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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 937e71e | At the center of the bouquet is a monstrous peony, probably purchased on sale at the supermarket. By Tuesday its curling petals had begun to collect at the bottom of the vase, infusing the room with the faint but unmistakable sweet odor of corruption and imminent death. ... In Tick's opinion there was something extravagantly excessive about the peony from the start, as if God had intended so suggest with this particular bloom that you could.. | Richard Russo | ||
| 4448e29 | When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in. | Richard Russo | ||
| 604129b | I hear you don't write any more," he says... "Not true," I inform him. "You should see the margins of my student papers." "Not the same as writing a book though, right?" "Almost identical," I assure him. "Both go largely unread." | Richard Russo | ||
| 3e51ecd | The drive back to the Mid-fucking-west was always brutal, his parents barely speaking to each other, as if suddenly recalling last year's infidelities, or maybe contemplating whom they'd settle for this year. Sex, if you went by Griffin's parents, definitely took a backseat to real estate on the passion gauge. | Richard Russo | ||
| eb1f30a | diverting one's attention from the past was not the same as envisioning and embarking upon a future. On the other hand, if the past were razed, the slate wiped clean, maybe fewer people would confuse it with the future, and that at least would be something. | Richard Russo | ||
| 058c4d0 | And so began my final stage of my boyhood in Mohawk. Later, as an adult, I would return from time to time. As a visitor, though, never again as a true resident. But then I wouldn't be a true resident of any other place either, joining instead the great multitude of wandering Americans, so many of whom have a Mohawk in their past, the memory of which propels us we know not precisely where, so long as it's away. Return we do, but only to gain.. | Richard Russo | ||
| 2ae8154 | She never answers during the day," Max explained. "She lets her machine pick up." People like you are the reason other people get answering machines to begin with," Miles told him. "In fact, people like you are driving a lot of modern technology." | Richard Russo | ||
| a1cf58e | And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn't be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can't fix anyway. Telling | Richard Ford | ||
| 57b16be | Fincher was the kind of Southerner who will try to address you through a web of deep and antic southernness, and who assumes every body in earshot knows all about his parents and history and wants to hear an update about them at every opportunity. He looks young, but still manages to act 65. | southern | Richard Ford | |
| e0ef468 | Against these forces -- an earth rotating, a sun lowering its angle in the sky, winds filling with rain and the geese arriving -- time is just a made-up thing, and recedes in importance, and should. | Richard Ford | ||
| 6313d5c | Most things dopn't stay the way they are very long. | Richard Ford | ||
| c206d26 | I had more positive views. Which made me feel that although I hadn't been taught to assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with other or for them. And assimilating possibly wasn't so hard and risky and didn't need to be permanent. This state of mind conferred another freedom on me and was like starting life over, or as I've already said, becoming someone else -- but someone.. | Richard Ford | ||
| f981c78 | that life can't be escaped and must be faced entirely. | Richard Ford | ||
| ec9bf84 | She looked at me and the expression on her face was an expression of dislike, one I hadn't seen before but knew right away. Later I would see it turned toward other people. But the first time was looking at me and was because she believed she'd done all she could that was correct and the best thing, and it had only gotten her stuck with me. And I couldn't do anything that mattered. Though if I could I would've had my father be there, or War.. | Richard Ford | ||
| 767e649 | I don't look in mirrors anymore. It's cheaper than surgery. | Richard Ford | ||
| 553c32b | How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of prairie air, the ground widening and flattening, growing less and less distinct below you. You notice it, or you don't notice it. But you're already too far away and all is lost. | Richard Ford | ||
| 0d492b2 | All this is a natural part of the aging process, in which you find yourself with less to do and more opportunities to eat your guts out regretting everything you have done. | Richard Ford | ||
| 906df66 | He was really quite addicted to her face, and yet for the longest time he could not remember it at all, it being so much brighter than sunlight on a pool of water that he could only recall that blinding brightness; then after awhile, since she refused to give him her photograph, he began to practice looking away for a moment when he was still with her, striving to uphold in his inner vision what he had just seen (her pale, serious, smooth a.. | memory photography | William T. Vollmann | |
| 4c347a9 | This is my final book. Any subsequent productions bearing my name will have been composed by a ghost. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| f511c76 | When it comes to revolutionaries, trust only the sad ones. The enthusiastic ones are the oppressors of tomorrow. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 622b7ca | All that's happened is inconsequential; it cannot hurt us anymore; there's only music, which lives within us and beyond us, needing us to express it but capable of surviving forever between expressions. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| a042c8c | Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is an armour. | innocence life-lessons | Hilary Mantel | |
