1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3300
3301
3302
3303
3304
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0047b43 | I wasn't able to think about them directly or summon them up in any conscious way, but as I put together their puzzles and played with their Lego pieces, building evermore complex and baroque structures, I felt that I was temporarily inhabiting them again--carrying on their little phantom lives for them by repeating the gestures they had made when they still had bodies. | Paul Auster | ||
| 128cd07 | It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. | Paul Auster | ||
| 1b9e082 | The big event that rips through the heart of things and changes life for everyone, the unforgettable moment when something ends and something else begins. Was that what this was, he asked himself, a moment similar to the outbreak of war? No, not quite. War announces the beginning of a new reality, but nothing had begun today, a reality had ended, that was all, something had been subtracted from the world, and now there was a hole, a nothing.. | Paul Auster | ||
| 14836b7 | Quinn froze. There was nothing he could do now that would not be a mistake. Whatever choice he made--and he had to make a choice--would be arbitrary, a submission to chance. Uncertainty would haunt him to the end. At that moment, the two Stillmans started on their way again. The first turned right, the second turned left. Quin craved an amoeba's body, wanting to cut himself in half and run off in two directions at once. (Chapter 7) | postmodern | Paul Auster | |
| ca73c8b | The grinding search for money can crush the spirit out of you unless you're made of steel. | money | Paul Auster | |
| e3d7a33 | Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. | Paul Auster | ||
| 5a1b526 | Everything solid for a time, and then the sun comes up one morning and the world begins to melt. | Paul Auster | ||
| 48062e8 | Winter solstice: the darkest time of the year. No sooner has he woken up in the morning than he feels the day beginning to slip away from him. There is no light to sink his teeth into, no sense of time unfolding. Rather, a feeling of doors being shut, of locks being turned. It is a hermetic season, a long moment of inwardness. The outer world, the tangible world of materials and bodies, has come to seem no more than an emanation of his mind.. | Paul Auster | ||
| df2e523 | because he was a man who had suffered but because he was a man who had suffered and could still crack jokes. | Paul Auster | ||
| 5974cfa | I'm an intelligent pessimist, a pessimist who has occasional flashes of optimism. Nearly everything happens for the worst, but not always, you see, nothing is ever always, but i'm always expecting the worst, and when the worst doesn't happen, I get so excited I begin to sound like an optimist. | Paul Auster | ||
| 8baba8e | Intellectuals suck, Nathan. They are the most boring people in the world. | Paul Auster | ||
| 29ba665 | All this belongs to the language of ghosts. There are many other possible kinds of talks in this language. Most of them begin when one person says to another: I wish. What they wish for might be anything at all, as long as it is something that cannot happen. I wish the sun would never set. I wish money would grow in my pockets. I wish the city would be like it was in the old days. You get the idea. | Paul Auster | ||
| 7cd1b18 | l shy 'kthr rhb@ mn mwjh@ 'GrD rjl myt. | Paul Auster | ||
| f9974dc | If you do not consider the man before you to be human, there are few restraints of conscience on your behavior towards him. | Paul Auster | ||
| f33318a | Would it be possible, he wondered, to stand up before the world and with the utmost conviction spew out lies and nonsense? To say that windmills were knights, that a barber's basin was a helmet, that puppets were real people? Would it be possible to persuade others to agree with what he said, even though they did not believe him? In other words, to what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement? The answer is obvi.. | fiction reading | Paul Auster | |
| b699ee4 | Upper-class parents enable their kids to form weak ties by exposing them more often to organized activities, professionals, and other adults. Working-class children, on the other hand, are more likely to interact regularly only with kin and neighborhood children, which limits their formation of valuable weak ties. | society | Robert D. Putnam | |
| 3ebe0cf | Busy people tend to forgo the one activity - TV watching _ that is most lethal to community involvement | Robert D. Putnam | ||
| 6f6acab | People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism. | Robert D. Putnam | ||
| 4bf9bf7 | TV-based politics is to political action as watching ER is to saving someone in distress. | Robert D. Putnam | ||
| c902999 | If we think of politics as an industry, we might delight in its new "labour-saving efficiency", but if we think of politics as democratic deliberation, to leave people out is to miss the whole point of the exercise." | Robert D. Putnam | ||
| 1a5f351 | By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can't think. The comedy of law's sterile logic--large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for.. | bureaucrats human-judgment law regulation responsibility tyranny | Philip K. Howard | |
| bfa8311 | seed of greatness exists in every human being. Whether it sprouts or not is our choice. | Sean Patrick | ||
