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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8e23b73 | A germ of religious exaltation, no bigger than a mustard seed. | Yann Martel | ||
| 8b1859e | Because of the gnawing feeling that no matter how hard they work their efforts will yield nothing, that what they build up in one year will be torn down in one day by others. | Yann Martel | ||
| 5a63898 | An epic simplicity | Yann Martel | ||
| 265f83d | Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It's the end. If the watch doesn't work properly, it must be fixed here and now by us. | Yann Martel | ||
| df9bfe0 | It's a joke in the zoo business, a weary joke, that the paperwork involved in trading a shrew weighs more than an elephant, that the paperwork involved in trading an elephant weighs more than a whale, and that you must never try to trade a whale, never. | paperwork | Yann Martel | |
| 524c9e5 | Then Richard Parker, companion of my torment, awful, fierce thing that kept me alive, moved forward and disappeared forever from my life. | Yann Martel | ||
| 3dd5cc2 | I am careful never to talk about religion. Who am I to kick at people's crutches? | Yann Martel | ||
| 4f0acae | Nil magnum nisi bonum. No greatness without goodness. | Yann Martel | ||
| f59895a | These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil within that has been let out. | Yann Martel | ||
| 364d9d2 | The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity - it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous possessive love that grabs at it what it can. | Yann Martel | ||
| 7018ac8 | What don't we realize is that we are a strange and forbidding species to wild animals. We fill them with fear. They avoid us as much as possible. It took centuries to still the fear in some pliable animals - domestication it's called - but most cannot get over their fear, and I doubt they ever will. When wild animals fight us, it is out of sheer desperation. They fight when they feel they have no other way out. | Yann Martel | ||
| 39be6c7 | That's the great, enduring challenge of our modern times, is it not, to marry faith and reason? So hard--so unreasonable--to root our lives upon a distant wisp of holiness. Faith is grand but impractical: How does one live an eternal idea in a daily way? It's so much easier to be reasonable. Reason is practical, its rewards are immediate, its workings are clear. But alas, reason is blind. Reason, on its own, leads us nowhere, especially in .. | Yann Martel | ||
| 85c7be9 | The reward for the watching eye and listening ear is great. | Yann Martel | ||
| 84eba6a | If Christ played doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation." | Yann Martel | ||
| 79be7e7 | I must say a word about fear. It's is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. it begins in your mind, always. | Yann Martel | ||
| 4fd5381 | The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity-- it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, jealous possessive love that grabs what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but a passing shadow of a cloud. | Yann Martel | ||
| 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 | ||
| 3f7525e | each of them was better together than either of them could have been apart. | Louis de Bernières | ||
| 461132e | Dolphins love each other so romantically, so playfully, so completely, that it is obvious that they are sent by God to teach us by their example to do the same. | Louis de Bernières | ||
| c3da266 | Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away. | love | Louis de Bernières | |
| e4fe2a5 | In those days Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. It had a sense of humanitarian responsibility and a myth of its own importance that was quixotically true and universally accepted merely because it believed in it, and said so in a voice loud enough for foreigners to understand. It had not yet acquired the schoolboy habit of waiting for months for permission from Was.. | Louis de Bernières | ||
| b365757 | Thus the headstrong German Shepherd dog, Fritz, and Moritz, the Barbaryy ape, innocently and gallantly defending his mate, plunge Greece into a political void. | Louis de Bernières | ||
| 2c537fa | Mustafa Kemal drily reminds his co-conspirators that the object is not to die for the revolution, but to live for it. | Louis de Bernières | ||
| 335c447 | Inside, the doctor filled an eyedropper with goat milk and began to drip it into the back of the marten's throat. It filled him with immense medical satisfaction when eventually it urinated on the knee of his trousers. This indicated healthy renal functioning. | Louis de Bernières | ||
