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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0fd74a4 | Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. | Herman Melville | ||
| 21f3385 | For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. | Herman Melville | ||
| 57b5e48 | Of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are the most apt to get out of order. | manipulation mankind resilience | Herman Melville | |
| 59a05b9 | Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad? | Herman Melville | ||
| df4399a | Mom's smiles were so full of feeling that people leaned back a little when she greeted them. It was hard to know just how much was being offered. | Aimee Bender | ||
| d027b30 | They'd been married for years, and he wanted her to give up the last thread of cover so she would stand before him nude and he could make love to her entire skin. Well, of course that made her head fall off. Of course. | Aimee Bender | ||
| a149470 | He had set up a telescope on a corner of the roof, and we went up to take a look. This is time travel, he said, narrowing an eye to set the lens. Because the light is old. We're seeing back in time. No, we said, wrinkling our noses. We are seeing right now, today. No, he said, the light has to travel to us and it takes millions of years. What you're seeing is time. Excuse me, we said. We were embarrassed to correct him. He seemed so smart... | time time-passing time-travel | Aimee Bender | |
| 226d9bf | but the rest of the evening is nothing but the trembling edges of something I am so tired of feeling and I do not want to feel anymore. | Aimee Bender | ||
| fcc3489 | It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what's happened. | flood spaces | Aimee Bender | |
| 7429113 | I like to smile at the men who look mean so they know I believe in their better selves. That makes a difference in the world. This is how you might be able to reform a possible rapist without ever going to psychology school. | humor make-a-difference psychology smiling | Aimee Bender | |
| 588ce89 | My birthday is in March, and that year it fell during an especially bright spring week, vivid and clear in the narrow residential streets where we lived just a handful of blocks south of Sunset. The night-blooming jasmine that crawled up our neighborhood's front gate released its heady scent at dusk, and to the north, the hills rolled charmingly over the horizon, houses tucked into the brown. Soon, daylight savings time would arrive, and ev.. | hair-color march plants rose-edelstein spring | Aimee Bender | |
| 2d41bfb | He breathed in her hair, the sweet-smelling thickness of it. My father usually agreed with her requests, because stamped in his two-footed stance and jaw was the word Provider, and he loved her the way a bird-watcher's heart leaps when he hears the call of the roseate spoonbill, a fluffy pink wader, calling its lilting coo-coo from the mangroves. Check, says the bird-watcher. Sure, said my father, tapping a handful of mail against her back. | Aimee Bender | ||
| b26ad18 | The people were all busy in their cars, listening to the radio, so there was no one to smile at, so I just sent my love to the traffic lights. No one ever appreciates them, all day long, working so hard to turn red and yellow and green, right in time with us to make sure we don't crash into each other. If there was any tiny chance, even the tiniest chance, that they happened to be alive, I bet I was the first person ever to tell them they w.. | Aimee Bender | ||
| c9c3463 | I will never die, thought the cake to itself, in even simpler terms, as cakes did not have sophisticated use of language. | Aimee Bender | ||
| f4b8c4f | It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name. | Steve Erickson | ||
| 36def3c | When L.A.'s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea. | government politics | Steve Erickson | |
| 38dd182 | When the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the collision of time and memory, called history, the dreams began to come. | Steve Erickson | ||
| 3a7aba7 | Truth is neither joyful nor sad, neither good nor bad. It is simply truth. | good joy sad truth | Robert Ludlum | |
| c379a00 | The mind plays tricks. It rejects things until it thinks -- or something tells it -- that the remembering can be handled. | reject remembering trick | Robert Ludlum | |
| 6a68d35 | Accountants and economists are natural enemies. One views trees, the other forests, and the visions are usually at odds, as they should be. | Robert Ludlum | ||
| 222a2e7 | In those days the worst vice in England was pride, I guess--the worst vice of all, because folks thought it was a virtue. | Carol Ryrie Brink | ||
| 7ec918c | Might-have-beens are a bitch. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| ac18fdb | I must rejoice that I am part of her, instead of resenting that I am not more of her. | miro | Orson Scott Card | |
