1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3354
3355
3356
3357
3358
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b763108 | He stabs at the mouse mat with one finger and I wince, but instead of fat purple sparks and a hideous soul-sucking manifestation, it simply wakes up his Windows box. (Not that there's much difference.) | Charles Stross | ||
| df7acb5 | Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons -- literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd. (331) | passel pigeons | Charles Stross | |
| 2b75744 | Though liberal in his praise and always courteous and condescending to the shop-people, he was scarcely ever known to pay a bill and when he died, the amount of money owing to Brandy's was considerable. Mr. Brandy, a short-tempered, pinched-faced, cross little old man, was beside himself with rage about it. He died shortly afterwards, and was presumed by many people to have done so on purpose and to have gone in pursuit of his noble debtor. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 86c9fcf | Beautiful flames, can destroy so many things--prison walls that hold you, stitches that bind you fast. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 6a029df | Saints, such as me, ought always to listen attentively to the prayers of poor, dirty, ragged men, such as you. No matter how offensively those prayers are phased. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| ed793ea | Ah, but sir,' said Lascelles, 'it is precisely by passing judgments upon other people's work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your own opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one's own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one's theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 69d508e | Above all remember this: that magic belongs as much to the heart as to the head and everything which is done, should be done from love or joy or righteous anger. | witches | Susanna Clarke | |
| 02d838d | Sometimes you my graciously permit all the most beautiful ladies in the land to wait in line to kiss your hands and fall in love with you. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 3a2a581 | A] smile is the most becoming ornament that any lady can wear. | beauty happiness becoming most ornament wear smile lady | Susanna Clarke | |
| 3cabc83 | Mr. Norrell gazed at Strange with an odd expression upon his face as though he would have been glad of a little conversation with him, but had not the least idea how to begin. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 16b1598 | And all the nursemaids and kitchen maids I ever knew when I was a child, always had a aunt, who knew a woman, whose first cousin's boy had been put into just such a box, and had never been seen again. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| e23d8a9 | She had been a comet; and her blazing descent through dark skies had been plain for all to see. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 6bd5f7b | For the rest of the night he sat by himself under the elm-tree. Until this moment it had never seemed to him that his magicianship set him apart from other men. But now he had glimpsed the wrong side of something. He had the eeriest feeling - as if the world were growing older around him, and the best part of existence - laughter, love and innocence - were slipping irrevocably into the past. | waterloo magician | Susanna Clarke | |
| 6046017 | Sometimes the pain in Childermass's shoulder escaped from him and ran about the room and hid. When this happened he thought it became a small animal. No one else knew it was there. He supposed he ought to tell them so that they could chase it out. Once he caught sight of it; it had flame-coloured fur, brighter than a fox. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 502d1e1 | Mr Norrell was very well pleased. Lord Liverpool was exactly the sort of guest he liked - one who admired the books but shewed no inclination to take them down from the shelves and read them. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 70bc22e | Now toasted cheese is a temptation few men can resist, be they charcoal burners or kings. John Uskglass reasoned thus: all of Cumbria belonged to him - therefore this wood belonged to him - therefore this toasted cheese belonged to him. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 03a4db4 | She spoke Basque, which is a language which rarely makes any impression upon the brains of any other race, so that a man may hear it as often and as long as he likes, but never afterwards be able to recall a single syllable of it. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 0defc50 | in the old days, silvery bells would often sound just as some Englishman or Englishwoman of particular virtue or beauty was about to be stolen away by fairies to live in strange, ghostly lands for ever. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| d7a38d3 | The gentlemen among my readers will smile to themselves and say that women never did understand business, but the ladies may agree with me that Mrs Brandy understood her business very well, for the chief business of Mrs Brandy's life was to make Stephen Black as much in love with her as she was with him. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 38a2e20 | We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes, from feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these thi.. | Donald Antrim | ||
| fb227fb | His errors and failures have not traveled the same distance as his successes. | Rick Bass | ||
| b85f101 | everyone has to do one really bad thing in life to call their life a life. | Rick Bass | ||
