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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5fa8701 | Everyone's body betrayed them in different ways, it was all forgiven and never discussed. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| e1a43e2 | Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 600da43 | You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 56ccf47 | I'm tightly wound. I'm a loose cannon. Both - I'm a tightly wound loose cannon, a tight loose. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 82350ac | Winter days were static glimpsed between channel flips. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| b52ba50 | There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways. | nyc subway tourettes | Jonathan Lethem | |
| d64658f | Did he ever--try?' Mingus shrugged. 'He was like you.' What's that mean?' Means he tried.' Of course. The ring was not a neutral tool. It judged its wearer: Aaron Doily flew drunkenly, and Dylan flew like a coward, only when it didn't matter, at the Windles' pond. So if had attuned to Robert Woolfolk's chaos. Don't tell me,' said Dylan. 'He flew sideways.' Mingus left it vague. He'd always made it his habit to protect their honor against on.. | friendship | Jonathan Lethem | |
| fc24a65 | Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had ben taken from me, stripped off like clothes I'd only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| afd9011 | The Joker's henchmen break into the museum and empty the display cases; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes a part of the exhibition. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| f340572 | There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 837e63a | People have to be patient when they're talking to a nervous person. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 799faf0 | We writers aren't sculpting in DNA, or even clay or mud, but words, sentences, paragraphs, syntax, voice; materials issued by tongue or fingertips but which upon release dissolve into the atmosphere, into cloud, confection, specter. Language, as a vehicle, is a lemon, a hot rod painted with thrilling flames but crazily erratic to drive, riddled with bugs like innate self-consciousness, embedded metaphors and symbols, helpless intertextualit.. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| a5ad15f | Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with The New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, w.. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| b94f313 | The speaker was stringy and angular, his blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, his plaid workman's shirtsleeves rolled up around his pale biceps. Journalism major, I guessed. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 36d6bad | How do you feel about this terrible thing?" "Terrible," said Oedipa. "Wonderful!" | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| a4f38c1 | But I hope you will -- use your brains. Use your brains. Don't be distracted. Once you make that mistake, of being -- distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden, a woman always does. | Alice Munro | ||
| edfa8f6 | He tells me how the Great Lakes came to be. All where Lake Huron is now, he says, used to be flat land, a wide flat plain. Then came the ice, creeping down from the north, pushing deep into the low places. Like that--and he shows me his hand with his spread fingers pressing the rock-hard ground where we are sitting. His fingers make hardly any impression at all and he says, "Well, the old ice cap had a lot more power behind it than this han.. | Alice Munro | ||
| dcbdc78 | The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity. | Alice Munro | ||
| 0e281cc | It was all he could do. To make her see what she was doing, what she was ending, and to punish her if she did so. Nobody would blame him. There might be finagling, there might be bargaining, there would certainly be humbling of herself, but there it was, like a round cold stone in her gullet, like a cannonball. And it would remain there unless she changed her mind entirely. The children stay, | Alice Munro | ||
| 4ed9503 | Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some kind of small untidy evergreens rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling. | Alice Munro | ||
| 99ed090 | And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble - the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know. | misunderstanding | Alice Munro | |
| fe2c5c2 | A million dollars in those days was a million dollars. | Alice Munro | ||
| fbec172 | Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now? | Alice Munro | ||
| 7a963c9 | yky dwbr krl ykdf`h shrw` krdh bwd bh Hrf zdn w kr khyly Hmqnh y krdh bwd, fqT bry ankh fD r `wD knd. z an krhyy kh kh wqty swrkrhy dst w pchlfty w wHshtzdh tzh kr Hss Hqrt my krdnd, z w sr my zd. | Alice Munro | ||
| a690cca | The dark and the snow are too thick for him to see beyond the first trees. He's been in there before at this time, when the dark shuts down in early winter. But now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up in itself it is, how dense and secret. It's not a matter of one tree after another, it's all the trees together, aiding and abetting one another and weaving into.. | Alice Munro | ||
| b2c8f45 | Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant. | Alice Munro | ||
| 3f1b6a7 | Be thou of Zen. Remember, in tranquillity, that the Absolute, the Tao, is within thee, that no priest or cult or dogma or book or saying or teaching or teacher stands between Thou and It. Know that Good and Evil are irrelevant, I and Thou irrelevant, Inside and Outside irrelevant as are Life and Death. Enter into the Sphere where there is no fear of death nor hope of afterlife, where thou art free of the impediments of life or the needs of .. | James Clavell | ||
| 2b6976e | He took a deep breath of air. Once again he caught a strangeness on the wind, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither odor nor perfume--just strange, and curiously exciting. "Superintendent, what's that smell? Casey noticed it too, the moment Sven opened the door." Armstrong hesitated. Then he smiled. "That's Hong Kong's very own, Mr. Bartlett. It's money." | James Clavell | ||
| 4db969c | I prefer the mist that surrounds me. Yes, I don't like a lot of what I see nowadays. | James Clavell | ||
| 11bcd92 | In war and in peace, a good enemy can be more valuable than a good ally. | James Clavell | ||
| cd74f2c | Listen, if you want peace you must learn to drink cha from an empty cup. | cup peace tea | James Clavell | |
| 3b30ad4 | Patience is important for a man, vital for a leader | man men patience | James Clavell | |
| 49a0b54 | time has no single measure, that time can be like frost or lightning or a tear or siege or storm or sunset, or even like a rock. | James Clavell | ||
| b3afb0a | Only merchants have money to waste, and what are they but parasites who create nothing, grow nothing, make nothing but feed off another's labor? | money | James Clavell | |
| 09880b0 | If you smile when you lose, then you win in life. | James Clavell | ||
| 49e6e91 | Oedipa resolved to pull in at the next motel she saw, however ugly, stillness and four walls having at some point become preferable to this illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair, unreeling landscape--it wasn't. What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 3f77c4f | Proverbs for Paranoids: 1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures. 2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. 3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. 4. You hide, they seek. 5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paran.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 4fbb1c0 | If her luck held, she'd never have to know. The baby was perfect cover, it made her something else, a mom, that was all, just another mom in the nation of moms, ad all she'd ever have to do to be safe was stay inside that particular fate, bring up the kid, grow into some version of Sasha... speak the right lines, stay within budget, wrap each day, one by one, before she lost the light. | settling-for-less | Thomas Pynchon | |
| f34af5c | There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present as his own assembley--perhaps heavily paranoid voices whisper, 'his time's assembley'--and there ought to be a punchline to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead and being scattered. His cards have been laid down, Celtic style, in the order suggested by Mr. A.E. Waite, laid out and read, but they are the cards of a tan.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| c7079de | True pornography is given us by vastly patient professionals. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 0f16db9 | She has stepped out into a different night, a different town altogether, one of those first-person-shooter towns that you can drive around in seemingly forever, but never away from. The only humanity visible are virtual extras in the distance, none offering any of the help she needs. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| ae324de | What I mean is something like a closed circuit. Everybody on the same frequency. And after a while you forget about the rest of the spectrum and start believing that this is the only frequency that counts or is real. While outside, all up and down the land, there are these wonderful colors and x-rays and ultraviolets going on. | opinion reinforcement | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 0ee592f | She sank with an enormous sigh that carried all rigidity like a mythical fluid from her, down next to him; so weak she couldn't help him undress her; it took him 20 minutes, rolling, arranging her this way and that, as if she thought, he were some scaled-up, short-haired, poker-faced little girl with a Barbie doll. She may have fallen asleep once or twice. She awoke at last to find herself getting laid; she'd come in on a sexual crescendo i.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 061301c | It was always easy, in open and lonely places, to be visited by Panic wilderness fear, but these are the urban fantods here, that come to get you when you are lost or isolate inside the way time is passing, when there is no more History, no time-travelling capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness and the absence that fill a great railway shed after the capital has been evacuated, and the goat-god's city cousins wait for you at th.. | Thomas Pynchon |