| 05f4ee0 | There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to outcarol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence .. | legend | Colleen McCullough | |
| 032bf8a | No creo que el final sea muy feliz. Creo que obtendremos el resultado que se obtiene siempre con la imparcialidad. Nadie nos dara las gracias, y todos nos criticaran. | Colleen McCullough | ||
| 8a4395a | But not we men. We weren't fit to be told. For so you women think, and hug your mysteries, getting your backs on us for the slight God did in not creating you in His image. | Colleen McCullough | ||
| 0d83bd7 | And people are different from animals because they can have pictures on the screens in their heads of things which they are not looking at. They can have pictures of someone in another room. Or they can have a picture of what is going to happen tomorrow. Or they can have pictures of themselves as an astronaut. Or they can have pictures of really big numbers. Or they can have pictures of Chains of Reasoning when they're trying to work someth.. | Mark Haddon | ||
| 6fb3495 | Places remained and time flowed through them like wind through the grass. Right now. This was the future turning into the past. One thing becoming another. Like a flame on the end of a match. Wood turning into smoke. If only we could burn brighter. A barn roaring in the night. | Mark Haddon | ||
| b901832 | And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert, except that you can't see the desert because it is not a thing. | Mark Haddon | ||
| 598a0b4 | I took the little radio from the kitchen and I went and sat in the spare room and I tuned it halfway between two stations so that all I could hear was white noise and I turned the volume up really loud and I held it against my ear and the sound filled my head and it hurt so that I couldn't feel any other sort of hurt, like the hurt in my chest | Mark Haddon | ||
| 713183c | Everything seemed suspended, in some kind of balance. Obviously someone would come along and fuck it up, because that's what other people did. | Mark Haddon | ||
| 096fbe0 | sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth. | Mark Haddon | ||
| b1ef531 | He said, 'are you telling the truth?' I said, 'Yes. I always tell the truth. | Mark Haddon | ||
| 86b2dc4 | but in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. | Mark Haddon | ||
| 4653236 | I thought about how for a long time scientists were puzzled by the fact that the sky is dark at night, even though there are billions of stars in the universe and there must be stars in every direction you look, so that the sky should be full of starlight because there is very little in the way to stop the light from reaching earth. Then they worked out that the universe was expanding, that the stars were all rushing away from one another a.. | Mark Haddon | ||
| 36f2dea | Six thousand pounds of muscle powering a hoop of butcher's knives. The only animal | jaws poetry shark | Mark Haddon | |
| f678d0e | He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn't take orders. Also I didn't have 20/20 vision, which you needed to be a pilot. | subtlety | Mark Haddon | |
| 8fcd0ce | Because time is not like space. And when you put something down somewhere, like a protractor or a biscuit, you can have a map in your head to tell you where you have left it, but even if you don't have a map it will still be there because a map is a representation of things that actually exist so you can find the protractor or the biscuit again. And a timetable is a map of time, except that if you don't have a timetable time is not there li.. | Mark Haddon | ||
| 7f085cf | A Rough Guide Be polite at the reception desk. Not all the knives are in the museum. The waitresses know that a nice boy is formed in the same way as a deckchair. Pay for the beer and send flowers. Introduce yourself as Richard. Do not refer to what somebody did at a particular time in the past. Remember, every Friday we used to go for a walk. I walked. You walked. Everything in the past is irregular. This steak is very good. Sit down. Ther.. | Mark Haddon | ||
| 13e1338 | prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them. | Mark Haddon | ||
| 87b4ece | Life is difficult, you know. It's bloody hard telling the truth all the time. Sometimes it's impossible. | Mark Haddon | ||
| ef292a6 | I think I would make a very good astronaut. To be a good astronaut you have to be intelligent and I'm intelligent. You also have to understand how machines work and I'm good at understanding how machines work. You also have to be someone who would like being on their own in a tiny spacecraft thousands and thousands of miles away from the surface of the earth and not panic or get claustrophobia or homesick or insane. And I really like little.. | stars toby | Mark Haddon |