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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f3652f6 | Modernity is the condition a society reaches when life is no longer conceived as cyclical. In a premodern society, where the purpose of life is understood to be the reproduction of the customs and practices of the group, and where people are expected to follow the life path their parents followed, the ends of life are given at the beginning of life. People know what their life's task is, and they know when it has been completed. In modern s.. | Louis Menand | ||
| 0fe58d9 | All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are gong to come tumbling out before you. I'm going to divulge them. What a juicy work that is, 'divulge.' Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat. | Nicholson Baker | ||
| 3be7cb3 | What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, butterflies settled in long fluffy tracts. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if you drove too fast your tires lost their grip, and some people lost their lives, skidding on butterflies. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 93791f6 | The disorder in Yashar's apartment was that comfortable littering and stacking that only another writer can recognize as order - the considered scatter of papers and books a writer builds around himself until it acquires the cozy solidity of a nest. | Paul Theroux | ||
| baed04d | So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which.. | sight-seeing train-travel travel | Paul Theroux | |
| 47b42da | There are few things more abrasive to the human spirit, even in Patagonia, than someone standing behind you chomping and sucking ice cubes. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 48875fc | A slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window and disappears and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves. | railways south-america travel-writing | Paul Theroux | |
| 7602daf | I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 5bcf90f | You two still establishing a pecking order?" "Oh, it's clear who's at the top," Jayan said. "The lesser hordes need to sort out their own hierarchy. Are you enjoying being the prize they're fighting over?" "Me?" "Yes, you. I'm afraid female magicians have quite a reputation. My young, naive subordinates are trying to work out if any of them stands a chance with you." "A chance?" She turned and began picking fruit again. "Am I to expect a ma.. | tessia the-magicians-apprentice trudi-canavan | Trudi Canavan | |
| e82893f | But right now it's a friend's love. | Trudi Canavan | ||
| 7bfac69 | People and land, they're the same, his father used to say. Neglect one and the other suffers eventually. | the-magicians-apprentice trudi-canavan | Trudi Canavan | |
| cf574a9 | Lo unico que se necesita en la vida es seguridad, conocimiento y mucho descaro. | Trudi Canavan | ||
| 52940c7 | It is said, in Imardin, that the wind has a soul, and that it wails through the narrow city streets because it is grieved by what it finds there. | Trudi Canavan | ||
| 8a93c78 | Nunca le gusto mirar atras. El pasado estaba repleto de malos recuerdos, y los buenos lo dejaban lleno de amargura | recuerdos | Trudi Canavan | |
| 0dab8ea | That is, adoration was patient and waiting while love or, if you liked, plain sexual passion banged everything about. It either shouted or thought it knew too much, and it had always left him cold and had not involved his heart. Therefore, if he wanted to get involved now it would be on his own terms and at his own pace. | Bessie Head | ||
| 4ed63ff | Life is such a gentle, treasured thing. I learn about it every minute. I think about it so deeply. | Bessie Head | ||
| b281b80 | I could spend the whole afternoon telling you about him, but it's not gonna do much good, is it? You never smelled his hair after he just got out of the bath, or carried him from the car after he'd fallen asleep on the way home, or heard the way he laughed when someone tickled him. So you'll just have to take my word for it: He was a great kid and he made you glad to be alive. | bittersweet-memories joy-of-having-a-child | Tom Perrotta | |
| 32c2323 | And of course they used her like a disposable object, without regret or apology, because that's what privilege is--the license to treat other people like shit while still getting to believe that you're a good person. | Tom Perrotta | ||
| b325b19 | When your words are futile, you're better off keeping them to yourself, | Tom Perrotta | ||
| 2341596 | Sarah smelled chocolate on Lucy's breath as she leaned forward to plant a soft kiss on the tip of her cute little nose. A vision came to her as her lips touched Lucy's skin, a sudden vivid awareness of the life they'd lead together from here on out, the hothouse intimacy of a single mother and her only child, the two of them sharing everything, breathing the same air, inflicting their moods on each other, best friends and bitter rivals, com.. | Tom Perrotta | ||
| 91f9894 | Nora had been training herself not to think too much about her kids. Not because she wanted to forget them - not at all - but because she wanted to remember them more accurately. For the same reason, she tried not to look too often at old photographs or videos...After a while, these scraps hardened into a kind of official narrative that crowded out thousands of equally valid memories, shunting the losers to some cluttered basement storage a.. | memory | Tom Perrotta | |
| c5a6e6f | Next time she'd have to ask him to keep the light on while he did it, so she could watch his face. That was the best part of the whole thing as far as she was concerned, the way a guy's face contorted so violently and then relaxed, as if some terrible mystery had just been solved. | mystery | Tom Perrotta | |
