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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8aaed1d | Every difficult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for not grasping what is going on. Montaigne encouraged us to blame the author. An incomprehensible prose-style is likely to have resulted more from laziness than cleverness; what reads easily is rarely so written... | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| fa9a1ec | I don't drive. Will you kindly go away? I am waiting for my mother. | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| cb74b77 | Do you think that I have a problem?" Ignatius bellowed. "The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hairsprays. That why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions." "Ignatius, that ain't true. You remember old Mr. Becnel used to live dow.. | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| 1e1e973 | You must realize the fear and hatred which my instills in people. | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| 1a5381b | Whoa! If I'm gonna be a doorman, I gonna be the mos sabotagin doorman ever guarded a plantation. Ooo-wee. The cotton fiel be burn to the groun before I'm through. | jones toole | John Kennedy Toole | |
| 64012f4 | Oh, my God!" Ignatius bellowed from the front of the house. "What an egregious insult to good taste." | pretentious | John Kennedy Toole | |
| 3330abc | I would very much like to know what the Founding Fathers would say if they could see these children being debauched to further the cause of Clearasil. However, I always suspected that democracy would come to this . . . "A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss"." | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| 7f3a4fe | but who are we to question the motives of these giants of commerce whose whims rule the course of our nation. | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| 06a9e3b | I doubt whether any hack, under pressure, could pen such atrocious melodrama, | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| 10845f1 | Adventure, my dear, is as much a state of mind as anything else. One can travel the world and never find the excitement to be found within arm's reach. Remain true to yourself, but understand happiness may not always be found in the plans we have laid out for ourselves, but rather in the unforeseen turns life takes us. Do not close your mind, or your heart, to the unexpected twists of life. It is those unexpected paths that could well lead .. | the-marriage-lesson | Victoria Alexander | |
| e386931 | You and I have found something few people ever do.Do you not understand, Matthew? I refuse to let your misguided nobility keep us apart.My life as a princess, or a peasant, is not worth living without you in it." "And mine is without you? I'm willing to go to Avalonia and be your blasted lapdog, if that will keep you in my life. Damn it all, Tatiana, I love you. I have loved you from the moment you went up in my balloon. From the moment I s.. | Victoria Alexander | ||
| 8d36502 | Tomorrow at the press conference would be dreadful. She would be surrounded by nice young men who spoke Big Business or Computer or Bachelor on the Make, and she would not understand a word they said." "Short Story: Blued Moon" | Connie Willis | ||
| 4e49c73 | then in a conversational tone said, "I slapped my Aunt Martha. When my fiance died. She told me God needed him in heaven, and I hauled off and slapped her, a sixty year old woman....People say unbelievable things to you. They deserve slapping." | death outrage slapping | Connie Willis | |
| cf60389 | One of the first symptoms of time-lag is a tendency to maudlin sentimentality, like an Irishman in his cups or a Victorian poet cold-sober. | Connie Willis | ||
| cb3f6dd | They were a susitute. They were what you did when you couldn't have what you wanted. | Connie Willis | ||
| acfe618 | Civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity--enough to provide a little leisure. But, far more, it requires confidence--confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one's own mental powers.... Vigour, energy, vitality: all the great civilisations--or civilising epochs--have had a weight of energy behind them. People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| b800ada | Generalization is a natural human mental process, and many generalizations are true--in average. What often does promote evil behavior is the lazy, nasty habit of believing that generalizations have anything at all to do with individuals. | evil generalizations individual individuals stereotypes | David Brin | |
| bb93e1a | The greedy and the power-hungry will always look for ways to break the rules, or twist them to their advantage. | David Brin | ||
| 1ad63e3 | The three basic material rights -- continuity, mutual obligation, and the pursuit of happiness. | law | David Brin | |
| a8acc74 | He looks out the window at the falling snow, then turns and takes his wife in his arms, feeling grateful to be here even as he wonders what he is going to do with his life in strictly practical terms. For years he had trained himself to do one thing, and he did it well, but he doesn't know whether he wants to keep doing it for the rest of his life, for that matter, whether anyone will let him. He is still worrying when they go to bed. Feeli.. | life novel | Jay McInerney | |
