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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 503bb26 | And so does pity lead straight to disaster. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 65bafc9 | He settled for writing a letter, in a quiet corner, while Temeraire dictated his own: "Gentlemen, I am very happy to accept your commission, and we should like to be the eighty-first regiment, if that number is not presently taken. We do not need any rifles, and we have got plenty of powder and shot for our cannons," Laurence wrote with a vivid awareness of the reactions this should produce, "but we are always in need of more cows and picks.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| b4f9295 | I will lay my hand upon the flow of time, if need be, that you shall have however much of it you seek. | fantasy rumpelstiltskin | Naomi Novik | |
| fa30dcc | Laurence felt his face going red; she was sitting there in breeches that showed every inch of her leg, with a shirt held closed only by a neckcloth; he shifted his gaze to the unalarming top of her head and managed to say, "Your servant, Miss Harcourt." | Naomi Novik | ||
| 1f20218 | They are ours," he said, "although not properly the sailors: they are only along because we would not leave them to drown, and ought to be more grateful for it than they are. Laurence," he said, turning, "this is Palta, and that man is called Taruca: Iskierka snatched him, and I cannot find she asked him in the least." | Naomi Novik | ||
| 2a2fc11 | I know i'm making her sound like something out of a story. But it was the other way around. When my mother told me stories about the spinning princess or the brave goose-girl or the river-maiden, in my head I imagined them all a little like Kasia; that was how I thought of her. And I wasn't old enough to be wise, so I loved her more, not less, because I knew she would be taken from me soon. | Naomi Novik | ||
| e1ce503 | I'd chosen- not the lesser evil, but the less immediate one. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 6060664 | I bent down and sang Tihas, tihas, kai tihas, kai tihas, over and over, and found myself falling into the sound of the birthday song about living a hundred years. That sounds absurd, but the rhythm of it was easy and familiar, comforting. I stopped having to think about the words: they filled my mouth and spilled over like water out of a cup. I forgot to remember Jerzy's mad laughter, and the green vile cloud that had drowned the light insi.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 68cab58 | Didn't he come to--to ask you for some magic?" "No, he came to enjoy the view of the Wood," the Dragon said. "Of course he came for magic, and I sent him about his business, which is hacking at enemy knights and not meddling in things he scarcely understands." | Naomi Novik | ||
| a907cf5 | They would have devoured my family and picked their teeth with the bones, and never been sorry at all. Better to be turned to ice by the Staryk, who didn't pretend to be a neighbor. | neighborliness | Naomi Novik | |
| 6ee39f6 | I did not really need Magretta to tell me that love had caught my father like an unwilling fish, and having slipped the hook he had been glad to forget he had ever been on it in the first place. | descriptive | Naomi Novik | |
| 590551e | The crew were all of them inclined to cough and sneeze, the boys particularly, and Keynes said, "We ought put them all in the water: to keep the chest warm must be the foremost concern." Laurence agreed without thinking and was shortly appalled by the sight of Emily bathing with the rest of the young officers, innocent of both clothing and modesty. "You must not bathe with the others," Laurence said to her urgently, having bundled her out a.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| cc956e4 | But I realized now that without quite thinking it through, I'd half-imagined myself a place here in the tower. My little room upstairs, a cheerful rummaging through the laboratory and the library, tormenting Sarkan like an untidy ghost who left his books out of place and threw his great doors open, and who made him come to the spring festival and stay long enough to dance once or twice. | Naomi Novik | ||
| faedda4 | Once down by the shore, only Temeraire went directly into the deep water and began to swim. Maximus came tentatively into the shallows, but went no further than he could stand, and Lily stood on the shore watching, nosing at the water but not going in. Levitas, as was his habit, first wavered on the shore, and then dashed out all at once, splashing and flapping wildly with his eyes tightly shut until he got out to the deeper water and began.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| da91137 | I do not know that the Chinese system is any worse; there is a limit to the evil one despot alone can do, and if he is truly vicious he can be overthrown; a hundred corrupt members of Parliament may together do as much injustice or more, and be the less easy to uproot. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 8d15419 | I looked at Lukas. He did not look very pleased, but he did not look very sad either. He was only giving me a considering eye. I was a pig at the market he had decided to buy. He was hoping I fattened up well and gave him many piglets before it was time to make bacon. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 86db772 | It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every insterstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker. | insterstellar-colony | Charles Stross | |