| b292a45 | Maybe we just get given our faces, our lives, our fates, our happiness and unhappiness. Some get a lot, some bugger all. And love the same. Like different glass sizes for beer. You get a lot, you get bugger all, you drink it and it's gone. You know it and then you don't know it. Maybe we don't control any of it. No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pre.. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| f4ce075 | They talked about fishing, food, winds and stonework; about growing tomatoes, keeping poultry and roasting lamb, catching crayfish and scallops; telling tales, jokes; the meaning of their stories nothing, the drift of them everything; the brittle and beautiful dream itself. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| f9b7f5f | But sometimes things are said and they're not just words. They are everything that one person thinks of another in a sentence. Just one sentence. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| ce010f5 | Every day I feel more like some defeated matador limping out of the arena after I've been gored, or like some general coming back from a long battle. | Mary Karr | ||
| 92f9d33 | Joy, it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self - delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving. | memoirs memoir | Mary Karr | |
| c71f824 | Faith is not a feeling, she says. It's a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope. Fake it till you make it. | Mary Karr | ||
| 2d6e66d | After Mother got her picture, we all stood around the fire truck eating moon-shaped cookies dusted with powdered sugar that the mayor's wife had brought in some Tupperware. It was stuff like that that'd break your heart about Leechfield, what Daddy meant when he said the town was too ugly not to love. | Mary Karr | ||
| ea4738c | Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?) | Mary Karr | ||
| 47e7b60 | Before that summer, I had many times heard long-winded Baptist preachers take ten minutes to pray over card tables of potato salad and fried chicken at church picnics, but the way those sweating, red-faced men sat around on stacked pallets of lumber gulping oysters taught me most of what I knew about simple gladness. | Mary Karr | ||
| 22a3e69 | Charm is from the Latin carmen: to sing. By "charm," I mean sing well enough to hold the reader in thrall. Whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page. What drives them crazy will keep you humble. You'll need both sides of yourself--the beautiful and the beastly--to hold a reader's attention." | Mary Karr | ||
| e46c532 | But what if I don't believe in God? It's like they've sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can't will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this. Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball shap.. | prayer prayers alcoholics-anonymous atheist desperation | Mary Karr | |
| a11e8e7 | Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It's not just raw reportage flung splat on the page. | Mary Karr | ||
| 86948a2 | Simon decidio salvar la situacion. -James, hoy vamos a repasar cada momento de la noche en la que te capturaron. Al parecer, el desayuno dejo de interesarle a su amigo, porque James coloco su tenedor lentamente dobre la mesa. -Tenia la impresion de que ya lo habiamos hecho. -No como vamos a hacerlo hoy. Agatha asintio. -Muy bien. Yo tambien quiero oirlo. James se ruborizo de la manera mas sorprendente. -!Aggie! Hubo algunos detalles muy imp.. | Celeste Bradley | ||
| 423127b | And I am overwhelmed now by the awfulness of over-simplification. For now I realize that not only have I been guilty of it through this long and burning day but also through most of my yet young life and it is only now that I am doubly its victim that I begin to vaguely understand. For I had somehow thought that 'going away' was but a physical thing. And that it had only to do with movement and with labels like the silly 'Vancouver' that I .. | Alistair MacLeod | ||
| 63ea5b0 | Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love. | William Maxwell | ||
| 652e3c6 | But he was careful. He didn't make a simple remark without rehearsing it beforehand. And he continually removed the expression from his face lest it be the wrong one, and give him away. He also avoided any strong light, such as the lamp on the kitchen table. Sometimes a weakness overcame him, his legs were unstrung, and he had to find some place to sit down, but this was easy enough to disguise. It was his voice that gave him the most troub.. | William Maxwell | ||
| b712867 | People often ask themselves the right questions. Where they fail is in answering the questions they ask themselves, and even there they do not fail by much. A single avenue of reasoning followed to its logical conclusion would bring them straight home to the truth. But they stop just short of it, over and over again. When they have only to reach out and grasp the idea that would explain everything, they decide that the search is hopeless. T.. | truth searching-and-finding questioning | William Maxwell | |
| 67b7eb5 | It would have been a help if at some time Baptist preacher, resting his forearms on the pulpit and hunching his shoulders, had said On the other hand, how could any preacher, Baptist or otherwise, say this? | god divine-providence deserve | William Maxwell | |
| c407c49 | I remembered a friend who'd died of a bad liver, and what he'd always said. Yeah, he'd said, maybe it's just my idea, but really it always hurts, the times it don't hurt is when we just forget, we just forget it hurts, you know, it's not just because my belly's all rotten, everybody always hurts. So when it really starts stabbing me, somehow I feel sort of peaceful, like I'm myself again. It's hard to take, sure, but I feel sort of peaceful.. | Ryū Murakami | ||
| 01bff73 | My play over, watching the sun go down, I'd frown and blow on the wound, and then I felt a sense of peace, as if I and the gray evening landscape were confiding in each other. Just the opposite from heroin or melting together in a woman's juices, the pain made me stand out from my surroundings, the pain made me feel as if I were shining. And I thought this shining self could get along well with the lovely orange light of the setting sun. | Ryū Murakami | ||
| 40cf051 | From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward. I joined them, flew amount them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would. | death happiness dying | George Saunders | |
| 5742093 | Mr. A calls me into his office and says he's got bad news and bad news, and which do I want first. I say the bad news. | funny humor bad-news | George Saunders |