1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3471
3472
3473
3474
3475
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 236271d | People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing such as pens, paper, computers, tape recorders, and generally by the time they have reached this decision, they have had a simple education. | writing-books writing-advice writing-process | Muriel Spark | |
| 2f2ba5a | If you don't remember Death, Death reminds you to do so. And if you can't cope with the facts the next best thing is to go away for a holiday. | Muriel Spark | ||
| 90cf44f | There was altogether too much candor in married life; it was an indelicate modern idea, and frequently led to upsets in a household, if not divorce... | married-life | Muriel Spark | |
| f3643d9 | If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practise which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs. | Muriel Spark | ||
| 11875b7 | When people say that nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease. | Muriel Spark | ||
| 77466c5 | Well, she thought, that big old dawg with the hatred in his eyes had killed her after all. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| a07ca4b | Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus' listenin' tuh you, Janie. Ah ain't satisfied with mahself no mo'. Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin' wid him after this. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| 8d2c347 | Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times, just as she was cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness...Like the pecking order in a chicken yard... Once having set up her idols and built altars to them it was inevitable that she would worship there. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| 626e05c | They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without master... | rumors | Zora Neale Hurston | |
| c695b81 | We Afficans try raise our chillun right. When dey say we ign'nant we go together and build de school house. Den de county send us a teacher. We Afficky men doan wait lak de other colored people till de white folks gittee ready to build us a school. We build one for ourself den astee de county to send us de teacher. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| 5e74ccc | Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| b7c6324 | Mind-pictures brought feelings, and feelings dragged out dramas from the hollows of the heart. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| 498fc69 | Somebody got to think for women and chillun and cows. I god, they sho don't think none theirselves... When Ah see one thing Ah understands ten. You see ten things and don't understand one. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| ab0bf86 | There was already something dead about him. He didn't rear back in his knees any longer. He squatted over his ankles when he walked. That stillness at the back of his neck. His prosperous-looking belly...sagged like a load suspended from his loins. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| 22bcfbb | Ah done lived Grandma's way, now Ah means tuh live mine. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| 284bbd7 | Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days. That was to say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously. How? Why? It was.. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| 651a63b | They sat on the boarding house porch and saw the sun plunge into the same crack in the earth from which the night emerged. | earth their-eyes-were-watching-god zora-neale-hurston crack renewal sun night | Zora Neale Hurston | |
| 4c15dbe | Long before the year was up, Janie noticed that her husband had stopped talkin to he rin rhymes. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| 83ae9d4 | Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| 985a18b | she received all things with the stolidness of the earth which soaks up urine and perfume with the same indifference. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| 6f0055f | Now they got to look into me loving Tea Cake and see whether it was done right or not! They don't know if life is a mess of corn-meal dumplings, and if love is a bed-quilt! | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| c278649 | Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain | simile | Zora Neale Hurston | |
| c6dcf31 | Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| a977129 | That though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| 3e08367 | Once upon uh time, Ah never 'spected nothin', Tea Cake, but bein' dead from the standin' still and tryin' tuh laugh. But you come 'long and made somethin' outa me. So Ah'm thankful fuh anything we come through together." "Thanky, Ma'am." | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| 8adaf4f | Gods always behave like the people who make them. | religion voodoo | Zora Neale Hurston | |
| efcd9ca | I prayed for my heart to soften, to forgive her, and love her for what she did give me--life, great values, a lot of tennis lessons, and the best she could do. Unfortunately, the best she could do was terrible, thee the Minister of Silly Walks trying to raise an extremely sensitive young girl, and my heart remained hardened toward her. [p. 46] | Anne Lamott | ||
| 1b13cb0 | I do believe that God is with us even when we're at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, and protects. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 94e55a7 | You lose the known package of your nice organized self almost instantly here. Overeating is one way back, the way it is at funerals at home. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 7150b33 | Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.) | Anne Lamott | ||
| b3556a6 | Then it came to me: I was asking the wrong question. The right one is: Where is God in gang warfare? And the answer is, The same place God is in Darfur, and in our alcoholism, and when children are bullied: being crucified. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 284da6d | When we agree to (or get tricked into) being part of something bigger than our own wired, fixated minds, we are saved. When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 783119c | They taught me that being of service, an ally to the lonely and suffering, a big-girl helper to underdogs, was my best shot at happiness. They taught me that most of my good ideas were not helpful, and that all of my ideas after ten p.m. were especially unhelpful. They taught me to pay attention, but not so much attention to my tiny princess mind. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 867bc11 | You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You're not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love. --ANNE LAMOTT | Arianna Huffington | ||
| a9bf327 | Rosie had been a little girl with a dead dad, and there was no getting around that or over that. Even a drunk dad, even an asshole, was better than a dead dad, which shouldn't reflect on you but did, and left a cannon hole in your heart. [p. 121] | Anne Lamott | ||
| 0ace0c6 | I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and save the world. You sent money to the Red Cross, you registered people to vote, you marched in rallies, stood in vigils, picked up litter. | Anne Lamott | ||
| cd56765 | Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit. God tells Job, who wants an explanation for all his troubles, "You wouldn't understand." | Anne Lamott | ||
| fad389d | This is where I liked to be when I was hangover or coming down off a cocaine binge, here in the dust with all these dusty people, all this liveliness and clutter and color, things for sale to cheer me up, and greasy food that would slip down by throat. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 2710b64 | We want a sense that an important character, like a narrator, is reliable. We want to believe that a character is not playing ages or being coy or being manipulative, but is telling the truth to the best of his or her ability...We do not wish to be crudely manipulated...We want to be massaged by a masseur, not whapped by a carpet beater. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 455d06d | I tell my students that the odds of their getting published and of it bringing them financial security, peace of mind, and even joy are probably not that great. Ruin, hysteria, bad skin, unsightly tics, ugly financial problems, maybe; but probably not peace of mind. I tell them that I think they ought to write anyway. | Anne Lamott | ||
| becc7c8 | But it is fantasy to think that successful writers do not have these bored, defeated hours, these hours of deep insecurity when one feels as small and jumpy as a water bug. They do. But they also often feel a great sense of amazement that they get to write, and they know that this is what they want to do for the rest of their lives. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 44a66f1 | I decided to go to the beach at San Quentin, and practice living as if today was one of the precious few left to me. What a concept. | Anne Lamott | ||
| d759334 | For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 3e99c13 | This one truth, that the few people you adore will die, is plenty difficult to absorb. But on top of it, someone's brakes fail, or someone pulls the trigger or snatches the kid, or someone deeply trusted succumbs to temptation, and everything falls apart. We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep o.. | Anne Lamott |