| 15c9a63 | You have to think ahead, the next move, the next move, the next move, to see where it's all going to lead. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 870556d | The Nordic language recognizes four orders of foreignness. The first is the otherlander, or utlanning, the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country. The second is the framling--Demosthenes merely drops the accent from the Nordic framling. This is the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world. The third is the raman, the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another specie.. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 42bf89c | And it occurred to me that what we professors think of as a 'brilliant student' is nothing but a student who is enthusiastically converted to whatever idiotic ideas we've been teaching them. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 8fe86b5 | Why do we persist in this divided idiocy? Because the world is full of prideful bastards, that's why. Everyone believes they're smarter than everyone else, more capable than everyone else, more justified than everyone else. Humility went extinct a long time ago. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| bd16a04 | Our great civilizations are nothing more than social machines to create the ideal female setting, where a woman can count on stability; our legal and moral codes that try to abolish violence and promote permanence of ownership and enforce contracts--those represent the primary female strategy, the taming of the male. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| a53e878 | Could you possibly be a little more incoherent?" asked Olivenko. "There are bits of this I'm almost understanding, and I'm sure that's not what you have in mind." -- | coherence p-46 | Orson Scott Card | |
| 1076c06 | That was Ender's gift to us, to free us from the illusion that any one explanation will ever contain the final answer for all time, for all hearers. There is always, always more to learn. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 8949a84 | You're bigger than I remember," she said stupidly. "You too," he said. "I also remember that you were beautiful." "Memory does play tricks on us." "No. Your face is the same, but I don't remember what beautiful means anymore. Come on. Let's go out into the lake." | children ender forget meaning memory valentine your-face | Orson Scott Card | |
| b9f5f8a | What kind of rescue is this, where you toss the prisoner a knife and stand and wait to see what happens? | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 23e283f | Little children gladly accept even the strangest stories that others tell them, because they lack either the context or the confidence to doubt. They go along because they don't know how to be alone, either physically or intellectually. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 40f5a83 | Just because your former understanding of the purpose of your life is contradicted doesn't mean that you have to decide there is no purpose. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 7244bf4 | And you don't understand how devastating fear and rage can be, and how quickly religion and civilization and human decency are forgotten when a mob forms. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 4fcacf7 | Bean sighed inwardly. It never failed. Whenever he had any conversation with Ender, it turned into an argument. | bean family life relationships | Orson Scott Card | |
| d64d727 | I'm just saying that I...I regret that everybody else has nineteen chances, and only I am limited to a single chance for my genes to continue." "Because you believe your genes would confer a great blessing upon the human race." Ram thought about this for a moment, "I suppose that's what every adolescent male believes with his whole heart." | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 5c4589d | That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 11d6f41 | People get used to anything, if it just goes on. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 0db3e37 | all living things are manipulated as long as there is a will, it is bent and twisted constantly. Only the dead are allowed the luxury of freedom, and then only because they want nothing, and therefore can't be thwarted. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 55e5d55 | Running was the way he dreamed. Having never been in control of his life, his idea of freedom was simply to break free. He dreamed of being at the mercy of the wind, carried aloft and blown here and there, a life of true randomness instead of always being part of someone else's purpose. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 0a34ac6 | Saving the human race is a frantic one. Or a tedious one. It all depends on what stage of the process you're taking part in. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| c0a4368 | I know you know, and you know that I know that you know. It spirals on from there, so let's just assume the dot dot dot. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 7a209dd | I never went to the priests to confess," she said, "because I knew they would despise me for my sin. Yet when you named all my sins today, I could bear it because I knew you didn't despise me. I couldn't understand why, though, till now." "I'm not one to despise other people for their sins," said Ender. "I haven't found one yet, that I didn't say inside myself, I've done worse than this." "All these years you've borne the burden of humanity.. | Orson Scott Card |