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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a4fab7b | America?" said Gamesh, smiling. "Roland, what's American to you? Or me, or those tens of thousands up in the the stands? It's just a word they use to keep your nose to the grindstone and your toes to the line. America is the opiate of the people." | Philip Roth | ||
| 56c7647 | I am not impressed by the White House!" my father cried, hammering on the table to shut her up after she'd said "the White House" for the fifteenth time. "I am only impressed by who lives there. And the person who lives there is a Nazi." | Philip Roth | ||
| f55f87f | To become a new being. To bifurcate. The drama that underlies America's story, the high drama that is upping and leaving-and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands." --p. 342" | Philip Roth | ||
| e3deb1a | But why did you go," my mother asked him, "when it was bound to upset you like this?" "I went," he told her, "because every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I'd think I was having a hallucination." | Philip Roth | ||
| 5e52522 | Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness -- the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived an.. | Philip Roth | ||
| a54f5d2 | It's no picnic up there in the egosphere. | Philip Roth | ||
| 2e70680 | You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them wrong all again...That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that- well, lucky you. | Philip Roth | ||
| 73da0f4 | It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wond.. | Philip Roth | ||
| 9edf44c | How far back must you go to discover the beginning of trouble? | Philip Roth | ||
| 96d1adc | He was not a practical joke nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure. | John Cheever | ||
| 734adcb | In middle age there is mystery, there is mystification. The most I can make out of this hour is a kind of loneliness. Even the beauty of the visible world seems to crumble, yes even love. I feel that there has been some miscarriage, some wrong turning, but I do not know when it took place and I have no hope of finding it. | John Cheever | ||
| 0537ebb | People who escape familiar groups and make contact with unfamiliar ones becomes smarter and more creative. They have what Ronald Burt calls a "vision advantage." They are no longer captives of their cultures." | Grant McCracken | ||
| cbfcfef | The music came through clearly. The new instrument had a much purer tone, she thought, than the old one. She decided that tone was most important and that she could conceal the cabinet behind a sofa. But as soon as she had made her peace with the radio, the interference began. | John Cheever | ||
| c1683fc | He followed her into the bathroom and sat on the shut toilet seat while she washed her back with a brush. "I forgot to tell you," he said. "Liza sent us a wheel of Brie." "That's nice," she said, "but you know what? Brie gives me terribly loose bowels." He hitched up his genitals and crossed his legs. "That's funny," he said. "It constipates me." That was their marriage then--not the highest paving of the stair, the clatter of Italian fount.. | marriage | John Cheever | |
| ecec936 | Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor. | John Cheever | ||
| d1bbfec | It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong. | summer | John Cheever | |
| 45a93f8 | She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom and then berries, blackthorn, hawthorn, dog-roses, the odd ash tree with its sooty buds. | description england english-garden flowers nature | A.S. Byatt | |
| 2b0dd42 | There was once a poor shoemaker who had three fine strong sons and two pretty daughters and a third who could do nothing well, who shivered plates and tangled her spinning, who curdled milk, could not get butter to come, nor set a fire so that smoke did not pour into the room, a useless, hopeless, dreaming daughter, to whom her mother would often say that she should try to fend for herself in the wild wood, and then she would know the value.. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 6b0d643 | Roland was so used to the pervasive sense of failure that he was unprepared for the blood-rush of success. He breathed differently. The dingy little room humped around in his vision briefly and settled at a different distance, an object of interest, not of choking confinement. He reread his letters. The world opened. [...] How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence. Nothing in what he had written .. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 9f524dc | A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 444ca89 | She leads you on and baffles you," said Beatrice. "She wants you to know and not to know. She took care to write down that the box was there. And she buried it." | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 1d9c608 | But poets don't want homes -- do they? -- they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 63e2c59 | Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| e846496 | She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good. | god logic punishment religion sin | A.S. Byatt | |
| 65ba5d8 | She was looking for a husband, partly because she was afraid no one might want her, partly because she couldn't decide what to do with herself until that problem was solved, partly because everyone else was looking for a husband. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 16e08d7 | Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland could see her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets. | possession | A.S. Byatt | |
| 53c333d | The hands were ivory-coloured, the skin finely wrinkled everywhere, like the crust on a pool of wax, and under it appreared livid bruises, arthritic nodes, irregular tea-brown stains. ...The flesh under the horny nails was candlvwax-coloured, and bloodless. | old-age | A.S. Byatt | |
| 37ebfdb | He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful dark brown eyes. He had a look of wariness, which could change when he felt relaxed or happy, which was not often in these difficult days, into a smile of amused friendliness and pleasure which aroused feelings of warmth, and something more, in many women. | character-development characteristics description prose | A.S. Byatt | |
| 5ed981c | Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 54bc618 | All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous. | academia madness maud-bailey obsession scholarship | A.S. Byatt | |
| 4aaf65b | So--I went on, on my own--deeper and deeper into the silent Tunnel of the Ride--not so sure of where I was and yet not anxious either, not concerned about my companions nor even about the nearness of--certain friends. The trees were beech, and the buds, just breaking, fiercely brilliant, and the new, the renewed light on them--intermittent diamond--but the depths were dark, a silent Nave. And no birds sang, or I heard none, no woodpecker ta.. | sense-of-self sense-of-time | A.S. Byatt | |
| a044329 | What is read and understood and contemplated and intellectually grasped is our own, madam, to live and work with. A lifetime's study will not make accessible to us more than a fragment of our own ancestral past, let alone the aeons before our race was formed. But that fragment we must thoroughly possess and hand on. Hoc opus, hic labor est. There is, I am tempted to assert, no easy way, no short cut: we are, in attempting those, like Bunyan.. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| fdd8e6f | Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 3601971 | He always told them the same thing, to begin with. 'Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don't invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don't try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 2122e3a | She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did not translate into the English language, or into any other she knew: they were things that accumulated, solidly, knocked against each other, heaped and slipped. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 5a7cf65 | The minds of stone lovers had colonised stones as lichens clung to them with golden or grey-green florid stains. The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammilated, botryoidal, dendrite, haematite. Carnelian is from carnal, from flesh. Serpentine and lizardite are stone reptiles ; phyllite is leafy-green. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| ee328db | I would not for the whole world diminish you. I know it is usual in these circumstances to protest--"I love you for yourself alone"--"I love you essentially"--and as you imply, my dearest, to mean by "you essentially"--lips hands and eyes. But you must know--we do know--that it is not so--dearest, I love your soul and with that your poetry--the grammar and stopping and hurrying syntax of your quick thought--quite as much essentially you as .. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| b3cebbd | The realest and scariest monsters are internal demons, the specters of regret and guilt and lack of fulfillment, awareness of the entropic end of love, or the first shivers occasioned by the realization of our own ageing, and the eventual inevitability of death. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| 4f819ba | I guess, like some guy once said, if triangles invented a god, the chances are high it would have three sides. | god religion | Michael Marshall Smith | |
| 878ea62 | You have to accept gifts occasionally, because there are some things you can't give yourself | life | Michael Marshall Smith | |
| 307355a | I have to believe he will do as he promised. Yet the truth is that I trust him because of the way he snared my fingers in his. That is the worst reason of all to trust, but my bitter heart will not stop singing its recklessly giddy song. | Kate Elliott | ||
| fb353d9 | Maybe I'm no longer a dog, but I can still bite! | Sherwood Smith | ||
| d2cecb6 | You don't look at the problem all at once, or it's like being caught in a spring flood under a downpour. You tackle the problem in pieces... | Sherwood Smith | ||
| d075ee5 | Judging the actions of the many by those of the one is both human and dangerous. | Sherwood Smith |