commission, and we should like to be the eighty-first regiment, if that number is not presently taken. We do not need any rifles, and we have got plenty of powder and shot for our cannons," Laurence wrote with a vivid awareness of the reactions this should produce, "but we are always in need of more cows and picks.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| b4f9295 | I will lay my hand upon the flow of time, if need be, that you shall have however much of it you seek. | fantasy rumpelstiltskin | Naomi Novik | |
| fa30dcc | Laurence felt his face going red; she was sitting there in breeches that showed every inch of her leg, with a shirt held closed only by a neckcloth; he shifted his gaze to the unalarming top of her head and managed to say, "Your servant, Miss Harcourt." | Naomi Novik | ||
| 1f20218 | They are ours," he said, "although not properly the sailors: they are only along because we would not leave them to drown, and ought to be more grateful for it than they are. Laurence," he said, turning, "this is Palta, and that man is called Taruca: Iskierka snatched him, and I cannot find she asked him in the least." | Naomi Novik | ||
| 2a2fc11 | I know i'm making her sound like something out of a story. But it was the other way around. When my mother told me stories about the spinning princess or the brave goose-girl or the river-maiden, in my head I imagined them all a little like Kasia; that was how I thought of her. And I wasn't old enough to be wise, so I loved her more, not less, because I knew she would be taken from me soon. | Naomi Novik | ||
| e1ce503 | I'd chosen- not the lesser evil, but the less immediate one. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 6060664 | I bent down and sang Tihas, tihas, kai tihas, kai tihas, over and over, and found myself falling into the sound of the birthday song about living a hundred years. That sounds absurd, but the rhythm of it was easy and familiar, comforting. I stopped having to think about the words: they filled my mouth and spilled over like water out of a cup. I forgot to remember Jerzy's mad laughter, and the green vile cloud that had drowned the light insi.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 68cab58 | Didn't he come to--to ask you for some magic?" "No, he came to enjoy the view of the Wood," the Dragon said. "Of course he came for magic, and I sent him about his business, which is hacking at enemy knights and not meddling in things he scarcely understands." | Naomi Novik | ||
| a907cf5 | They would have devoured my family and picked their teeth with the bones, and never been sorry at all. Better to be turned to ice by the Staryk, who didn't pretend to be a neighbor. | neighborliness | Naomi Novik | |
| 6ee39f6 | I did not really need Magretta to tell me that love had caught my father like an unwilling fish, and having slipped the hook he had been glad to forget he had ever been on it in the first place. | descriptive | Naomi Novik | |
| 590551e | The crew were all of them inclined to cough and sneeze, the boys particularly, and Keynes said, "We ought put them all in the water: to keep the chest warm must be the foremost concern." Laurence agreed without thinking and was shortly appalled by the sight of Emily bathing with the rest of the young officers, innocent of both clothing and modesty. "You must not bathe with the others," Laurence said to her urgently, having bundled her out a.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| cc956e4 | But I realized now that without quite thinking it through, I'd half-imagined myself a place here in the tower. My little room upstairs, a cheerful rummaging through the laboratory and the library, tormenting Sarkan like an untidy ghost who left his books out of place and threw his great doors open, and who made him come to the spring festival and stay long enough to dance once or twice. | Naomi Novik | ||
| faedda4 | Once down by the shore, only Temeraire went directly into the deep water and began to swim. Maximus came tentatively into the shallows, but went no further than he could stand, and Lily stood on the shore watching, nosing at the water but not going in. Levitas, as was his habit, first wavered on the shore, and then dashed out all at once, splashing and flapping wildly with his eyes tightly shut until he got out to the deeper water and began.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| da91137 | I do not know that the Chinese system is any worse; there is a limit to the evil one despot alone can do, and if he is truly vicious he can be overthrown; a hundred corrupt members of Parliament may together do as much injustice or more, and be the less easy to uproot. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 8d15419 | I looked at Lukas. He did not look very pleased, but he did not look very sad either. He was only giving me a considering eye. I was a pig at the market he had decided to buy. He was hoping I fattened up well and gave him many piglets before it was time to make bacon. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 86db772 | It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every insterstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker. | insterstellar-colony | Charles Stross | |
| 5dae395 | It would not be hard to imagine that a happy hermit, living in isolation, might feel connected to everything in nature and all people on the planet and not be at all affected by a dearth of human neighbors. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 49f09d0 | If we are not careful, it is all too easy to fall into becoming more of a human doing than a human being, and forget who is doing all the doing, and why. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 5ba5a17 | That sentence is: "Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine." In other words, no attachments--especially to fixed ideas of yourself and who you are." | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| fe9f387 | Meditation is neither shutting things out nor off. It is seeing things clearly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| e98f2fd | Feeling threatened can easily lead to feelings of anger and hostility and from there to outright aggressive behavior, driven by deep instincts to protect your position and maintain your sense of things being under control. When things do feel "under control," we might feel content for a moment. But when they go out of control again, or even seem to be getting out of control, our deepest insecurities can erupt. At such times we might even ac.. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| bce4d73 | and remind you that you are here now, and that when you get there, you will be there. If you miss the here, you are likely also to miss the there. If your mind is not centered here, it is likely not to be centered just because you arrive somewhere else. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 2bf4ceb | Anybody who is imitating somebody else, no matter who it us, is heading in the wrong direction. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself. | imitation inspiration meditation wisdom | Jon Kabat-Zinn | |
| 2283d88 | Whether we are basically healthy at the moment or have a terminal illness, none of us knows how long we have to live. Life only unfolds in moments. The healing power of mindfulness lies in living each of those moments as fully as we can, accepting it as it is as we open to what comes next--in the next moment of now. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| cdedc81 | But when we start to focus in on what our own mind is up to, for instance, it is not unusual to quickly go unconscious again, to fall back into an automatic-pilot mode of unawareness. These lapses in awareness are frequently caused by an eddy of dissatisfaction with what we are seeing or feeling in that moment, out of which springs a desire for something to be different, for things to change. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 2f0ae5e | We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. The incessant stream of thoughts flowing through our minds leaves us very little respite for inner quiet. And we leave precious little room for ourselves anyway just to be, without having to run around doing things all the time. Our actions are all too frequently driven rather than undertaken in awareness, driven by those perfectly ordinary thoughts and impulses.. | psychology | Jon Kabat-Zinn |