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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7ac1e01 | It has been remarked thousands of times that Christ died under torture. Many of us have read so often that he was a "humble carpenter" that we feel a little surge of nausea on seeing the words yet again. But no one ever seems to notice that the instruments of torture were wood, nails, and a hammer; that the man who built the cross was undoubtedly a carpenter too; that the man who hammered in the nails was as much a carpenter as a soldier, a.. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| ac4c7ca | Whatever we may say, all of us suffer from disturbed sleep at times. Some in truth hardly sleep, though some who sleep copiously swear that they do not. Some are disquieted by incessant dreams, and a fortunate few are visited often by dreams of delightful character. Some will say that they were at one time troubled in sleeping but have 'recovered' from it, as though awareness were a disease, as perhaps it is. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| cf7dd38 | The brown book I carry says there is nothing stranger than to explore a city wholly different from all those one knows, since to do so is to explore a second and unsuspected self. I have found a thing stranger: to explore such a city only after one has lived in it for some time without learning anything of it. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 84b6a00 | The picture he was cleaning showed an armored figure standing in a desolate landscape. It had no weapon, but held a staff bearing a strange, stiff banner. The visor of this figure's helmet was entirely of gold, without eye slits or ventilation; in its polished surface the deathly desert could be seen in reflection, and nothing more. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| 26db88f | It is well, I think, for us to learn to tell evil from good; but it has its price, as everything does. We leave our evil friend behind. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| c44cc75 | I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe--but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual; so it may be that some of .. | memories unreliable-narrator memory | Gene Wolfe | |
| cba53e2 | I have noticed that in books this sort of stalemate never seems to occur; the authors are so anxious to move their stories forward (however wooden they may be, advancing like market carts with squeaking wheels that are never still, though they go only to dusty villages where the charm of the country is lost and the pleasures of the city will never be found) that there are no such misunderstandings, no refusals to negotiate. The assassin who.. | Gene Wolfe | ||
| d236fbe | Yes, she would have been partial to men, perhaps she might even have confined herself to one man in particular, if only she had been able to find one who shared her view that intimacy between two people was of value irrespective of whether it led to sticky conflux. | Jonathan Coe | ||
| bced3ff | Your gravity, your grace have turned a tide In me, no lunar power can reverse; But in your narcoleptic eyes I spied A sightlessness tonight: or something worse, A disregard that made me feel unmanned. Meanwhile, insomniac, I catch my breath To think I saw my future traced in sand One afternoon "as still, as carved, as death," And pray for an oblivion so deep It ends in transformation. Only dawn Can save me, flood this haunted house of sleep.. | poem the-house-of-sleep | Jonathan Coe | |
| 9dd3f96 | There is strange, and yet not strange, is the kiss. It is strange because it mixes silliness with tragedy, and yet not strange because there is good reason for it. There is shaking by the hand. That should be enough. Yet a shaking of hands is not enough to give a vent to all kinds of feeling. The hand is too hard and too used to doing all things, with too little feeling and too far from the organs of taste and smell, and far from the brain,.. | kissing kisses | Richard Llewellyn | |
| aacc077 | I was just about to get up when Dad rushed into the kitchen. He was in pajamas, which was totally bizarre. Dad never came down to breakfast until he was completely dressed. Of course, his pajamas even had a little pocket and handkerchief, so maybe he felt dressed. He had a sheet of paper in his hands and was staring at it, his eyes wide. "James," Aislinn acknowledged. "You're up kind of late this morning. Is Grace sleeping in, too?" Dad gla.. | Rachel Hawkins | ||
| 3e840ec | Terrible diarrhea, Doctor, and I feel so weak!" "Take these pills and come back in three days if you're not better." "Terrible diarrhea..." "Take these pills..." "Terrible..." "Take..." "Doctor, I know it's Sunday, but the kid's in such a terrible state - you've got to help me!" "Give him some junior aspirin and bring him to my office tomorrow. Goodbye." EVERYWHERE, USA: a sudden upswing in orders for very small coffins, the right size t.. | disease | John Brunner | |
| 50366ad | You will die, and I, and all we can create--why not a city? But if there is one thing that deserves to be immortal, it is knowledge. | mortality optimism barratong knowledge | John Brunner | |
| d82f9fd | Toffler's Law, I guess: the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order. | John Brunner | ||
| 2dca460 | intelligence and wisdom aren't the same. | John Brunner | ||
| 38b9f6e | It's natural for a man to defend what's dear to him: his own life, his home, his family. But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles-in short to defend not himself but people whom he's never met and moreover would not care to be in the same room with him-you have to condition him into loving violence not for the benefits it bestows on him but for its own sake. .. | war human-nature | John Brunner | |
| 8ccfe68 | Too long now things divine have been cheaply used And all the power of heaven, the kindly, spent In trifling waste by cold and cunning Men without thanks, who when he, the Highest, In person tills their field for them, think they know the daylight and the Thunderer, and indeed Their telescope may find them all, may Count and may name every star of heaven. Yet will the Father cover with holy night, That we may last on earth, our too knowing .. | Friedrich Hölderlin | ||
| ded7305 | Come! into the open, friend! admittedly only a little is gleaming today down and narrowly the heaven is enclosing us. Neither the mountains have yet risen of the forest the peak as wished and empty the air is resting of singing It's dull today, the ways and lanes are slumbering and nearly it may seem to me to be as in the leaden time. | Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin | ||
| c6e8113 | What was the thread that held together the scattered beads of experience if not the pressure of interpretation? The meaning of life was whatever meaning one could thrust down its reluctant throat. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| 85257f9 | Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense. | stupidity | Edward St. Aubyn | |
