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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 445a54b | Societies only have waste products while acquiring fresh raw material remains a cheaper option than recycling. | recycling society waste | Peter F. Hamilton | |
| 77ccc24 | The penalty for a long life is increasing resistance to change. | stubbornness | Peter F. Hamilton | |
| 5dced8d | This must be the sixth realm, the nameless void. Entropy is the only lord here. We will all bow down before him in the end. | Peter F. Hamilton | ||
| d019854 | The balance is the penalty of being human: the danger of allowing yourself to feel. For this we walk a narrow path high above rocky ground. On one side we have the descent into animalism, on the other a godhead delusion. Both pulling at us, both tempting. But without these forces tugging at your psyche, stirring it into conflict, you can never love. They awaken us, you see, these warring sides, they arouse our passion. | Peter F. Hamilton | ||
| 4fd5798 | Computers aren't smart, just fast. Garbage in, garbage out. | Peter F. Hamilton | ||
| 560007e | I doubt any system that won't reveal its purpose, that only offers promises of a better tomorrow. | Peter F. Hamilton | ||
| 6961f2a | All readers have reading in common. | Will Schwalbe | ||
| dd00a1d | Lahiri's characters, just like people all around us, are constantly telling each other important things, but not necessarily in words. | will schwalbe | ||
| d520057 | Yes," Mom said. "People may want to kill themselves. But no one wants to be depressed, or in pain, or lonely, or hurt." | Will Schwalbe | ||
| f60ad64 | No one in the family has ever really gotten over Bob's death. We talk of him daily, recounting stories and imagining what his reactions would be to new books and recent events. He remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you, in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life, no matter how long it's been since you turned the last page. | Will Schwalbe | ||
| d8d3c9a | life depends on what she thinks of as 'big bursts' and 'little bursts.' Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. | Will Schwalbe | ||
| 03d6332 | And if the book is too silly, I find that it's often because the writer doesn't really have anything to say - or there are no values. Or because the whole book is just a lead-up to a trick at the end. If you read the end first, you may have much less patience for wasting time with that kind of book. Even a well-written book can be silly and a waste of time. | silliness | Will Schwalbe | |
| 2165293 | the apartment is an oasis - of civility, kindness, and elegance. | Will Schwalbe | ||
| 3348a0f | No one is ever safe. So why not live as much as you can? | Rita Mae Brown | ||
| de9ea40 | My voice rings down through thousands of years to coil around your body and give you strength, you who have wept in direct sunlight, who have hungered in invisible chains, tremble to the cadence of my legacy: An army of lovers shall not fail. | sappho | Rita Mae Brown | |
| 3427399 | Anyway, how did I know the president was for real? I never saw him, just pictures in the paper and they can make those up. How do you know someone is real if you don't see him? | Rita Mae Brown | ||
| 9876f00 | what would happen if she'd open her eyes and see only dark and feel satin from the coffin? That'd scare her enough to kill her all over again. How do they know dead people don't open their eyes and see? they don't know nothing about being dead. | Rita Mae Brown | ||
| ddfbdc3 | you can't be a doctor. Only boys can be doctors. Leroy's got to be the doctor." "You're full of shit, Spiegelglass, Leroy's dumber than I am. I got to be doctor because I'm the smart one and being a girl don't matter." "You'll see. You think you can do what boys do but you're going to be a nurse, no two ways about it. It doesn't matter about brains, brains don't count. What counts is whether you're a boy or a girl." I hauled off and belted .. | Rita Mae Brown | ||
| 72bf2b8 | Course I didn't want to be a doctor. I was going to be president only I kept it secret. | Rita Mae Brown | ||
| 731bad6 | I have changed my definition of tragedy. I now think tragedy is not foul deeds done to a person (usually noble in some manner) but rather that tragedy is irresolvable conflict. | Rita Mae Brown | ||
| debc353 | Are Russian cannibals worse than the English? Of course. The English eat only the feet, the Russians the soul. "The soul is a mirage," I told Anna Alexandrovna, but she went on eating mine anyway." | souls russians | Charles Simic | |
| 14ecca4 | I have always believed a window into a person's true nature is how they treat animals, children, and the elderly. A person who mistreats animals isn't worth knowing. A person who mistreats children--especially those who abuse and kill them--should be shot without wasting any taxpayer money for a trial and for feeding them in prison. When a perpetrator of heinous crimes can live in a climate-controlled environment and eat three meals a day w.. | Rita Mae Brown | ||
| faa3b0e | In the Library" for Octavio There's a book called "A Dictionary of Angels." No one has opened it in fifty years, I know, because when I did, The covers creaked, the pages Crumbled. There I discovered The angels were once as plentiful As species of flies. The sky at dusk Used to be thick with them. You had to wave both arms Just to keep them away. