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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 418ba5e | If at the moment when someone cuts us off in traffic or breaks our heart or begins bombing our ancestral village, we could withdraw from judging mode, and enter this other, more accepting mode, we could paradoxically, make ourselves more powerful. By resisting the urge to reduce, in order to subsequently destroy, we keep alive - if only for a few seconds more - the possibility of transformation. -The Thought Experiment | inspirational | George Saunders | |
| 7b5fdcd | Oh, mansion shmansion. Did Gandhi's house have the largest outdoor trampoline in the tristate area? Did Jesus have a two-acre remote-controlled car track, with mountains to scale and a little village that lit up at night? Not in his Bible. | George Saunders | ||
| 3882641 | Stood awhile watching, thinking, praying: Lord, give us more. Give us enough. Help us not fall behind peers. Help us not, that is, fall further behind peers. For kids' sake. Do not want them scarred by how far behind we are. That is all I ask. | George Saunders | ||
| ec23ade | O.K., then, all right, they would adopt a white-trash dog. Ha ha. They could name it Zeke, buy it a little corncob pipe and a straw hat. She imagined the puppy, having crapped on the rug, looking up at her, going, Cain't hep it. But no. Had she come from a perfect place? Everything was transmutable. She imagined the puppy grown up, entertaining some friends, speaking to them in a British accent: My family of origin was, um, rather not, shal.. | humor puppy | George Saunders | |
| 577b41c | Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal. | suffering | George Saunders | |
| 8131fc0 | Her hair looked like her hair in the dream and her eyes looked like her eyes in the dream, and as for her body, he couldn't tell, she was wearing a mumu. | dreams love obesity | George Saunders | |
| 787f430 | Still, accomplishment is unreliable. "Succeeding," whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there's the very real danger that "succeeding" will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended." | George Saunders | ||
| 13b872f | The work that stirs the greatest passion is also the work that creates around it the greatest silence, the strongest imperative to stand back and admire and let others admire, without interfering. | George Saunders | ||
| ec8e490 | In the beginning, there's a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world. Mistaking the idea for the world, the mind formulates a theory and, having formulated a theory, feels inclined to act. Because the idea is always only an approximation of the world, whether that action will be catastrophic or beneficial depends on the distance between the idea and the world. Ma.. | George Saunders | ||
| f431ae2 | The subterranean lair of the wily human relationship: a dark maze of pop-up demons, fun house mirrors, spooky dead ends, multiple false bottoms. | Stephen Wright | ||
| 018bc1f | Sometimes, in India, you have to surrender before you win. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| c49f0cc | You can't kill love. You can't even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can't kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it's a part of God, .. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| cf7262f | Here, Lin,' he puffed. 'You are such a big fellow, I hope we can get a good fits. These are from Fat Satish. He is so fat, I think they might fit you. I told him a story, and then he gave it this two pairs for you. I told him that on the journey you had loose motions, and you made such a mess in your over-underpants that we had to throw them away.' 'You told him,' I asked, 'that I shit my pants?' 'Oh, yes, Lin. I certainly couldn't tell him.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| d13774f | Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 8bafd08 | The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example was no less and no more than the amoount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary? That was the unspoken but implied, and unavoidable question everywhere in India. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 8e8190f | The simple and astonishing truth about India and Indian people is that when you go there, and deal with them, your heart always guides you more wisely than your head. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 41f6963 | Religion is just a long competition to see who can design the silliest hat. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 55fa7d9 | The same legends also carry warnings that such fated love may, sometimes, be the possession and the obsession of one, and only one, of the two souls twinned by destiny. But wisdom, in one sense, is the opposite of love. Love survives in us precisely because it isn't wise. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| c175ef1 | I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 8849d24 | I heard a warning, deep within - we usually do , when something worse than we can imagine is stalking us, and set to pounce. Fate's way of beating us in a fair fight is to give us warnings that we hear, but never heed. