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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c71f824 | Faith is not a feeling, she says. It's a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope. Fake it till you make it. | Mary Karr | ||
| 2d6e66d | After Mother got her picture, we all stood around the fire truck eating moon-shaped cookies dusted with powdered sugar that the mayor's wife had brought in some Tupperware. It was stuff like that that'd break your heart about Leechfield, what Daddy meant when he said the town was too ugly not to love. | Mary Karr | ||
| ea4738c | Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?) | Mary Karr | ||
| 47e7b60 | Before that summer, I had many times heard long-winded Baptist preachers take ten minutes to pray over card tables of potato salad and fried chicken at church picnics, but the way those sweating, red-faced men sat around on stacked pallets of lumber gulping oysters taught me most of what I knew about simple gladness. | Mary Karr | ||
| 22a3e69 | Charm is from the Latin carmen: to sing. By "charm," I mean sing well enough to hold the reader in thrall. Whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page. What drives them crazy will keep you humble. You'll need both sides of yourself--the beautiful and the beastly--to hold a reader's attention." | Mary Karr | ||
| e46c532 | But what if I don't believe in God? It's like they've sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can't will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this. Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball shap.. | alcoholics-anonymous atheist desperation prayer prayers | Mary Karr | |
| a11e8e7 | Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It's not just raw reportage flung splat on the page. | Mary Karr | ||
| 86948a2 | Simon decidio salvar la situacion. -James, hoy vamos a repasar cada momento de la noche en la que te capturaron. Al parecer, el desayuno dejo de interesarle a su amigo, porque James coloco su tenedor lentamente dobre la mesa. -Tenia la impresion de que ya lo habiamos hecho. -No como vamos a hacerlo hoy. Agatha asintio. -Muy bien. Yo tambien quiero oirlo. James se ruborizo de la manera mas sorprendente. -!Aggie! Hubo algunos detalles muy imp.. | Celeste Bradley | ||
| 423127b | And I am overwhelmed now by the awfulness of over-simplification. For now I realize that not only have I been guilty of it through this long and burning day but also through most of my yet young life and it is only now that I am doubly its victim that I begin to vaguely understand. For I had somehow thought that 'going away' was but a physical thing. And that it had only to do with movement and with labels like the silly 'Vancouver' that I .. | Alistair MacLeod | ||
| 63ea5b0 | Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love. | William Maxwell | ||
| 652e3c6 | But he was careful. He didn't make a simple remark without rehearsing it beforehand. And he continually removed the expression from his face lest it be the wrong one, and give him away. He also avoided any strong light, such as the lamp on the kitchen table. Sometimes a weakness overcame him, his legs were unstrung, and he had to find some place to sit down, but this was easy enough to disguise. It was his voice that gave him the most troub.. | William Maxwell | ||
| b712867 | People often ask themselves the right questions. Where they fail is in answering the questions they ask themselves, and even there they do not fail by much. A single avenue of reasoning followed to its logical conclusion would bring them straight home to the truth. But they stop just short of it, over and over again. When they have only to reach out and grasp the idea that would explain everything, they decide that the search is hopeless. T.. | questioning searching-and-finding truth | William Maxwell | |
| 67b7eb5 | It would have been a help if at some time Baptist preacher, resting his forearms on the pulpit and hunching his shoulders, had said On the other hand, how could any preacher, Baptist or otherwise, say this? | deserve divine-providence god | William Maxwell | |
| c407c49 | I remembered a friend who'd died of a bad liver, and what he'd always said. Yeah, he'd said, maybe it's just my idea, but really it always hurts, the times it don't hurt is when we just forget, we just forget it hurts, you know, it's not just because my belly's all rotten, everybody always hurts. So when it really starts stabbing me, somehow I feel sort of peaceful, like I'm myself again. It's hard to take, sure, but I feel sort of peaceful.. | Ryū Murakami | ||
| 01bff73 | My play over, watching the sun go down, I'd frown and blow on the wound, and then I felt a sense of peace, as if I and the gray evening landscape were confiding in each other. Just the opposite from heroin or melting together in a woman's juices, the pain made me stand out from my surroundings, the pain made me feel as if I were shining. And I thought this shining self could get along well with the lovely orange light of the setting sun. | Ryū Murakami | ||
| 40cf051 | From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward. I joined them, flew amount them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would. | death dying happiness | George Saunders | |
| 5742093 | Mr. A calls me into his office and says he's got bad news and bad news, and which do I want first. I say the bad news. | bad-news funny humor | George Saunders | |
| 418ba5e | If at the moment when someone cuts us off in traffic or breaks our heart or begins bombing our ancestral village, we could withdraw from judging mode, and enter this other, more accepting mode, we could paradoxically, make ourselves more powerful. By resisting the urge to reduce, in order to subsequently destroy, we keep alive - if only for a few seconds more - the possibility of transformation. -The Thought Experiment | inspirational | George Saunders | |
| 7b5fdcd | Oh, mansion shmansion. Did Gandhi's house have the largest outdoor trampoline in the tristate area? Did Jesus have a two-acre remote-controlled car track, with mountains to scale and a little village that lit up at night? Not in his Bible. | George Saunders | ||
