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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| eaf1505 | Abigail Adams, who did not set sail until November, seemed miffed by the enforced southward shift, swearing that she would try to enjoy Philadelphia but that "when all is done it will not be Broadway." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 6ba884e | In his self-serving view of events, Lee believed that he had performed a prodigious feat, rescuing his overmatched army from danger and organizing an orderly retreat. "'The American troops would not stand the British bayonets," he insisted to Washington. "You damned poltroon," Washington rejoined, "you never tried them!" Always reluctant to resort to profanities, the chaste Washington cursed at Lee "till the leaves shook on the tree," recal.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 83ac25e | Both Hamilton and Jefferson believed in democracy, but Hamilton tended to be more suspicious of the governed and Jefferson of the governors. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 968c5e9 | This fierce defender of private property--this man for whom contracts were to be sacred covenants--expressly denied the sanctity of any agreement that stripped people of their freedom. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 9f5ac15 | Hamilton's relatively short life robbed him not only of any chance for further accomplishment but of the opportunity to mold his historical image. | Ron Chernow | ||
| d493dc4 | Again and again in his career, Hamilton committed the same political error: he never knew when to stop, and the resulting excesses led him into irremediable indiscretions. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 6e1b969 | The task of government was not to stop selfish striving--a hopeless task--but to harness it for the public good. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 594f14d | This, I confess, hurts my feelings, and if it obtains credit will require a contradiction, | Ron Chernow | ||
| 2bb5fc9 | Clearly, this ambivalent twenty-year-old favored the Revolution but also worried about the long-term effect of habitual disorder, especially among the uneducated masses. Hamilton lacked the temperament of a true-blue revolutionary. He saw too clearly that greater freedom could lead to greater disorder and, by a dangerous dialectic, back to a loss of freedom. Hamilton's lifelong task was to try to straddle and resolve this contradiction and .. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 83d61eb | Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power's comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballet box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve just.. | power | David Mitchell | |
| 02041c7 | Glass half empty, glass half full, glass too small? | David Mitchell | ||
| e01161d | All rising suns set, Archivist. [...] All revolutions are [fantacy, lunacy], until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities. [...] I was not genomed to alter history, [...] no revolutionary ever was. | David Mitchell | ||
| 4f541c1 | I made it to Boxing Day because I was too miserable to hang myself. I lie. I made it to Boxing Day because I was too cowardly to hang myself. | David Mitchell | ||
| acd6be5 | I skanked deep on Wolt's pipe an' four days march from our free Windward to Kona Leeward seemed like four mil'yun, yay, babbybies o' blissweed cradled me that night, then the drummin' started up, see ev'ry tribe had its own drums. Foday o' Lotus Pond Dwellin' an' two-three Valleysmen played goatskin'n'pingwood tom-toms, an' Hilo beardies thumped their flumfy-flumfy drums an' a Honokaa fam'ly beat their sash-krrangers an' Honomu folk got the.. | David Mitchell | ||
| d919bd9 | Go to hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed! | David Mitchell | ||
| c1a3ab1 | Tumbado en el fondo de la canoa, veia balancearse las nubes. Las almas surcan las eras como las nubes los cielos, y aunque las nubes cambien continuamente de forma, color y tamano, una nube siempre es una nube, y un alma siempre es un alma. ?Quien sabe de donde vienen las nubes y donde estara el alma manana? Solo lo sabe Sonmi: el este y el oeste, la brujula y el atlas, si senor, el atlas de las nubes. | David Mitchell | ||
| 3f7d3cf | Nowadays, in Japan, when mother, or baby, or mother and baby die in childbirth, people say, 'Ah...they die because gods decide so.' Or, 'They die because bad karma.' Or, 'They die because o-mamori--magic from temple--too cheap.' Mr. de Zoet understand, it is same as bridge. True reason of many,. Many death of ignoration. I wish to build bridge from ignoration," her tapering hands form a bridge, "to knowledge. This," she lifts, with reverenc.. | David Mitchell | ||
| 1a68a60 | Linnaeus's last lesson, of which he himself was unaware, was that professorships kill philosophers. Oh, I'm vain enough to want my burgeoning Flora Japonica to be published one day--as a votive offering to human knowledge--but a seat at Uppsala, or Leiden, or Cambridge, holds no allure. My heart is the East's in this lifetime. This is my third year in Nagasaki, and I have work enough for another three, or six. During the court embassy I can.. | David Mitchell | ||
| 927bad0 | Do you know? He says. "I feel I've known you for years, not ninety minutes." | minutes time years | David Mitchell | |
