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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d85e744 | Beh oui. Better sticky than burned. | Peter Mayle | ||
| 55a8fec | Not for the first time, Peter thought about how much of our lives we spend sequestered inside small patches of electric brightness, blind to everything beyond the reach of those fragile bulbs. | bulbs electric fragile sequestered lives | Michel Faber | |
| fdc9a76 | Forgive me, Lord, for the smallness and selfishness of my mind. Amen. | Michel Faber | ||
| da02574 | All along the street, keys rattle in key-holes as each shop's ornate metal clothing is stripped away...It's as if, having unlocked the chastity of shutters and doors, they can't see the point in maintaining any shred of modesty. | Michel Faber | ||
| 9e5f005 | He were still smiling but his voice were hard as a spoon rattling in a metal cup. | Peter Carey | ||
| 53ae730 | Would you rather have the lords and nobles back? What is Democracy for? Not so we can rob each other. Or cheat.' I said and felt the teeth in it, the cleat, the cut, the eat. | Peter Carey | ||
| cf1f019 | 7. Some Theories that Arose at the Time 1. The world is merely a dream dreamt by god who is waking after a long sleep. When he is properly awake the world will disappear completely. When the world disappears we will disappear with it and be happy. 2. The world has become sensitive to light. In the same way that prolonged use of, say, penicillin can suddenly result in a dangerous allergy, prolonged exposure of the world to the sun has made.. | Peter Carey | ||
| 4894bd9 | Given that all three of us were Londoners, we paused a moment to carry out the ritual of the "valuation of the property." I guessed that, given the area, it was at least a million and change. "Million and a half, easy," said Carey. "More," said Guleed. "If it's freehold." | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 5c92791 | A cormorant broke the surface, like an improbable idea tearing the membrane between dreams and life. | Peter Carey | ||
| 00d4e4b | She had no criticism of his dress, which was bagged at the knees, dropping at the lapels, rucked around the buttons, while she-although she wore a flowing white cotton-appeared (she knew it and wished it was not so) as starched and pressed as a Baptist in a riding habit. They were different, and yet not ill matched. They had both grown used to the attentions that are the eccentric's lot-the covert glances, smiles, whispers, worse. Lucinda w.. | Peter Carey | ||
| b5bb7d6 | The song she heard from the meadow was the same tune as the bird's call.She looked up in the trees.For a moment she thought she'd lost the bird, and she nearly cried out for him, but he fluttered down,landed right at her feet, and grew into a man." "Oh." Meg sighed.She'd always liked that part. "He whistled the tune once more, then the fey man said, 'My lady,will you dance?" "'I will.' She crossed the bridge to the meadow,and danced with th.. | Janet Lee Carey | ||
| 542facb | In the general course of things, when beauty passes, the flower bows its head upon the stem and fails. Sometimes, though, when the petals droop, a framework of tempered steel is revealed within. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| f424981 | But to force growth is to kill it. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 558fd28 | I thought about what a priest of Elua had told me about love many years ago, the first time I kept his vigil on the Longest Night. You will find it and lose it, again and again. And with each finding and each loss, you will become more than before. What you make of it is yours to choose. It was true. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 9999727 | in the arts of covertcy, it is death to second-guess oneself. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| b3e5967 | Genius requires an audience. For all his cleverness, Delaunay was an artist and as vulnerable as any of his kind to the desire to vaunt his brilliance. And there were few, very few, people capable of appreciating his art. I did not know, then, how deep-laid a game they played with each other, nor what part in it I was to play. All I knew was that she was the audience he chose. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| b9047ba | It must sound, I know, as if I had no pity for him; it wasn't true. I was angry because I was terrified. But there are times when a curse is more bracing than an endearment. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| f0c4ff7 | Adult gorillas will fight to the death defending their families. This is why poachers who may be seeking only one infant for the zoo trade must often kill all the adults in the family to capture the baby. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 060720a | At the Seattle Aquarium, Sammy the giant Pacific octopus enjoyed playing with a baseball-size plastic ball that could be screwed together by twisting the two halves. A staffer put food inside the ball but later was surprised to find that not only had the octopus opened the ball, it had screwed it back together when it was done. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 63202d7 | A giant Pacific octopus--the largest of the world's 250 or so octopus species--can easily overpower a person. Just one of a big male's three-inch-diameter suckers can lift 30 pounds, and a giant Pacific octopus has 1,600 of them. An octopus bite can inject a neurotoxic venom as well as saliva that has the ability to dissolve flesh. Worst of all, an octopus can take the opportunity to escape from an open tank, and an escaped octopus is a big.. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| a515a8b | I am still learning how to be a good creature. Though I try earnestly, I often fail. But I am having a great life trying... | inspirational self-growth love-of-animals how-to-be-a-good-creature | Sy Montgomery | |