| 5dae395 | It would not be hard to imagine that a happy hermit, living in isolation, might feel connected to everything in nature and all people on the planet and not be at all affected by a dearth of human neighbors. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 49f09d0 | If we are not careful, it is all too easy to fall into becoming more of a human doing than a human being, and forget who is doing all the doing, and why. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 5ba5a17 | That sentence is: "Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine." In other words, no attachments--especially to fixed ideas of yourself and who you are." | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| fe9f387 | Meditation is neither shutting things out nor off. It is seeing things clearly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| e98f2fd | Feeling threatened can easily lead to feelings of anger and hostility and from there to outright aggressive behavior, driven by deep instincts to protect your position and maintain your sense of things being under control. When things do feel "under control," we might feel content for a moment. But when they go out of control again, or even seem to be getting out of control, our deepest insecurities can erupt. At such times we might even ac.. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| bce4d73 | and remind you that you are here now, and that when you get there, you will be there. If you miss the here, you are likely also to miss the there. If your mind is not centered here, it is likely not to be centered just because you arrive somewhere else. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 2bf4ceb | Anybody who is imitating somebody else, no matter who it us, is heading in the wrong direction. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself. | inspiration wisdom imitation meditation | Jon Kabat-Zinn | |
| 2283d88 | Whether we are basically healthy at the moment or have a terminal illness, none of us knows how long we have to live. Life only unfolds in moments. The healing power of mindfulness lies in living each of those moments as fully as we can, accepting it as it is as we open to what comes next--in the next moment of now. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| cdedc81 | But when we start to focus in on what our own mind is up to, for instance, it is not unusual to quickly go unconscious again, to fall back into an automatic-pilot mode of unawareness. These lapses in awareness are frequently caused by an eddy of dissatisfaction with what we are seeing or feeling in that moment, out of which springs a desire for something to be different, for things to change. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 2f0ae5e | We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. The incessant stream of thoughts flowing through our minds leaves us very little respite for inner quiet. And we leave precious little room for ourselves anyway just to be, without having to run around doing things all the time. Our actions are all too frequently driven rather than undertaken in awareness, driven by those perfectly ordinary thoughts and impulses.. | psychology | Jon Kabat-Zinn | |
| 17802ac | Above all, meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment. It's not about getting somewhere else, but about allowing yourself to be where you already are. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 88c8b1d | When asked about his apparent lack of anger toward the Chinese by an incredulous reporter at the time he won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama replied something to the effect that: "They have taken everything from us; should I let them take my mind as well?" | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 6d0ba13 | R]emain open to not knowing, perhaps allowing yourself to come to the point of admitting, "I don't know," and then experimenting with relaxing a bit into this not knowing instead of condemning yourself for it. After all, in this moment, it may be an accurate statement of how things are for you." | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 02ae95f | The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say. | humor androids chip hammer soldering nail computer robots computers | Charles Stross | |
| 9975123 | Amateur grammar snobs are a lot like amateur gynecologists--they're everywhere, they're all to eager to offer their services, and they're anything but gentle. | June Casagrande | ||
| 8af8b13 | Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They're using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas. | politics humor | Charles Stross | |
| fccb14b | She turns and stalks off in search of other minions to intimidate, leaving you flexing your fingers and trying to decide whether you want to strangle her or go down on your knees and beg for lessons. | Charles Stross | ||
| 147c6ed | there is a point at which eccentricity begins to impact operational effectiveness. | Charles Stross | ||
| d17764f | American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor--that, and the army is less trigger-happy. | Charles Stross | ||
| 10356f2 | Pay attention: There will be an exam later. | Charles Stross | ||
| 3885fad | There are two types of people in this world," Pete volunteers helpfully, "those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else." | Charles Stross | ||
| a8fbdeb | The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it? | ironic-self-reference | Charles Stross | |
| 53aaf74 | The Laundry field operations manual is notably short on advice for how to comport one's self when being held prisoner aboard a mad billionaire necromancer's yacht, other than the usual stern admonition to keep receipts for all expenses incurred in the line of duty. | Charles Stross | ||
| 37ff557 | He shakes his head. "I'm sorry, but the official Home Office superhero team is going to have to conform to public expectations of what a superhero team should look like, or it's not really going to work terribly well. There's room for one person of color, one female or LGBT, and one disability in a core team of four - if you push it beyond that ratio it'll lose credibility with the crucial sixteen to twenty-four male target demographic, by .. | Charles Stross | ||
| ce8c8f8 | For programming is a job where Lovecraft meets tradecraft, all the time. | Charles Stross | ||
| ae24e25 | A historian who works for a bank: That's not the most likely background for someone who capers around the cosmos having adventures, is it? | historian | Charles Stross | |
| b70d4e3 | There is a philosophy by which many people live their lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you've got, the less shit you have to eat. These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don't get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grow up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine's a Rolex brigade. (This i.. | hate greed weirdly-prophetic dictatorship | Charles Stross |