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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a0372cb | Not out of them are the shows of history erected: the world would be a grey, bloodless place were it composed entirely of Miss Schlegels. But the world being what it is, perhaps they shine out in it like stars. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 4111627 | All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt. So at all events thought old Mr. Graysford and young Mr. Sorley, the devoted missionaries who lived out beyond the slaughterhouses, always travelled third on the railways, and never came to the club. In our Father's house are many mansions, they taught, and there alone will the.. | E.M. Forster | ||
| ccfacf0 | Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,' she said. 'This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can't help hoping. | E.M. Forster | ||
| a612593 | Don't you think there are two great things in life that we ought to aim at--truth and kindness? Let's have both if we can, but let's be sure of having one or the other. | truth | E.M. Forster | |
| 01dd0fe | Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes; perhaps they will attain to a woman's tenderness. | E.M. Forster | ||
| baf292b | She had not died there. A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which society would measure the quick motions of man. | E.M. Forster | ||
| fc81af7 | Nonsense of this type is more difficult to combat than a solid lie. It hides in rubbish heaps and moves when no one is looking. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 809b598 | I believe in aristocracy. . . -- if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our quee.. | E. M. Forster | ||
| 9f95c98 | He did not know, but presently he would know. Great is information, and she shall prevail. | E.M. Forster | ||
| c452ec6 | Yet complicated people were getting wet - not only the shepherds. For instance, the piano-tuner was sopping. So was the vicar's wife. So were the lieutenant and the peevish damsels in his Battlesden car. Gallantry, charity, and art pursued their various missions, perspiring and muddy, while out on the slopes beyond them stood the eternal man and the eternal dog, guarding eternal sheep until the world is vegetarian. | wet | E.M. Forster | |
| 835f7a8 | So never give in," continued the girl, and restated again and again the vague yet convincing plea that the Invisible lodges against the Visible. Her excitement grew as she tried to cut the rope that fastened Leonard to the earth. Woven of bitter experience, it resisted her. Presently the waitress entered and gave her a letter from Margaret. Another note, addressed to Leonard, was inside. They read them, listening to the murmurings of the ri.. | letter resistance river water | E.M. Forster | |
| ccb7111 | For that little incident had impressed the three women more than might be supposed. It remained as a goblin footfall, as a hint that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy, who has recovered his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address behind him, and no name. | E.M. Forster | ||
| edaa008 | Give me life, with its struggles and victories, with its failures and hatreds, with its deep moral meaning and its unknown goal! | E.M. Forster | ||
| 5562c37 | What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? | E.M. Forster | ||
| 3620248 | Secrecy has this disadvantage: we lose the sense of proportion; we cannot tell whether our secret is important or not. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 918b53a | One. Margaret's own faith held firm. She knew the human soul will be merged, if it be merged at all, with the stars and the sea. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 22990c8 | The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again. | E.M. Forster | ||
| abb7a37 | It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious. | E.M. Forster | ||
| efc45e6 | Trying to imagine , who found indecorous, at a London performance of --to which in fact he was once taken. Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported --who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked by the profusion of naked statues. | lenny-bruce nathaniel-hawthorne norms puritanism | David Markson | |
| 3aca489 | But let yourself go. You are inclined to get muddled, if I may judge from last night. Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them. By understanding George you may learn to understand yourself. It will be good for both of you. | E.M. Forster | ||
| aa8dc14 | E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He's a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain't going to be no tea. | Katherine Mansfield | ||
| 838a2e7 | it was English, and the wych-elm that she saw from the window was an English tree. No report had prepared her for its peculiar glory. It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these roles do the English excel. It was a comrade bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clust.. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 40ea440 | Why has not England a great mythology? Our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our country-side have all issued through the pipes of Greece. Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here. It has stopped with the witches and the fairies. It cannot vivify one fraction of a summer field, or give names to half a dozen stars. England still waits for the supreme moment of he.. | fairies mythology myths poetry tolkien witches | E. M. Forster | |
| c7d5887 | My conviction," says the mystic, "gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it," and they had agreed that there was something beyond life's daily grey." | E.M. Forster | ||
