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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 17802ac | Above all, meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment. It's not about getting somewhere else, but about allowing yourself to be where you already are. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 88c8b1d | When asked about his apparent lack of anger toward the Chinese by an incredulous reporter at the time he won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama replied something to the effect that: "They have taken everything from us; should I let them take my mind as well?" | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 6d0ba13 | R]emain open to not knowing, perhaps allowing yourself to come to the point of admitting, "I don't know," and then experimenting with relaxing a bit into this not knowing instead of condemning yourself for it. After all, in this moment, it may be an accurate statement of how things are for you." | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 02ae95f | The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say. | androids chip computer computers hammer humor nail robots soldering | Charles Stross | |
| 9975123 | Amateur grammar snobs are a lot like amateur gynecologists--they're everywhere, they're all to eager to offer their services, and they're anything but gentle. | June Casagrande | ||
| 8af8b13 | Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They're using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas. | humor politics | Charles Stross | |
| fccb14b | She turns and stalks off in search of other minions to intimidate, leaving you flexing your fingers and trying to decide whether you want to strangle her or go down on your knees and beg for lessons. | Charles Stross | ||
| 147c6ed | there is a point at which eccentricity begins to impact operational effectiveness. | Charles Stross | ||
| d17764f | American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor--that, and the army is less trigger-happy. | Charles Stross | ||
| 10356f2 | Pay attention: There will be an exam later. | Charles Stross | ||
| 3885fad | There are two types of people in this world," Pete volunteers helpfully, "those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else." | Charles Stross | ||
| a8fbdeb | The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it? | ironic-self-reference | Charles Stross | |
| 53aaf74 | The Laundry field operations manual is notably short on advice for how to comport one's self when being held prisoner aboard a mad billionaire necromancer's yacht, other than the usual stern admonition to keep receipts for all expenses incurred in the line of duty. | Charles Stross | ||
| 37ff557 | He shakes his head. "I'm sorry, but the official Home Office superhero team is going to have to conform to public expectations of what a superhero team should look like, or it's not really going to work terribly well. There's room for one person of color, one female or LGBT, and one disability in a core team of four - if you push it beyond that ratio it'll lose credibility with the crucial sixteen to twenty-four male target demographic, by .. | Charles Stross | ||
| ce8c8f8 | For programming is a job where Lovecraft meets tradecraft, all the time. | Charles Stross | ||
| ae24e25 | A historian who works for a bank: That's not the most likely background for someone who capers around the cosmos having adventures, is it? | historian | Charles Stross | |
| b70d4e3 | There is a philosophy by which many people live their lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you've got, the less shit you have to eat. These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don't get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grow up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine's a Rolex brigade. (This i.. | dictatorship greed hate weirdly-prophetic | Charles Stross | |
| b763108 | He stabs at the mouse mat with one finger and I wince, but instead of fat purple sparks and a hideous soul-sucking manifestation, it simply wakes up his Windows box. (Not that there's much difference.) | Charles Stross | ||
| df7acb5 | Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons -- literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd. (331) | passel pigeons | Charles Stross | |
| 2b75744 | Though liberal in his praise and always courteous and condescending to the shop-people, he was scarcely ever known to pay a bill and when he died, the amount of money owing to Brandy's was considerable. Mr. Brandy, a short-tempered, pinched-faced, cross little old man, was beside himself with rage about it. He died shortly afterwards, and was presumed by many people to have done so on purpose and to have gone in pursuit of his noble debtor. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 86c9fcf | Beautiful flames, can destroy so many things--prison walls that hold you, stitches that bind you fast. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 6a029df | Saints, such as me, ought always to listen attentively to the prayers of poor, dirty, ragged men, such as you. No matter how offensively those prayers are phased. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| ed793ea | Ah, but sir,' said Lascelles, 'it is precisely by passing judgments upon other people's work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your own opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one's own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one's theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 69d508e | Above all remember this: that magic belongs as much to the heart as to the head and everything which is done, should be done from love or joy or righteous anger. | witches | Susanna Clarke | |
| 02d838d | Sometimes you my graciously permit all the most beautiful ladies in the land to wait in line to kiss your hands and fall in love with you. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 3a2a581 | A] smile is the most becoming ornament that any lady can wear. | beauty becoming happiness lady most ornament smile wear | Susanna Clarke | |
| 3cabc83 | Mr. Norrell gazed at Strange with an odd expression upon his face as though he would have been glad of a little conversation with him, but had not the least idea how to begin. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 16b1598 | And all the nursemaids and kitchen maids I ever knew when I was a child, always had a aunt, who knew a woman, whose first cousin's boy had been put into just such a box, and had never been seen again. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| e23d8a9 | She had been a comet; and her blazing descent through dark skies had been plain for all to see. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 6bd5f7b | For the rest of the night he sat by himself under the elm-tree. Until this moment it had never seemed to him that his magicianship set him apart from other men. But now he had glimpsed the wrong side of something. He had the eeriest feeling - as if the world were growing older around him, and the best part of existence - laughter, love and innocence - were slipping irrevocably into the past. | magician waterloo | Susanna Clarke | |
| 6046017 | Sometimes the pain in Childermass's shoulder escaped from him and ran about the room and hid. When this happened he thought it became a small animal. No one else knew it was there. He supposed he ought to tell them so that they could chase it out. Once he caught sight of it; it had flame-coloured fur, brighter than a fox. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 502d1e1 | Mr Norrell was very well pleased. Lord Liverpool was exactly the sort of guest he liked - one who admired the books but shewed no inclination to take them down from the shelves and read them. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 70bc22e | Now toasted cheese is a temptation few men can resist, be they charcoal burners or kings. John Uskglass reasoned thus: all of Cumbria belonged to him - therefore this wood belonged to him - therefore this toasted cheese belonged to him. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 03a4db4 | She spoke Basque, which is a language which rarely makes any impression upon the brains of any other race, so that a man may hear it as often and as long as he likes, but never afterwards be able to recall a single syllable of it. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 0defc50 | in the old days, silvery bells would often sound just as some Englishman or Englishwoman of particular virtue or beauty was about to be stolen away by fairies to live in strange, ghostly lands for ever. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| d7a38d3 | The gentlemen among my readers will smile to themselves and say that women never did understand business, but the ladies may agree with me that Mrs Brandy understood her business very well, for the chief business of Mrs Brandy's life was to make Stephen Black as much in love with her as she was with him. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 38a2e20 | We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes, from feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these thi.. | Donald Antrim | ||
| fb227fb | His errors and failures have not traveled the same distance as his successes. | Rick Bass | ||
| b85f101 | everyone has to do one really bad thing in life to call their life a life. | Rick Bass | ||
| b292a45 | Maybe we just get given our faces, our lives, our fates, our happiness and unhappiness. Some get a lot, some bugger all. And love the same. Like different glass sizes for beer. You get a lot, you get bugger all, you drink it and it's gone. You know it and then you don't know it. Maybe we don't control any of it. No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pre.. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| f4ce075 | They talked about fishing, food, winds and stonework; about growing tomatoes, keeping poultry and roasting lamb, catching crayfish and scallops; telling tales, jokes; the meaning of their stories nothing, the drift of them everything; the brittle and beautiful dream itself. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| f9b7f5f | But sometimes things are said and they're not just words. They are everything that one person thinks of another in a sentence. Just one sentence. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| ce010f5 | Every day I feel more like some defeated matador limping out of the arena after I've been gored, or like some general coming back from a long battle. | Mary Karr | ||
| 92f9d33 | Joy, it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self - delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving. | memoir memoirs | Mary Karr |