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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9b7b2d1 | You Americans are a very singular people," he later recalled to one of his friends. "I went with my automaton all over my own country--the Germans wondered and said nothing. In France they exclaimed, Magnifique! Merveilleux! Superbe! The English set themselves to prove--one that it could be, and another that it could not be, a mere mechanism acting without a man inside. But I had not been long in your country, before a Yankee came to see me.. | automata conduct | Tom Standage | |
| 232bd2b | As an inspiration for terrorism, however, nationalism has been far more productive than religion. Terrorism experts agree that the denial of a people's right to national self-determination and the occupation of its homeland by foreign forces has historically been the most powerful recruiting agent of terrorist organizations, whether their ideology is religious (the Lebanese Shii) or secular (the PLO). | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 45d66cb | Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives - they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 0f2a5a7 | Dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant: it is somehow deemed, by Western people at least, to be morally superior,' says British psychologist Jacqueline Rose. 'Why dying with your victim should be seen as a greater sin than saving yourself is unclear.'The colonial West had created a two-tier hierarchy that privileged itself at the expense of 'The Rest'. The Enlightenment had preached the equality of all human beings, .. | religion neo-colonialism | Karen Armstrong | |
| 6c68c95 | Fundamentalism therefore reveals a fissure in society, which is polarized between those who enjoy secular culture and those who regard it with dread. As time passes, the two camps become increasingly unable to understand one another. Fundamentalism thus begins as an internal dispute, with liberalizers or secularists within one's own culture or nation. In the first instance, for example, Muslim fundamentalists will often oppose their fellow .. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 8326c50 | We routinely and rightly condemn the terrorism that kills civilians in the name of God but we cannot claim the high moral ground if we dismiss the suffering and death of the many thousands of civilians who die in our wars as 'collateral damage'. Ancient religious mythologies helped people to face up to the dilemma of state violence, but our current nationalist ideologies seem by contrast to promote a retreat into denial or hardening of our .. | terrorism | Karen Armstrong | |
| 8d68518 | Tu sei un predestinato, Howard; il tuo cammino e tracciato nelle stelle, ed e fatto della stessa sostanza dell'oro di Tutankhamon. Io, invece, rappresento solo una tappa. | love tutankhamon | Christian Jacq | |
| 94602c3 | Someone's affection would give someone else freedom. | Laura Dave | ||
| 8018a2f | But Eve - ow whoever comes after Eve - cant save him from eventually doing the hard work that comes after that. The work he has never wanted to do, that she spent the better part of her life trying to protect him from having to do. To jump beyond the impasses, the stuck places, to go deeper with someone. You can do the work to honor what you created, or you don't. But if you don't, you get to the same point with the next person, don't you? .. | Laura Dave | ||
| b43ac17 | If things were eventually going to work out, did it matter how you got there? Didn't it ultimately just matter that you got the ending you wanted? | Laura Dave | ||
| 7783f24 | Where do we go from here? I started off this crazy weekend by trying to make sense of these moments--these moments that you know you're going to remember--but like anything else, nothing exists without its opposite. So maybe it makes a certain kind of sense that I ended up thinking about the moments you know you'll forget. Or, more accurately, try to remember incorrectly. How do we all learn how to do that? Relive something again and again .. | Laura Dave | ||
| 41b58f3 | Even now, after Nick had caused me pain, the truth was I didn't want to cause him any. Wasn't that love, after all? | Laura Dave | ||
| cdc7586 | why people travel far from home-far from where they started. There was, of course, the obvious reason:escape. Escape from the monotony of every day. SO many of us chasing what we wished our everyday existence could be instead. But there was a less obvious and perhaps more important reason. Somewhere, often right in the middle of a trip, you got to believe this was your everyday life. You got to believe you were never going home again. | Laura Dave | ||
| d3fa93a | A small, inexplicable part of me was scared, right from the start - of counting on someone, of trusting that he'd always be there for me - as much it was exactly what another part of me wanted. | Laura Dave | ||
| 581439c | Sometimes there is no hope," whispered Das. "There's always some hope, Mr. Das." "No, Mr. Luczak, there is not. Sometimes there is only pain. And acquiescence to pain. And, perhaps, defiance at the world which demands such pain." "Defiance is a form of hope, is it not, sir?" | Dan Simmons | ||
| f7f595f | I desperately want to talk to her now. I want to ask her who it was who so deftly crafted and shaped the legend that was our love. | love-story | Dan Simmons | |