| ffa16de | The study of a language . . . allows its students to hear a people's 'interpretation (or misinterpretation) of messages from environment to human.' The spoken word reveals, upon reflection, that to which its speakers first chose to listen, then ponder, then live by. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 699d74b | But Wilson was ahead of the curve. Long before the first octopus-enrichment handbook was published, many octopuses ago, he set out to create a safe toy worthy of an octopus's intellect. Working at his lab at Arthur D. Little Corp., Wilson devised a series of three clear Plexiglas cubes with different locks. The smallest of the three has a sliding latch that twists to lock down, like the bolt on a horse's stall. You can put a live crab--a fa.. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 9ede179 | The sight of a slender young woman sitting in the anaconda exhibit with a 13-foot-long, predatory reptile snuggling in her lap, the tip of a tail coiled lovingly around one leg, provided dramatic evidence of what Scott and Wilson already knew: "Just about every animal," Scott says--not just mammals and birds--"can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy." Once" | Sy Montgomery | ||
| a023bb6 | Books don't repeat the same words over and over. The Gulliver's Travels whose whimsey amused you at twelve is not the Gulliver's Travels whose acid engaged you at thirty. | James K. Morrow | ||
| d7dde91 | Love makes clear the eyes that else would never see: "Love makes blind the eyes to all but me and thee." | William Morris | ||
| c33088f | Philip knew by now that whenever anyone was angry with him his first thought was to say something about his club-foot. His estimate of the human race was determined by the fact that scarcely anyone failed to resist the temptation. | human-race temptation club-foot | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 739ac77 | Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years and what will anything matter then? | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 91d51be | He was at once to great and too small for love. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| b25b307 | Sometimes I think that when we say our honour prevents us from doing this or that we deceive ourselves, and our real motive is vanity. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| f832bf9 | We English have no very strong attachment to the soil, we can make ourselves at home in any part of the world, but the French, I think, have an attachment to their country which is almost a physical bond. They're never really at ease when they're out of it. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 41db9a9 | She must really love you to distraction." "It's rather a funny sensation, you know," he answered, wrinkling a perplexed forehead. "I haven't the smallest doubt that if I really left her, definitely, she would commit suicide. Not with any ill-feeling towards me, but quite naturally, because she was unwilling to live without me. It is a curious feeling it gives one to know that. It can't help meaning something to you." | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 232144d | I hate you. I wish you was dead. | pain hate heart | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| b9f921e | It was as though the house had been left empty but a minute before and yet that minute was fraught with eternity so that you could not imagine that ever again that house would echo with talk and resound with laughter. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 00b2358 | Grief she could not feel, for there had been too much bitterness between her mother and herself to leave in her heart any deep feeling of affection; and looking back on the girl she had been she knew that it was her mother who had made her what she was. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| fdcbb59 | Let me be frank just this once, father. I've been foolish and wicked and hateful. I've been terribly punished. I'm determined to save my daughter from all that. I want her to be fearless and frank. I want her to be a person, independent of others because she is possessed of herself, and I want her to take life like a free man and make a better job of it than I have. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 96c9103 | He was thankful not to have to believe in God, for then such a condition of things would be intolerable; one could reconcile oneself to existence only because it was meaningless. | religion life | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 1ed5f53 | It may be that in his rogues the writer gratifies instincts deep-rooted in him, which the manners and customs of a civilised world have forced back to the mysterious recesses of the subconscious. In giving to the character of his invention flesh and bones he is giving life to that part of himself which finds no other means of expression. His satisfaction is a sense of liberation. The writer is more concerned to know than to judge. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 298d193 | How ugly most people are! It's a pity they don't try to make up for it by being agreeable. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 07f05f7 | I have written this because it may have escaped the notice of many who have admired her [Marie Tempest] brilliant performances that they are due not only to her natural gifts...but to patience, assiduity, industry and discipline. Without these it is impossible to excel in any of the arts. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 2953317 | The general idiocy of mankind is such that they can be swayed by words, and however mortifying, for the present you have to accept the fact as you accept it in the cinema that a film to be a success must have a happy ending. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| cf6ca97 | The bright hopes of youth had to be paid for at such a bitter price of disillusionment. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 5c81ab3 | How silly men were! Their part in procreation was so unimportant; it was the woman who carried the child through long months of uneasiness and bore it with pain, and yet a man because of his momentary connection made such preposterous claims. Why should that make any difference to him in his feelings towards the child? | men women procreation conception children | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| f3aa980 | Everything passed, and what trace of its passage remained? It seemed to Kitty that they were all, the human race, like the drops of water in that river and they flowed on, each so close to the other and yet so far apart, a nameless flood, to the sea. When all things lasted so short a time and nothing mattered very much, it seemed pitiful that men, attaching an absurd importance to trivial objects, should make themselves and one another so u.. | metaphor human-race kindness humanity triviality-of-life | W. Somerset Maugham |