1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3332
3333
3334
3335
3336
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 |
| f1ae26b | Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes. | John Updike | ||
| fe527d5 | Though old himself, he disliked old men. | John Updike | ||
| 8e8ed8f | And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease? | identity life-philosophy philosophy science | John Updike | |
| 930f89d | With his white collar he forges god's name on every word he speaks | John Updike | ||
| 6e9306e | In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love.. | life self-consciousness | John Updike | |
| ab2d933 | His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill. | John Updike | ||
| 83016c1 | His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don't understand. | ceremony costume nelson-angstrom vulnerability | John Updike | |
| 5028a7e | My little ankle-strap sandals curled with embarrassment for her. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 15375ff | It's difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words "Thou shalt not." But who cannot summon the confidence to say: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature--why w.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 2c3b9c7 | I fear no bad angel, and have offended no good one. | Horace Walpole | ||
| 7530a48 | The guardians with their stern faces had no creative power. But they had strength and cunning, and they had found a way to steal and harness other people's powers for their own needs. They were forcing the children to describe the future they wanted, not the one that could be. | Lois Lowry | ||
| 70553f7 | They would go about town sighing and talking to themselves. "I love you," they would say to the imagined beloved, though it might have appeared to someone else that they were speaking to a snow shovel or an egg crate." | Mark Helprin | ||
| 3992ed7 | And he was seldom out of sight of the new bridges, which had married beautiful womanly Brooklyn to her rich uncle, Manhattan; had put the city's hand out to the country; and were the end of the past because they spanned not only distance and deep water but dreams and time. | Mark Helprin | ||
| 8d40a38 | The ones who are always on your side, or so they think, are the ones who keep you down. Everything they do keeps you down. They'll forgive you for anything. Rob, rape, pillage, and kill, and they'll defend you to yourself. They understand all outrages, and all your failings and faults, too. Perfect! You can go on that way forever. What do they care? Excuse me: they do care. They want it that way. How would they make a living, these servan.. | welfare | Mark Helprin | |
| e83f520 | A cat can outrace the best thoroughbred horse if only it can grasp the idea of racing. | Mark Helprin | ||
| f2043ee | They danced on the shore in marvelous, civilized, humorous reels in which the old contributed wit when they could not contribute grace, and the young listened to their elders, who told them in their dancing to hold on, to love, to be patient, and most of all, to trust. | Mark Helprin | ||
| fa9b168 | Every city has its gates, which need not be of stone. Nor need soldiers be upon them or watchers before them. At first, when cities were jewels in a dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective walls. To enter, one had to pass through gates, the reward for which was shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing expanse of greens, whites, and blues - wild and free - that stopped at the.. | Mark Helprin | ||
| 0bc4e79 | I want nothing more than what I have, for what I have is enough. I'm grateful for it. I foresee no reward, no eternal life. I expect only to leave further pieces of my heart in one place or another, but I love God nonetheless, with every atom of my being, and will love Him until I fall into black oblivion. | Mark Helprin | ||
| 783a35d | To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor close to being in love. | Mark Helprin | ||
| 54e6214 | But, Catherine, everything's that true despite us - the things they're talking about, natural laws - will always remain true despite us. What matters is what's true because of us. That's what's up for grabs. That's where the battle is. One remembers and values one's life not for its objective truths, but for the emotional truths...The only thing that's really true, that lasts, and makes life worthwhile is the truth that's fixed in the heart.. | Mark Helprin | ||
| dc1d1fe | Defiance, Catherine, is a gift of God, who is superior to nature. When nature comes to get you, honor God by treating it, as he would, with neither fear nor respect. | Mark Helprin | ||
| aa8ca59 | In a life, or a portion of a life illuminated, there's a fullness and a balance that no theory or abstraction can match. Why do people waste so much time on abstraction? The life that is given to us, that we play out, is something that you cannot any more grasp with systems and ideas than you can tame an elephant with tweezers. | Mark Helprin | ||