| 9c452ac | This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship--replete with ever more rights and responsibilities--would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or lang.. | civilization consent contract-for-service government politics rome soldiers voluteer-army war warfare western-culture | Victor Davis Hanson | |
| 959ec11 | Who asks for justice? We make our own justice. | Frank Herbert | ||
| c22217d | You've turned Mikey's death into a life sentence - for all of you - for Paul, for Jordan. You turned them into lifers. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 97e41ab | We lay there with our bodies touching, and as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth around us smelled like what it was, moist dirt where animals lived their daily lives. I could have yelled for hours. | rape survival | Alice Sebold | |
| b15db6e | I now think that was distanced me from Tricia and from the Rape Crisis Center was their use of generalities. I did not want to be one of a group or compared with others. It somehow blindsided my sense that I was going to survive. Tricia prepared me for failure by saying that it would be okay if I failed. She did this by showing me that the odds out there were against me. But what she told me, I didn't want to hear. In the face of dismal sta.. | rape-survivor therapy | Alice Sebold | |
| 8f8b68c | One day, Buckley came home from the second grade with a story he'd written: "Once upon a time there was a kid named Billy. He liked to explore. He saw a hole and went inside but he never came out. The End." | i-do-not-know-waht-to-tag | Alice Sebold | |
| e279f62 | My mother gave Lindsey a meaningful look. 'We are not discussing this further. You can go up to your room and wait or wait with me. Your choice.' Lindsey was dumbfounded. She stared at our mother and knew what she wanted most: to flee, to run out into the cornfield where my father was, where I was, where she felt suddenly that the heart of her family had moved. But Buckley wtood warm against her. ~pg 143; Lindsey, Buckley and Mom | Alice Sebold | ||
| 9c047bd | I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was Ray and he was Indian. He had an accent and was dark. I wasn't supposed to like him. Clarissa called his large eyes, with their half closed lids, "freak-a-delic," but he was nice and smart and helped me cheat on my algebra exam while pretending he hadn't. He kissed me by my locker the day before we turned in our photos for the yearbook. When the yearbook came out at the end of the summ.. | Alice Sebold | ||
| f7e3371 | She used the bathroom, running the tap noisily and disturbing the towels. She knew immediately that her mother had bought these towels -- cream, a ridiculous color for towels -- and monogrammed -- also ridiculous, my mother thought. But then, just as quickly, she laughed at herself. She was beginning to wonder how useful her scorched-earth policy had been to her all these years. Her mother was loving if she was drunk, solid if she was vain... | Alice Sebold | ||
| 682cb31 | I would do what I did best, I thought. I would wait. It was only a matter of time, after all. | Alice Sebold | ||
| a78910e | Exactly,' she said, and made her point as simply as that. There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven. ~pg 8 | Alice Sebold | ||
| 2eea24a | I knew my mother's limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 115c731 | In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky. | emotional-abuse rape sexual-abuse | Alice Sebold | |
| 99fc2c3 | She was in the downstairs bathroom sneaking bites from the macaroons my father's firm always sent us for Christmas. She ate them greedily they were like suns bursting open in her mouth. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 03a5fd4 | When Lindsey and I played Barbies Barbie and Ken got married at sixteen. To us there was only one true love in everyone's life we have no concept of compromise or retries. | Alice Sebold | ||
| b442c4a | When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 55a7701 | You're dead and you have to accept it. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 8dd18c4 | I was not in the bathroom, in the tub, or in the spigot; I did not hold court in the mirror above her head or stand in miniature at the tip of every bristle on Lindsey's or Buckley's toothbrush. In some way I could not account for- had they reached a state of bliss? were my parents back together forever? had Buckley begun to tell someone his troubles? would my father's heart truly heal?- I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn f.. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 50eb83d | I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really. | drawing rebel rebellion talent teachers | Alice Sebold | |
| 3d43e6a | I was unable to recognize something that I would come up against time and time again. You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate. So how could I be both..? | Alice Sebold | ||
| 5201df2 | As he wrote, the candle in the window kept flickering, and despite his desk lamp the flickering distracted him. He sat back in the old wooden school chair he'd had since college and heard the reassuring squeak of the wood under him. At the firm he was failing to even register what was needed of him. Daily now he faced column after of column of meaningless numbers he was supposed to make square with company claims. He was making mistakes wit.. | Alice Sebold | ||
| d0eca82 | The living room seemed to be where no living ever actually occurred. | Alice Sebold |