| 5aec27b | It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| b84d713 | It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms say. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| b20b3a6 | The gift blesses the giver. | an-occult-history-of-britain gifts thomas-cromwell | Hilary Mantel | |
| e21c262 | He does not know what caused him to break off from Weston and walk out. Perhaps it was when the boy said 'forty-five or fifty'. As if, past mid-life, there is a second childhood, a new phase of innocence. It touched him, perhaps, the simplicity of it. Or perhaps he just needed air. Let us say you are in a chamber, the windows sealed, you are conscious of the proximity of other bodies, of the declining light. In the room you put cases, you p.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 887c747 | So this morning--waking early, brooding on what Liz said last night--he wonders, why should my wife worry about women who have no sons? Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 92ecc72 | Thomas More syas that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don't do that. They're too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 3b585d0 | Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It's true he is at Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he thought, she'll know how to find me. She'll look for the cardinal, drawn through the space between worlds by incense and candlelight. Whereever the cardinal is, I will be. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| e8108f8 | But I want him north," Howard says. "Tell him to go. Tell him Norfolk says he must be on the road and out of here. Or--and tell him this--I will come where he is, and I will tear him with my teeth." "My lord." He bows. "May I substitute the word 'bite'?" Norfolk approaches him. He stands far too close. His eyes are bloodshot. Every sinew is jumping. He says, "Substitute nothing, you misbegotten--" the duke stabs a forefinger into his should.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| fb20f97 | The hunter is among the most innocent of men; living in the moment makes him feel pure. When he returns in the evening, his body aches, his mind is full of pictures of leaves and sky; he does not want to read documents. His miseries, his perplexities have receded, and they will tay away, provided--after food and wine, laughter and exchange of storeis--he gets up at dawn to do it all over again. But the winter king, less occupied, will begin.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 83cc46a | Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a . . . person? It isn't as if you could afford to be. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| c49ee04 | The ladies of Italy, seemingly carefree, wore constructions of iron beneath their silks. It took infinite patience, not just in negotiation, to get them of of their clothes. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 3eef1f4 | There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented or new things that pretend to be old. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| edb0866 | God knows what risks we take, God knows all that Danton has done. God and Camille. God will keep his mouth shut. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 0c069e3 | Wolsey always said that the making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms say. It is the processions that matter, the exchange of gifts, the royal games of bowls, the tilts, jousts and masques; these are not preliminaries to the process, they are the process itself. | royalty | Hilary Mantel | |
| da5062a | You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| ae7eb67 | Some said the world would end in 1533. Last year had its adherents too. Why not this year? There is always somebody ready to claim that these are the end times, and nominate his neighbor as the Antichrist. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 59b0c4d | No son wishes to see his son less powerful than himself. | pg-257 the-dead-coplain-of-their-burial thomas-cromwell | Hilary Mantel | |
| f12bf8c | This was the usual thing. What I asked for was facts: what I got was a sermon. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 93d104b | You know young Francis Weston? He that waits on the king? His people are giving out that you're a Hebrew... Next time you're at court, take your cock out and put it on the table and see what he says to that. ~ I do that anyway, if the conversation flags. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| efcffd6 | You know what it's like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a man's leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter was crushed at the front. They heard a man roar out his last confession, while another whispered his last will and testament. And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, t.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| af922b8 | When no one else could see, he could see: and that is what it means to be a king. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| f349df7 | The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain--the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in the man's eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? | Hilary Mantel |