| 64db181 | I think it takes some terrible or great event to fuse two people together without inhibition. Without heat or shock, it can't be done. I believe that's why sexual love, which needn't be, is so intensely intertwined with sin. | event fuse love sex shock sin terrible | Mark Helprin | |
| 55134a6 | Many people just like to show that they're thinking the right thoughts. And as the 'right' thoughts change like the wind, so do they. | Mark Helprin | ||
| 37af007 | I've imagined great victories, and I've imagined great races. The races are better. | Mark Helprin | ||
| 1115482 | In America, Fredericka, they don't really have trains for people. The trains here are used mainly to transport pigs, television sets, and fruit. | trains | Mark Helprin | |
| 41be089 | Read what you find interesting, and then follow your interests. You'll find that in doing so you always generate enough to illuminate the next step. | reading reading-books reading-habits | Mark Helprin | |
| 3ded5a5 | If when she is aged you cannot see in the eyes of a woman the youth she was at eighteen, then it is not she that is old but you that are blind. | Mark Helprin | ||
| fd03736 | Anticipation is the heart of wisdom. If you are going to cross a desert, you anticipate that you will be thirsty, and you take water. | Mark Helprin | ||
| 561a933 | I didn't know the world could be like this ... I've never seen the sky in such a passion of kindness. | Mark Helprin | ||
| bfb47dc | Though the house itself was a fortress, still, Isaac Penn had thought to make sure that anyone who did manage to break in would be kept busy. Thus the vault was not a vault but rather a solid plug of molybdenum steel which extended into the wall for five feet. | security-system | Mark Helprin | |
| e71f579 | Sometimes love is taken away unjustly, but not until the very end do you stop believing and then it is very bitter. It is bitter because somewhere within you the perfect standard still lives, the pure expectation against which failure and betrayal are contrasted like the dark shadows on a moonlit road. | breakup-quotes love | Mark Helprin | |
| eec7d1e | Absence makes the clitoris grow fonder. | sexy-humor | Cassie Mae | |
| dab74a6 | It's just empty boxers. Empty. It's not like there's a penis hiding in them. | Cassie Mae | ||
| b5fd947 | What, exactly, are you doing here?" "We're trying to prevent a war. Isn't that what Jedi are supposed to do?" --Mara Jade Skywalker and Alema Rar" | Troy Denning | ||
| ddb90f8 | Vergere taught me to embrace my pain by surrendering to it. I made that pain a part of me--something I would never fight or deny. You have to do the same thing with your fear, Uncle Luke. Then it will have no power over you." - Jacen" | Troy Denning | ||
| 20a1259 | I was not rebelling by smoking dope or drinking, I was testing ideas. I was experimenting with voice, what I could say and still be heard in an atmosphere of prescribed truths. | testing-ideas | Terry Tempest Williams | |
| a2aa88d | The hostility of this landscape teaches me how to be quiet and unobtrusive, how to find grace among spiders with a poisonous bite. I sat on a lone boulder in the midst of the curlews. By now, they had grown accustomed to me. This too, I found encouraging--that in the face of stressful intrusions, we can eventually settle in. One begins to almost trust the intruder as a presence that demands greater intent toward life. On a day like today wh.. | Terry Tempest Williams | ||
| d162abf | The irony of our existence is this: We are infinitesimal in the grand scheme of evolution, a tiny organism on Earth. And yet, personally, collectively, we are changing the planet through our voracity, the velocity of our reach, our desires, our ambitions, and our appetites. We multiply, our hunger multiplies, and our insatiable craving accelerates. Consumption is a progressive disease. We believe in more, more possessions, more power, more .. | Terry Tempest Williams | ||
| 988b808 | Wilderness is not a place of isolation but contemplation. Refuge. Refugees.....Wilderness is a knife that cuts through pretense and exposes fear. Even in remote country, you cannot escape your mind. | Terry Tempest Williams | ||
| 5167d97 | Listening over and over to the voices through a family of instruments allowed us to recognize and appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each living thing in the meadow and forest. | listening music peter-the-wolf story voice | Terry Tempest Williams | |
| 64eb83a | And all your Faithless doubts Will not destroy The rising spring In me. | faithless | Terry Tempest Williams | |
| 9ea49d1 | This is what we can promise the future: a legacy of care. That we will be good stewards and not take too much or give back too little, that we will recognize wild nature for what it is, in all its magnificent and complex history - an unfathomable wealth that should be consciously saved, not ruthlessly spent. | Terry Tempest Williams | ||
| 83bef13 | When one of us says, "Look, there's nothing out there," what we are really saying is, "I cannot see." | Terry Tempest Williams |