| 3dc267d | The candor was infectious. It spread back to the beginning of your life. You tried to tell her, as well as you could, what it was like being you. You described the feeling you'd always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they .. | Jay McInerney | ||
| e94473d | Here you are again. All messed up and no place to go. | Jay McInerney | ||
| 811b944 | They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart. | Colum McCann | ||
| a4cdc91 | Someone was high or brilliant or both. | Colum McCann | ||
| b1546a1 | Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrapy your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief. | Colum McCann | ||
| 121d86b | What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. | Colum McCann | ||
| dc707d3 | They entered the wild country. Broken fences. Ruined castles. Stretches of bogland. Wooded headlands. Turfsmoke rose from cabins, thin and mean. On the muddy paths, they glimpsed moving rags. The rags seemed more animate than the bodies within. As they passed, the families regarded them. The children appeared marooned with hunger. | potato-famine | Colum McCann | |
| c84df6c | Watching them together slipped a knife between my ribs and hit my heart exactly. | Colum McCann | ||
| 6df9bc2 | How very odd it is to be abandoned by language, how the future demands what should have been asked in the past, how words can escape us with such ease, and we are left, then, only with the pursuit. | Colum McCann | ||
| 53221ab | If you are wise you step through the darkness only one foot at a time. | Colum McCann | ||
| fca4c8e | there was always hunger in Ireland. She was a country that liked to be hurt. The Irish heaped coals of fire upon their own heads. They were unable to extinguish the fire. They were dependent,as always, on others. They had no notions of self-reliance. They burned and then poured empty buckets down upon themselves. It had always been so. | Colum McCann | ||
| d6e34fa | If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures. | Colum McCann | ||
| 409b193 | Once upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago that I couldn't have been there, and I wasn't there, but I'll tell you anyways: once upon a time and long ago... | Colum McCann | ||
| e3fdb4c | There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence. Even from a judge. Soderberg was not fond of bad language, but he knew its value at the right time. A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten stories in the air, can you possibly fucking believe it? | Colum McCann | ||
| 587f5d0 | What happened then was that, for an instant, almost nothing happened. He wasn't even there. Failure didn't even cross his mind. It felt like a sort of floating. He could have been in the meadow. His body loosened and took on the shape of the wind. The play of the shoulder could instruct the ankle. His throat could soothe his heel and moisten the ligaments at his ankle. A touch of the tongue against the teeth could relax the thigh. His elbow.. | Colum McCann | ||
| d4778c1 | That the reason life is so strange is that we have simply no idea what is around the next corner, and it was an obvious idea but one most of us had learned to forget. | Colum McCann | ||
| ab8c921 | The smallest moments: they return, dwell, endure. | Colum McCann | ||
| c56ffbf | It's the sort of hum that makes you feel that you're the actual ground lying under the sky, a blue hum that's all above and around you, but if you think about it too hard it will get too loud or big, and make you feel no more than just a speck. | Colum McCann | ||
| 0cfafb8 | I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student - thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan ha.. | Colum McCann | ||
| 846e1f6 | Many suburban legislators representing affluent school districts use terms such as "sinkhole" when opposing funding for Chicago's children. "We can't keep throwing money," said Governor Thompson in 1988, "into a black hole." The Chicago Tribune notes that, when this phrase is used, people hasten to explain that it is not intended as a slur against the race of many of Chicago's children. "But race," says the Tribune, "never is far from the s.. | race | Jonathan Kozol | |
| 54dda42 | If any lesson may be learned from the academic breakthroughs achieved by Pineapple and Jeremy, it is not that we should celebrate exceptionality of opportunity but that the public schools themselves in neighborhoods of widespread destitution ought to have the rich resources, small classes, and well-prepared and well-rewarded teachers that would enable us to give to every child the feast of learning that is now available to children of the p.. | inspirational | Jonathan Kozol | |
| 640a551 | This, then, is the dread that seems to lie beneath the fear of equalizing. Equity is seen as dispossession. Local autonomy is seen as liberty--even if the poverty of those in nearby cities robs them of all meaningful autonomy by narrowing their choices to the meanest and the shabbiest of options. In this way, defendants in these cases seem to polarize two of the principles that lie close to the origins of this republic. Liberty and equity a.. | politics | Jonathan Kozol | |
| 4fdb137 | When they pray, what do they say to God? | Jonathan Kozol | ||
| e22be50 | She stared at the building covered in dead vines and wildly gyrating roses. Amara stifled a laugh as she watched them dance. "Could you do me a favor?" Mollie pushed her sweaty bangs out of her eyes with a shaking hand. "Hmm?" "The roses have started doing the Macarena, and it's freaking me the fuck out. Could you make them stop?" | Dana Marie Bell |