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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d8c654e | H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.] | simile mind | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 2f0cd8f | She'd listened to a lot of these utopian discussions, and it was somehow comforting that Stephen and his friends could never quite work all the kinks out of their plan; that the world was as obstinately unfixable as her life was. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 531ab35 | The guiding principle of Martin's personality, the sum of his interior existence, was the desire to be left alone. If all those years he'd sought attention, even novelty, and if he still relished them, then that was because attention proved him different and solitude begins in difference. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| a62260c | Katz couldn't have said exactly why Walter mattered to him. No doubt part of it was simply an accident of grandfathering: of forming an attachment at an impressionable ago, before the contours of his personality were fully set. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| afae2a3 | The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 27463b5 | Tom's theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to.. | war science life spiritual-insights life-lesson | Jonathan Franzen | |
| bc13ab4 | The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 5f84d7d | Gary had hoped to find her more cooperative. He already had one "alternative" sibling and he didn't need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life." | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 43fc25d | For three years, all through junior high, my social death was grossly overdetermined. I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near-eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 58ea13f | They gathered not in anger but in celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more respectful way of being. A way, not incidentally, more in harmony with consuming. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| a36c042 | Well, and that's what really counts, isn't it? I've become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I'll have the whole problem pretty well licked. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 8a8124a | It's something to be anxious about," Manley said, "if you want to be anxious about something." | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 9145f5b | The advisors, on the other hand, were like older brothers and sisters. My favorite was Bill Symes, who'd been a founding member of Fellowship in 1967. He was in his early twenties now and studying religion at Webster University. He had shoulders like a two-oxen yoke, a ponytail as thick as a pony's tail, and feet requiring the largest size of Earth Shoes. He was a good musician, a passionate attacker of steel acoustical guitar strings. He l.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| f61068e | What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I'd outgrown the novel I'd once been so happy to live in | home | Jonathan Franzen | |
| bcefdaa | And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf--felt akin to an instance of religious grace. | words literature reading books | Jonathan Franzen | |
| dc14e40 | He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air's buoyancy even for an hour: the trad was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| ac0f942 | You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade. | professionalism home | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 3266df7 | He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| aea8e64 | To paraphrase Frank Zappa, she'd thought it was a man she wanted, but instead it was a muffin. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| df0d4c0 | Guys have four personalities: the one they use with their parents, the one they use around other adults, the one they use for talking to girls, and the one they use for hanging with their friends. Leakage between the various personality types can cause serious problems. | Pete Hautman | ||
| 1828300 | Dan is my ordinary friend. Everybody should have at least one ordinary friend and Dan is as ordinary as they come. He is so ordinary that most people have to meet him six or seven times before they remember his name. | Pete Hautman | ||
| 8eed5dd | Your first task is to find the place where your soul is at home. | Thomas Moore | ||
| 5c56ba2 | ongoing care for the soul rather than seek for a cure appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. I sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel. To approach this paradoxial point of tension where adjustment and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of our mystery-filled.. | care star soul | Thomas Moore | |
| a57d5a1 | Intel engineers did a rough calculation of what would happen had a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle improved at the same rate as microchips did under Moore's law. These are the numbers: Today, that Beetle would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost four cents! Intel engineers also estimated that if automobile fuel efficiency improved at the same rate as Moore's l.. | Thomas L. Friedman | ||
| 11895d8 | One day I would like to make up my own DSM-111 with a list of "disorders" I have seen in my practice. For example, I would want to include the diagnosis "psychological modernism," an uncritical acceptance of the values of the modern world. It includes blind faith in technology, inordinate attachment to material gadgets and conveniences, uncritical acceptance of the march of scientific progress, devotion to the electronic media, and a life-s.. | Thomas Moore | ||
| fed3f3b | Something deep in human make up needs and longs for a taste of eternity--a momentary release from the relentless pace of time. | time sex sexuality soul | Thomas Moore | |
| 7925f96 | But this is human life: the war, the deeds, The disappointment, the anxiety, Imagination's struggles, far and nigh, All human; bearing in themselves this good, That they are still the air, the subtle food, To make us feel existence. | soul | John Keats | |
| 03e24ea | I'm painfully aware that the experts in fields like religion and spirituality sometimes feel that bringing mysticism down so far into ordinary life is an insult to the great mystics and makes it all too light and breezy. I feel just the opposite. I believe that one day we'll understand that we've lost out on religion because we made it too lofty and distant. I see it as a simple quality of everyday life, and in that simplicity lie its beaut.. | Thomas Moore | ||
| ef52cf8 | Many of the arts practiced at home are especially nourishing to the soul because they foster contemplation and demand a degree of artfulness, such as arranging flowers, cooking, and making repairs. | Thomas Moore | ||
| bb20cb3 | Your body is not in control of your mind--your mind is in control of your body, and your mind is stronger than your body. Mind certainly is over matter. | Caroline Leaf | ||
| f8cccbf | Multitasking is a persistent myth. Paying deep, focused attention to one task at a time is the correct way. | Caroline Leaf | ||
| 72f5b2b | Daytime thinking is a building process, whereas nighttime thinking is a sorting process. | Caroline Leaf | ||
| a30f639 | The course of urban development in America is pushing the individual toward that line seperating proud independence from pitiable isolation. | urbanism | Ray Oldenburg | |
| 4d57539 | He sounded like me when I sensed there were drugs around: "All I know is that if someone wants to get high, or wants to watch while I smoke his dope, I'll do it. I really will." | David Sedaris | ||
| 8ddb645 | The thing to remeber is that more than anything in this world, these colored people wish they were white. | David Sedaris | ||
| 9097cc6 | In the role of Mary, six-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin. | David Sedaris | ||
| ef4267f | It was the artist's duty to find the appropriate objects, and the audience's job to decipher meaning. If the piece failed to work, it was their fault, not yours. | David Sedaris | ||
| 75e830a | Rather than admit defeat, I decided to change goals. | David Sedaris | ||
| ea64fd2 | Each one of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, sooner or later something's gonna get you. | pleasure | David Sedaris | |
| 7ec2ded | In the last month of the presidential campaign, I tuned in to conservative talk radio and listened as callers considered the unthinkable. One after another, they all threatened the same thing: "If McCain doesn't win, I'm leaving the country." "Oh, right," I'd say. "You're going to leave and go where? Right-wing Europe?" In the Netherlands now, I imagine it's legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn .. | David Sedaris | ||
| 6a3d156 | Use the word "y'all," and before you knew it, you'd find yourself in a haystack French-kissing an underage goat. Along with grits and hush puppies, the abbreviated form of you all was a dangerous step on an insidious path leading straight to the doors of the Baptist church." | David Sedaris | ||
| 6dce9b5 | never fall asleep in a Dumpster, never underestimate a bee, never drive a convertible behind a flatbed truck, never get old, never get drunk near a train, and never, under any circumstances, cut off your air supply while masturbating. | David Sedaris | ||
| 3a75594 | Hugh returned from his trip, and days later I still sounded like a Red Chinese asking questions about the democratic hinterlands. "And you actually saw people smoking in restuarants? Really! And offices, too? Oh, tell me again about the ashtrays in the hospital waiting room, and don't leave anything out." | smoking | David Sedaris | |
| 15f10fb | Her expression changed then, becoming fearful rather than merely pained. It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shakey ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape. | David Sedaris |