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 7e89ab9 | MEN WAGE WARS for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. Sooner or later, the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. Then, when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their minds in the bloody pit, when all the .. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| c2c3231 | The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance, Didier once said, is that it works so well. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 9671caf | Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 0772c96 | Istinata e, che ne s'shchestvuvat dobri ili loshi khora -- reche toi. -- Dobrota ili zlina pritezhavat samo delata im. Ima dobri dela ili loshi dela. Khorata sa prosto khora -- onova, koeto gi sv'rzva s dobroto i zloto, e onova, koeto v'rshat ili otkazvat da v'rshat. Istinata e, che edin mig na istinska obich v s'rtseto na vseki -- na nai-blagorodniia chovek na zemiata, ili na nai-pokvareniia -- s'd'rzha tsialoto prednaznachenie, i protses,.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| d3b9acc | In the beginning we feared everything--animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky--everything except each other. Now we fear each other, and almost nothing else. No-one knows why anyone does anything. No-one tells the truth. No-one is happy. No-one is safe. In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the li.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| af6d7fe | I felt a darkness growing within me that was too numb for sorrow and too cold for rage. | gregory david roberts | ||
| 9703a89 | The beautiful courage of us, the hope that defines our kind, is that we go on, no matter how much life wounds us. We walk. We face the sea and the wind and the salted truth of death, and we go on. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 0b41b01 | It's a fact of life on the run that you often love more people than you trust. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 39bc464 | WORLD IS RUN by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards, | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 511029c | We are made out of stars, you and I. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| c813c8c | Justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them | life philospohy | Gregory David Roberts | |
| 3115ba3 | Where did you get Ultima's name?" many ask me. "That was her name when she came to me," I answer. From that first fortuitous meeting I have trained myself to act as a dream catcher. I don't seek characters, they seem to come to me asking me to tell their stories." | Rudolfo Anaya | ||
| e98fa67 | He feels himself falling. He wants to spend every minute with her, he wants to possess her, her purity, her body, her mind. She is what he has been waiting for. Now he can live. | Alan Lightman | ||
| b12c6ea | Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed in for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time to be judged on their own. | Alan Lightman | ||
| 52927e7 | I should have written books instead of reading them. | Alan Lightman | ||
| c3ad3b8 | In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff. | Alan Lightman | ||
| 5fb916d | In a world of shifting past, these memories are wheat in wind, fleet in dreams, shapes in clouds. Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. | Alan Lightman | ||
| 7b9bf9a | I've decided that has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word. | Alan Lightman | ||
| 54e3593 | Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the two times go their separate ways, contentment. For, miraculously, a barrister, a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times. Each time is true, but the truths are not the same. | Alan Lightman | ||
| 23296c1 | Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this woman? [...] Will they feel what she felt in her life, will their memories have flickering strokes of her memories, will they recall that moment long ago when she stood by the window, guilt ridden and confused, and watched as the tadr bird circled the cistern? No, it is not possible. [...] But I will let them have thei.. | death religion science-fiction | Alan Lightman | |
| 972e086 | n l'shy jmyl@, wl`lm jmyl bl nhy@ ljmlh, wHdwdn lnsny@ hy lly tmn`n mn rw'yth. | Colin Wilson | ||
| 5aa1328 | n rshrdswn `lm 'wrwb kyf tstGrq f~ lHlm, 'm rwsw fqd `lmh kyf tfkr. | Colin Wilson | ||
| 03ca9b0 | there was a quality of loneliness to her that comes when your only friend walks away and you don't know why and there's no one else and never will be. A left-behind look. | Robert Crais | ||
| 156e7f4 | Every second we have with these fine animals is a blessing. No creature, human or otherwise, will love you with such devotion, or trust you so fully. Remember this, Officer James. These dogs will lay their precious hearts bare to you, and hold back no part for themselves. Can anyone else in your pathetic excuse for a life say the same? Such trust is a gift from God Almighty above, so best you be worthy. | Robert Crais |