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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 81417b0 | This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn't necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing. All in vain. All wasted. The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker. More and more suffering for more and more. And more and more in vain. | pain suffering dark world birthing older starving vain nothing necessary bomb obvious terrible wasted waste torture | John Fowles | |
| 20a7885 | I know I can't do things like love by halves, I know I have love pent up in me, I shall throw myself away, lose my heart and my body and my mind and soul to some cad like G.P. Who'll betray me. I feel it. | John Fowles | ||
| 85be867 | If it makes you happier - I'm free.' The rain came in sudden great swathes across the tree-tops and hit the windows and the roof; like spring rain, out of season. The bedroom air seemed full of unspoken words, unformulated guilts, a vicious silence, like the moments before a bridge collapses. We lay side by side, untouching, effigies on a bed turned tomb; sickeningly afraid to say what we really thought. In the end she spoke, in a voice tha.. | John Fowles | ||
| 0c00418 | But forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn't happen to me | John Fowles | ||
| 9820e12 | She was trying to write a novel, it was so slow, you had to destroy so much and start again; so hard to discover whether one was really a writer or just a victim of a literary home environment. | John Fowles | ||
| d40f2fd | Under this swarm of waspish self-inquiries he began to feel sorry for himself - a brilliant man trapped, a Byron tamed; and his mind wandered back to Sarah, to visual images, attempts to recollect that face, that mouth, that generous mouth. Undoubtedly it awoke some memory in him, too tenuous, perhaps too general, to trace to any source in his past; but it unsettled him and haunted him, by calling to some hidden self he hardly knew existed... | John Fowles | ||
| 13c059f | It makes me sick,the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England. | John Fowles | ||
| 4adee09 | He said it as if 'very rich' was a nationality; as perhaps it is. | John Fowles | ||
| 1bdcc91 | The truth was she couldn't do ugly things. She was too beautiful. | John Fowles | ||
| 09f9d5e | The thing I felt most clearly, when the first corner was turned, was that I had escaped. Obscurer, but no less strong, was the feeling that she loved me more than I loved her, and that consequently I had in some indefinable way won. | John Fowles | ||
| 604f5e7 | My only certainty in life is that I shall one day die. I can be certain of nothing else in the future. But either we survive (and so far in human history a vast majority has always survived) and having survived when we might not have done so gives us what we call happiness; or we do not survive and do not know it. | John Fowles | ||
| 211ee1e | He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy... | unhappiness rich | John Fowles | |
| 9c03c59 | You use your life. | John Fowles | ||
| b8810c7 | I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more. | names hate people living classify collectors cubism cubist drawer impressionism impressionist painter naming individual collect forget | John Fowles | |
| 4a64fa7 | Love is something that comes in different clothes, with a different way and different face, and perhaps it takes a long time for you to accept it, to be able to call it love. | John Fowles | ||
| 357e9dc | You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don't you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the story of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love,.. | hatred thoughts feelings passion beauty life love truth bourgeois despise horrid refusal snobbish snob classes nasty snobbishness class beautiful thought | John Fowles | |
| 6041560 | Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care. | free people care life beastly cellars decent filthy locked cellar | John Fowles | |
| 10dcb12 | A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgen Mary's; it reversed the entire order of nature. | John Fowles | ||
| 58f4a29 | Charles gave his hat to Mary, set his lapels, wished he were dead, then went down the hall and into his ordeal. | John Fowles | ||
| b5002ac | Ia - ego bezumie. Gody naprolet on iskal, vo chto by voplotit' svoe bezumie. I nashel menia. | John Fowles | ||
| e4b466e | If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse. | John Fowles | ||
| f3a73ea | I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjur.. | seduction-technique | John Fowles | |
| 38306cb | Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your politeness. | disproof | John Fowles | |
| 0ffe9ce | Elizabeth snapped awake in a terrified instant as the door to her bed chamber was flung open near dawn, and Ian stalked into the darkened room. "Do you want to go first, or shall I?" he said tightly, coming to stand at the side of her bed. "What do you mean?" she asked in a trembling voice. "I mean," he said, "that either you go first and tell me why in hell you suddenly find my company repugnant, or I'll go first and tell you how I feel w.. | Judith McNaught | ||
| b4a1bc3 | I used to think love could save anything, but it can't if the vessel's cracked. | Lorna Landvik | ||
| 4756efb | The vision of Van Helsing as a vampire is one before which my imagination balks; this is doubtless only a shortcoming on my part; he may have been well fitted for the role, since as we have seen he had already the power, by means of speech, to cast his victims into a stupor. | Fred Saberhagen | ||
| 06921bc | Actually, the situation was intolerable. But then it was surprising how much intolerableness a man could tolerate. | Philip José Farmer | ||