| 953f577 | Everyone says that love requires the utmost honesty, but that's not entirely true. Once I knew that my father was suffering for my sake--really suffering--I learned that love, especially the parental kind, requires the heartwarming sacrifice that can only accompany fake enthusiasm. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| d530cab | All those adorable towheaded kids in the promotional film are going to turn thirteen. Once a family member hits puberty, odds are that everybody is not going to have the same ideals. Unless everybody gets together and agrees that the new ideals involve turning the front yard into a skate ramp and officially changing Dad's name to Fuckhead. | florida humor parenting | Sarah Vowell | |
| 64201d3 | Luther's point was that, according to Scripture, salvation is not a bake sale: | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 3956c9c | This is a sappy way to put it, but the Winthrop who warns Williams is the Winthrop I fell in love with, the Winthrop Cotton Mather celebrates for sharing his firewood with the needy, the Winthrop who scolds Thomas Dudley for overcharging the poor, the Winthrop of 'Christian Charity,' who called for 'enlargement toward others' and 'brotherly affection,' admonishing that 'if thy brother be in want and thou canst help him...if thou lovest God .. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| c5fd0d8 | Professor Winthrop delivered an influential lecture at Harvard proposing the earthquake might have been caused by heat and pressure below the surface of the earth. With God's help, of course, but God comes off as an engineer instead of a hothead vigilante.) | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 4be5bc0 | breathing secondhand smoke, being subject to unfair dairy pricing, and not being able to mime (or lap dance), though they are all tragic, tragic injustices, are not quite as bad as the systematic segregation of public transportation based on skin color. And while fighting for your right to lap dance and mime and breathe just regular pollution is a very fine, very American idea, it is not quite as brave as being middle-aged black woman in Al.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| e1cbb95 | The names of the compact's signers, including Anne Hutchinson's husband, Will, are listed below the text. Here lies the deepest reason why the Woman's Healing Garden strikes me as so forlorn - that Hutchinson is remembered here by pink echinacea in bloom instead of on the Portsmouth Compact plaque, where she belongs. All of the signers were there because of her, because she stood up to Massachusetts and they stood with her. But all the sign.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 7987d8a | The doo-wop stalker love song on a Cincinnati oldies station--you broke up with me because I was an obnoxious jerk and now you're dating him, so I drive by your house and stare in your window every night, thereby proving that I'm an even bigger creep than you thought | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 3481fd6 | The subject of Peter Gallagher's eyebrows, I realize, is a digression away from the Oneida Community, and yet, I do feel compelled, indeed almost conspiracy theoretically bound to mention that one of the reasons the Oneida Community broke up and turned itself into a corporate teapot factory is that a faction within the group, led by a lawyer named James William Towner, was miffed that the community's most esteemed elders were bogarting the .. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| b4d6315 | Then, as if getting blown up is not enough to worry about, after I take a seat on the steps, I get a look at the choir. Thirty singers and from where I'm sitting, it looks like only two of them are black. It's not like I'm saying suburban white people shouldn't sing. Because I love Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher." | Sarah Vowell | ||
| dd38e11 | The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. | storytelling | Sarah Vowell | |
| 9055f0a | In other words, every cent the French government spent on guns for the Americans was another centime it would not have to spend on butter for the starving peasants who would one day storm Versailles. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 69c536a | Not until Theodore Roosevelt resigned his prestigious position as assistant secretary of the navy in 1898 to fight with the Rough Riders in the Cuban dirt would there be a rich man as weirdly rabid to join American forces in combat as Lafayette was. The two shared a child's ideal of manly military glory. Though in Lafayette's defense, he was an actual teenager, unlike the thirty-nine-year-old TR. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| f712772 | I swear on Peter Stuyvesant's peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston's communitarian English majors. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 1fc3751 | It was made clear to me that I wasn't supposed to trouble the moody Creator with any pesky questions about the eccentricities of His cosmic system. So when I asked about stuff that confused me, like "How come we're praying for the bar to be shut down when Jesus himself turned water into wine?", I was shushed and told to have faith. Thus my idea of heaven was that I got to spend eternity sitting at the feet of God, grilling Him. "Let me get .. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 541a50b | When fixing problems, always do the least you can. | Steve Krug | ||
| 3e18878 | If you can't make something self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory. | Steve Krug | ||
| ed24b1e | Yeah, Rubio," snorts Bear. "If I had a face like yours, I'd appreciate anyone who could make me look good. So shut up." | Gordon Korman | ||
| 5435177 | Our fans are great; our team is nifty! We're going to get blown out by fifty! | Gordon Korman | ||
| 641bb85 | Hey, things like that happen at the Academy too," I insisted, almost triumphantly. "Last year the freezers failed so there was no ice for"--the wind went out of my sails as I realized how lame this was going to sound--"the sushi bar." He nodded sympathetically. "You guys should get T-shirts made. You know: I Survived the Sushi Crisis." | Gordon Korman |