| 237fdf3 | He spun on his heels and jogged backward across the goal line, the ball raised triumphantly overhead, a gesture that looked arrogant when the pros did it on TV but felt right just then, allowing him to watch his teammates as they came charging joyfully down the field to join him. Todd spiked the ball and waited for them, his arms stretched wide, his chest heaving as if he were trying to suck the whole night into his lungs. All he wished was.. | Tom Perrotta | ||
| e4fd481 | Can't you just see all those enlightened monkey men sitting around a roaring woodfire around their Buddha saying nothing and knowing everything? | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 57cb478 | a choleric, red-faced, pudgy hater of everything, who could turn on the warmest and most charming smile in the world when real life confronted him sweetly in the night. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| ea9e9b9 | Life was dense, dark, ancient. They watched Dean, serious and insane at his raving wheel, with eyes of hawks. All had their hands outstretched. They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 2e22066 | Lissen Percepied do you believe in freedom?-then say what you want, it's poetry, poetry, all of it is poetry, great prose is poetry, great verse is poetry. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 4a45573 | I wasn't scare, I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. | stranger | Jack Kerouac | |
| 5088ae1 | I had nothing to offer anybody except for my own confusion | Jack Kerouac | ||
| c84f051 | Dammit that yodel of triumph of yours was the most beautiful thing I ever heard in my life. I wish I'd a had a tape recorder to take it down.' 'Those things aren't made to be heard by the people below,' says Japhy dead serious. 'By God you're right, all those sedentary bums sitting around on pillows hearing the cry of the triumphant mountain smasher, they don't deserve it. But when I looked up and saw you running down that mountain I sudde.. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 5f2bd65 | I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 85c36b5 | Does kittykat know there's a pigeon on the clothes closet? | beat-generation trembling-and-chaste | Jack Kerouac | |
| c983f2e | I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco - long, bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness. I stumbled around a few blocks. Weird bums (Mission and Third) asked me for dimes in the dawn. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| bc97ed0 | They were like the man with the dungeon stone and gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| b6cb6e4 | Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind." -- Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums" | Jack Kerouac | ||
| edcd27f | Not only was there no traffic but the rain came down in buckets and I had no shelter. I had to run under some pines to take cover; this did no good; I began crying and swearing and socking myself on the head for being such a damn fool. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 91f3509 | You know women," confided the fruitseller, ,,they love little cats... they always love the helpless things. But when it comes to men, you know, they'll want them cruel." The youth stranger smiled thinly. ,,Am I right?" laughed the man, slapping the youth on the back and reentering his store with the kitten, chuckling to himself. ,,Maybe so," mumbled the youth to himself. ,,How the hell should I know?" | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 44b2a97 | I was getting drunk and didn't care; everything was fine | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 96cd655 | It was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing. This we did. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 5701503 | you always go for the ones who don't really want you--she really wanted Adam Moorad, she had just been rejected coldly and subterraneanly by Julien--she was interested in thin ascetic strange intellectuals of San Francisco and Berkeley and not in big paranoiac bums of ships and railroads and novels and all that hatefulness which in myself is to myself so evident and so to others too--though and because ten years younger than I seeing none o.. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| cce06f8 | I've got my full rucksack pack and it's spring, I'm going to go Southwest to the dry land, to the long lone land of Texas and Chihuahua and the gay streets of Mexico night, music coming out of doors, girls, wine, weed, wild hats, viva! What does it matter? Like the ants that have nothing to do but dig all day, I have nothing to do but what I want and be kind and remain nevertheless uninfluenced by imaginary judgments and pray for the light. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| ed5dd86 | Smith, you don't realize it's a privilege to practice giving presents to others.' The way he did it was charming; there was nothing glittery and Christmasy about it, but almost sad, and sometimes his gifts were old beat-up things but they had the charm of usefulness and sadness of his giving. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 1c19ba1 | At least I had frost on my nose, boots on my feet, and protest in my mouth. | protest | Jack Kerouac | |
| 698dddd | I don't think anybody'd remember and certainly do know everybody'd lie. The reason I'm so bitter and, as I said, 'in anguish,' nowadays, or one of the reasons, is that everybody's begun to lie and because they lie they assume that I lie too: they overlook the fact that I remember very well many things (of course I've forgotten some...) I do believe that lying is a sin, unless it's innocent lie based on lack of memory, certainly the giving o.. | illusion lie lsd lying marxian-dialectical-propaganda sin truth | Jack Kerouac |