| fa05dde | His skin was blotched as a dying banana. | David Mitchell | ||
| 13c58fa | Writing poetry's,' I looked around the solarium, but Madame Crommelynck's got a tractor beam, 'sort of . . . gay.' '"Gay"? A merry activity?' This was hopeless. 'Writing poems is . . . what creeps and poofters do.' 'So are you one of these ,,creeps"? 'No.' 'Then you are a ,,pooof-ter", whatever one is?' 'No!' 'Then your logic is eluding me." | David Mitchell | ||
| 994ce26 | But,' I ducked the subject, 'don't heaps of artists use pseudonyms?' 'Who?' 'Um . . .' Only Cliff Richard and Sid Vicious came to mind. | David Mitchell | ||
| 36d4093 | Just as I was flung over the threshold, I embraced Grigoire the Swiss Fiance in a rugger grip, determined that smug cockatoo was coming with me...Stone steps and icy pavements bruised my own flesh as black as his, banged my elbows and hips just as hard, but at least mine was not the only ruined evening in Bruges, and I yelled, kicking his ribs once for each word, before half-running, half-hobbling off on my whacked ankle, 'Love hurts!' | David Mitchell | ||
| f3df555 | A book can't be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant | genre | David Mitchell | |
| 6773255 | Poems are lenses, mirrors, and X-ray machines. | poetry | David Mitchell | |
| 372e437 | I emerge into a library/study with the highest book population density I have ever come across. Book walls, book towers, book avenues, book side streets. Book spillages, book rubble. Papperback books, hardback books, atlases, manuals, almanacs. Nine lifetimes of books. Enough books to build an igloo to hide in. The room is sentient with books. Mirrors double and cube the books. A Great Wall of China quantity of books. Enough books to makes .. | David Mitchell | ||
| 0cefdf1 | Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well." Pens scratch. "Oh, and beware of the verb 'seem'; it's a textual mumble. And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better." | David Mitchell | ||
| e902107 | So do not fritter away your days. Sooner than you fear, you will stand before a mirror in a care home, look at your body, and think, E.T., locked in a ruddy cupboard for a fortnight. | David Mitchell | ||
| 2f8284b | Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core. Rome'll decline and fall again, Cortes'll lay Tenochtitlan to waste again, and later...the sun'll grow cold again. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities. | David Mitchell | ||
| 60bf912 | Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly frocks, enrolled her for ballet classes, and sent her to horse-riding camp five summers in a row. But look at her. She turned into Lester anyway. She kisses Luisa's forehead. Luisa frowns, suspiciously, like a teenager. "What?" | daughter father growing-up human-nature identity mother parents roles | David Mitchell | |
| dc6e71e | Oh, diplomacy," said M.D., in his element, "it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents." | war | David Mitchell | |
| bb05275 | Nothing is more tiresome than being told what to admire, and having things pointed at with a stick. -Robert Frobisher | style-consultants | David Mitchell | |
| c1ea310 | Faith shall save your Soul from Death. Without Faith, Death is a drowning, the end of ends, and what sane man wouldn't fear that? But with Faith, Death is nothing worse than the end of the voyage we call life, and the beginning of an eternal voyage in a company of our Loved Ones, with griefs and woes smoothed out, and under the capacity of our Creator... | David Mitchell | ||
| 8c7256f | The heating systems composed works in the style of John Cage. | humor music | David Mitchell | |
| 5d81433 | If only human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders. | David Mitchell | ||
| ef5db3b | Mrs.Comb tightened her headscarf and wondered why human beings despise what is beautiful and good, and seek to destroy the things they need the most. She could not understand it. She could not begin to understand. | David Mitchell | ||
| 96b99c0 | He thinks of the all steps that gathered this party and marvels at the weaverless looms of fortune. | David Mitchell | ||
| e49dee0 | I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans. | computers dreams technology | David Mitchell | |
| 0767213 | Other nights, Ayrs likes me to read him poetry, especially his beloved Keats. He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine. | David Mitchell | ||
| 656c934 | Todas las fronteras son convenciones, hasta las nacionales. Y todas se pueden rebasar, pero primero hay que concebir esa posibilidad. | David Mitchell | ||
| df4e433 | The first of 'Goose's Two Laws of Survival.' It runs thus, 'The weak are meat the strong do eat.' " ... Henry grinned in the dark & cleared his throat. "The second law of survival states that there is no second law. Eat or be eaten. That's it." | humorous life | David Mitchell | |
| 6e0eedb | Love is a big knot of whys. | David Mitchell | ||
| 784537f | Well, you seem to have embraced Union propaganda wholeheartedly, Sonmi-451. And I might observe that you have embraced corpocracy propaganda wholeheartedly, Archivist. | David Mitchell | ||
| 1eb6ec7 | I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes. | horror movies thriller | David Mitchell |