| 1484fa8 | People think they are individuals because they use the word ''I'' so often. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| 4344402 | Every paradise demands a serpent. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| 539db70 | Try as one might to live on the edge, thought Patrick, getting into the other lift, there was no point in competing with people who believed what they saw on television. | Edward St. Aubyn | ||
| b0a3269 | I's lonely to stay inside oneself. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| 1ad2762 | And there they were, arrived; and it was San Salvatore; and their suit-cases were waiting for them; and they had not been murdered. | Elizabeth Von Arnim | ||
| 18b66e1 | Beauty made you love, love made you beautiful.... She pulled her wrap closer round her with a gesture of defence, of keeping out and off. She didn't want to grow sentimental. Difficult not to, here; the marvelous night stole in through all one's chinks, and brought in with it, whether one wanted them or not, enormous feelings--feelings one couldn't manage, great things about death and time and waste; glorious and devastating things, magnifi.. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| 86083dd | Humility, and the most patient perseverance, seem almost as necessary in gardening as rain and sunshine, and every failure must be used as a stepping-stone to something better. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| ec57edf | I was for ever making plans, and if nothing came of them, what did it matter? The mere making had been a joy. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| dc4357e | Nobody could have put her in the shade, blown out her light that evening; she was too evidently shining. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| 403cf2f | The passion of being forever with one's fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| c37df73 | In the evening, when everything is tired and quiet, I sit with Walt Whitman by the rose beds and listen to what that lonely and beautiful spirit has to tell me of night, sleep, death, and the stars. This dusky, silent hour is his; and this is the time when I can best hear the beatings of that most tender and generous heart. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| fd8d06c | But down from the end of the path it looked so charming that she wished she could paint it in watercolours--the great trees, the tempered sunlight, the glimpse of the old church at one end, the glimpse of the embosomed lake at the other, and in the middle, set out so neatly, with such a grace of spotlessness, the table of her first tea-party. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| be04b80 | Mrs. Fisher had never cared for macaroni, especially not this long, worm-shaped variety. She found it difficult to eat--slippery, wriggling off her fork, making her look, she felt, undignified when, having got it as she supposed into her mouth, ends of it yet hung out. Always, too, when she ate it she was reminded of Mr. Fisher. He had during their married life behaved very much like macaroni. He had slipped, he had wriggled, he had made he.. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| 058b57a | I don't believe there was ever anybody who loved being happy as much as I did. What I mean is that I was so acutely conscious of being happy, so appreciative of it; that I wasn't ever bored, and was always and continuously grateful for the whole delicious loveliness of the world. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| e3b7cf8 | Well, she had had the most wonderful summer; she had got that anyhow tucked away up the sleeve of her memory, and could bring it out and look at it when the days were wet and she felt cold and sick. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| f7942a2 | Sternly she tried to frown the unseemly sensation down. Burgeon, indeed. She had heard of dried staffs, pieces of mere dead wood, suddenly putting forth fresh leaves, but only in legend. She was not in legend. She knew perfectly what was due to herself. Dignity demanded that she should have nothing to do with fresh leaves at her age; and yet there it was--the feeling that presently, that at any moment now, she might crop out all green. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| d9a10f4 | Life is an admirable arrangement, isn't it, little mother. It is so clever of it to have June in every year and a morning in every day, let alone things like birds, and Shakespeare, and one's work. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| 78f6b48 | You mustn't long in heaven," said Mrs. Wilkins. "You're supposed to be quite complete there. And it is heaven, isn't it, Rose? See how everything has been let in together -- the dandelions and the irises, the vulgar and the superior, me and Mrs. Fisher -- all welcome, all mixed up anyhow, and all so visibly happy and enjoying ourselves." | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| 048501d | In addition, when a neighborhood's crime victims are portrayed as victims-sympathetically and without blame, as humans rather than as statistics-people living in other parts of the city are more inclined to support social services for the area, which in turn can reduce the crime rate. | kids teens-moms minorities drugs | Barry Glassner | |
| 6195bd9 | Samuel Taylor Coleridge was right when he claimed, 'In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.' Political activists are more inclined, though, to heed an observation from Richard Nixon: 'People react to fear, not love. They don't teach that in Sunday school, but it's true.' That principle, which guided the late president's political strategy throughout his career, is the sine qua non of contemporary political campaigning. Ma.. | politics fear power irrationality | Barry Glassner | |
| 26d0fb0 | I had an unusually large-sized head, though this was not uncommon for a baby in the Midwest. The craniums in our part of the country were designed to leave a little extra room for the brain to grow in case one day we found ourselves exposed to something we didn't understand, like a foreign language, or a salad. | Michael Moore | ||
| 70ab003 | The worst thing to tell a free people in a country that's still mostly free is that they are not allowed to read something. | freedom | Michael Moore | |
| 7bed1d6 | And mental states may be inferred from actions. The tyrant rarely sends a handwritten note requesting the elimination of an enemy. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 2758114 | Los simbolos tiene poder, Netley... Poder suficiente como para retorcerle el estomago incluso a alguien como tu... O como para relegar a la mitad de este planeta a la esclavitud. | Alan Moore |