| e5cbed2 | It was frightening, though, how little time you got. You only became yourself when you were twenty-three or twenty-four. A few years later, you had an old man's chest hair. It wasn't worth it. | Roddy Doyle | ||
| b7396af | I love yeh, son, said Jimmy Sr. He could say it and no one could hear him, except young Jimmy, because of the singing and roaring and breaking glasses. -I think you're fuckin' great, said Jimmy Sr. -Ah fuck off, will yeh, said Jimmy Jr. -Packie saved the fuckin' penalty, not me. But he liked what he'd heard, Jimmy Sr could tell that. He gave Jimmy Sr a dig in the stomach. -You're not a bad oul' cunt yourself, he said. | Roddy Doyle | ||
| 75b5ee4 | Sure one could argue the naturalist's case that the mind experiences an external reality in which it participates. But how can this account really satisfy us, Olga? One could equally well argue that all experiences is highly subjective, that the only thing we really have is the image, the smell, the taste, and all of our assertions about the universe are constructions of the human mind. | Janna Levin | ||
| ed3da9b | We are all caught in the stream of a complicated legacy - a proof of the limits of human reason, a proof of our boundlessness. A declaration that were were down here on this crowded, lonely planet, a declaration that we mattered, we living clumps of ash, that each of us was once somebody, that we strove for what we could never have, that we could admit as much. That was us - funny and lousy and great all at once. | Janna Levin | ||
| f8c9642 | Somewhere in the universe two black holes collide -- as heavy as stars, as small as cities, literally black (the complete absence of light) holes (empty hollows). Tethered by gravity, in their final seconds together the black holes course through thousands of revolutions about their eventual point of contact, churning up space and time until they crash and merge into one bigger black hole, an event more powerful than any since the origin of.. | Janna Levin | ||
| 64e784e | Never mind. Never mind. In this brief life, one cannot always be counting the cost. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 1a9ea78 | I put my genius into my life, not into my art. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| cc60752 | Here, in their midst, George feels a sort of vertigo. Oh God, what will become of them all? What chance have they? Ought I to yell out to them, right now, here, that it's hopeless? But George knows he can't do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself, almost, he is a representative of the hope. And the hope is not false. No. It's just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The .. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 839c62f | And now an hour, maybe, has passed. And they are both drunk: Kenny fairly, George very. But George is drunk in a good way, and one that he seldom achieves. He tries to describe to himself what this kind of drunkenness is like. Well - to put it very crudely - it's like Plato; it's a dialogue. A dialogue between two people. Yes, but not a Platonic dialogue in the hair-splitting, word-twisting, one-up-to-me sense; not a mock-humble bitching ma.. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| c50279c | The Europeans hate us because we've retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate. We sleep in symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained- and that terrifies them, that fills them with fury and loathing because they can never understand it. | animosity commercialization europeans | Christopher Isherwood | |
| b876398 | Remorse is not for the elderly. When it comes to them it is not purging or uplifting, but merely degrading and wretched, like a bladder disease. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 04a490b | The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at Oxford had not been wired for electricity. Intellectual neglect technical education to this day. [Describing C.P. Snow's observations on the neglect of technical education.] | science education baron-c-p-snow baron-snow c-p-snow charles-percy-snow ernest-rutherford nucleus rutherford oxford cambridge study physics | Richard Rhodes | |
| acd5f30 | I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages, from the sentences of which I've conjured images of a bleak site years ago. Here in this room, I suppose, is to be found the interior world of the book; but it opens upon a world beyond the windows, where no event has been collapsed into syntax, where the vocabular.. | reading nature writing breathing meditation | Barry Lopez | |
| d3a2d91 | Chemist Michael] Polanyi found one other necessary requirement for full initiation into science: Belief. If science has become the orthodoxy of the West, individuals are nevertheless still free to take it or leave it, in whole or in part; believers in astrology, Marxism and virgin birth abound. But "no one can become a scientist unless he presumes that the scientific doctrine and method are fundamentally sound and that their ultimate premis.. | theory science the-making-of-the-atomic-bomb | Richard Rhodes | |
| 764d350 | You see, it's really quite simple. A simile is just a mode of comparison employing 'as' and 'like' to reveal the hidden character or essence of whatever we want to describe, and through the use of fancy, association, contrast, extension, or imagination, to enlarge our understanding or perception of human experience and observation. | Norton Juster | ||
| 3d087b0 | You can get in a lot of trouble mixing up words or just not knowing how to spell them. If we ever get out of here, I'm going to make sure to learn all about them. | knowledge | Norton Juster | |
| 4a0453e | Things which are equally bad are also equally good. Try to look at the bright side of things. | Norton Juster |