| e7be060 | Thus evolved some members of the Core--not altruists, but desperate survivalists who realized that the only way ultimately to win their never-ending zero-sum game was to stop the game. And to stop the game they needed to evolve into a species capable of empathy. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 72401ab | For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 35d8c4a | The young remember most deeply | Dan Simmons | ||
| fe2a917 | I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 2f44f02 | How do I know what I think until I see what I say? | Dan Simmons | ||
| a13c983 | He was, in other words, a careful man with careless impulses. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 3c1fce4 | Francis Crozier now understood that the most desirable and erotic thing a woman could wear were the many modest layers such as Sophia Cracroft wore to dinner in the governor's house, enough silken fabric to conceal the lines of her body, allowing a man to concentrate on the exciting loveliness of her wit | arctic hms-terror | Dan simmons | |
| ade6ba7 | The cruciform does not like pain. Nor do I but, like the cruciform, I am willing to use it to serve my purposes. And I will do so consciously, not instinctively like the mindless mass of alien tissue embedded in me. This thing only seeks a mindless avoidance of death by any means. I do not wish to die, but I welcome pain and death rather than an eternity of mindless life. Life is sacred--I still hold to that as a core element of the Church'.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| d564047 | I doubt if he ever confronted and acknowledged his own deeper motivations, except when they were as pure as spring water. | Dan Simmons | ||
| ef9d3d1 | But it sold three billion ..." "Look," said Tyrena. "In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 8694afe | We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 08923bd | at that moment, the sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains. | Dan Simmons | ||
| e04dce6 | It was fucking wonderful. It was fucking hell. | Dan Simmons | ||
| d7de539 | Goddamn fatherfucking asshole politician moral paraplegic dipshit drag-queen bitch! | insults | Dan Simmons | |
| 34e930a | Those who ignore history's lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them ... they may be forced to die by them. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 4081c11 | Be assured, I do not suffer from a sense of humor. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 84938ed | Inside me there was a lot of best friendship that no one but Ginger was using. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| 2422420 | I keep telling you that often the search proves more profitable than the goal. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| e219648 | Jamie: The only kind of deal that I can make is with money, and we haven't got any of that. Mrs. Frankweiler: You are very poor indeed if that is the only kind of deal you can make | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| f28f9f4 | A good lawyer never asks a witness a question she doesn't know the answer to.' 'But, Margaret, I'm not trying to be a good lawyer. I'm trying to be a good friend. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| c1f6dd8 | Becoming a team didn't mean the end of their arguments. But it did mean that the arguments became a part of the adventure, became discussions not threats. To an outsider the arguments would appear to be the same because feeling like part of a team is something that happens invisibly. You might call it caring. You could even call it love. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| 43dfefd | Shprintzl Rudashevsky's wide face takes on a philosophical, even mystic, blankness. She looks like she's wetting her pants and enjoying the warmth. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 3829107 | An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left with its engine running in the middle of his brain. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 237c486 | Naomi was a tough kid, so much tougher than Landsman ever needed to be. She was two years younger, close enough for everything Landsman did or said to constitute a mark that must be surpassed or a theory to disprove. She was boyish as a girl and mannish as a woman. When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, "In everything but sexual preference." | Michael Chabon | ||
| 10593e8 | He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them." | marriage conversation | Michael Chabon | |
| 65099b4 | I was still carrying the tuba, for no reason other than that, in my current circumstances, it passed for good company. That's another way of saying it was all I had. | Michael Chabon | ||
| ac407a4 | It would please him well enough to amount to no more in the end than a single great organ of detection, reaching into blankness for a clue. | Michael Chabon | ||
| dbe41a1 | He had been an indifferent father, better than his own, perhaps, but that was saying very little. When Tommy was still an unknown fishboy inside Rosa, Sammy had resolved never to let him feel abandoned, never to walk out on him, and until now, until tonight, he had managed to keep the promise, though there were times--the night he had decided to take that job at Gold Star Comics, for example--when it had been difficult. But the truth was th.. | Michael Chabon |