| 3882641 | Stood awhile watching, thinking, praying: Lord, give us more. Give us enough. Help us not fall behind peers. Help us not, that is, fall further behind peers. For kids' sake. Do not want them scarred by how far behind we are. That is all I ask. | George Saunders | ||
| ec23ade | O.K., then, all right, they would adopt a white-trash dog. Ha ha. They could name it Zeke, buy it a little corncob pipe and a straw hat. She imagined the puppy, having crapped on the rug, looking up at her, going, Cain't hep it. But no. Had she come from a perfect place? Everything was transmutable. She imagined the puppy grown up, entertaining some friends, speaking to them in a British accent: My family of origin was, um, rather not, shal.. | humor puppy | George Saunders | |
| 577b41c | Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal. | suffering | George Saunders | |
| 8131fc0 | Her hair looked like her hair in the dream and her eyes looked like her eyes in the dream, and as for her body, he couldn't tell, she was wearing a mumu. | dreams love obesity | George Saunders | |
| 787f430 | Still, accomplishment is unreliable. "Succeeding," whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there's the very real danger that "succeeding" will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended." | George Saunders | ||
| 13b872f | The work that stirs the greatest passion is also the work that creates around it the greatest silence, the strongest imperative to stand back and admire and let others admire, without interfering. | George Saunders | ||
| ec8e490 | In the beginning, there's a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world. Mistaking the idea for the world, the mind formulates a theory and, having formulated a theory, feels inclined to act. Because the idea is always only an approximation of the world, whether that action will be catastrophic or beneficial depends on the distance between the idea and the world. Ma.. | George Saunders | ||
| f431ae2 | The subterranean lair of the wily human relationship: a dark maze of pop-up demons, fun house mirrors, spooky dead ends, multiple false bottoms. | Stephen Wright | ||
| 018bc1f | Sometimes, in India, you have to surrender before you win. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| c49f0cc | You can't kill love. You can't even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can't kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it's a part of God, .. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| cf7262f | Here, Lin,' he puffed. 'You are such a big fellow, I hope we can get a good fits. These are from Fat Satish. He is so fat, I think they might fit you. I told him a story, and then he gave it this two pairs for you. I told him that on the journey you had loose motions, and you made such a mess in your over-underpants that we had to throw them away.' 'You told him,' I asked, 'that I shit my pants?' 'Oh, yes, Lin. I certainly couldn't tell him.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| d13774f | Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 8bafd08 | The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example was no less and no more than the amoount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary? That was the unspoken but implied, and unavoidable question everywhere in India. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 8e8190f | The simple and astonishing truth about India and Indian people is that when you go there, and deal with them, your heart always guides you more wisely than your head. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 41f6963 | Religion is just a long competition to see who can design the silliest hat. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 55fa7d9 | The same legends also carry warnings that such fated love may, sometimes, be the possession and the obsession of one, and only one, of the two souls twinned by destiny. But wisdom, in one sense, is the opposite of love. Love survives in us precisely because it isn't wise. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| c175ef1 | I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 8849d24 | I heard a warning, deep within - we usually do , when something worse than we can imagine is stalking us, and set to pounce. Fate's way of beating us in a fair fight is to give us warnings that we hear, but never heed. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 7e89ab9 | MEN WAGE WARS for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. Sooner or later, the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. Then, when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their minds in the bloody pit, when all the .. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| c2c3231 | The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance, Didier once said, is that it works so well. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 9671caf | Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 0772c96 | Istinata e, che ne s'shchestvuvat dobri ili loshi khora -- reche toi. -- Dobrota ili zlina pritezhavat samo delata im. Ima dobri dela ili loshi dela. Khorata sa prosto khora -- onova, koeto gi sv'rzva s dobroto i zloto, e onova, koeto v'rshat ili otkazvat da v'rshat. Istinata e, che edin mig na istinska obich v s'rtseto na vseki -- na nai-blagorodniia chovek na zemiata, ili na nai-pokvareniia -- s'd'rzha tsialoto prednaznachenie, i protses,.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| d3b9acc | In the beginning we feared everything--animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky--everything except each other. Now we fear each other, and almost nothing else. No-one knows why anyone does anything. No-one tells the truth. No-one is happy. No-one is safe. In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the li.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| af6d7fe | I felt a darkness growing within me that was too numb for sorrow and too cold for rage. | gregory david roberts | ||
| 9703a89 | The beautiful courage of us, the hope that defines our kind, is that we go on, no matter how much life wounds us. We walk. We face the sea and the wind and the salted truth of death, and we go on. | Gregory David Roberts |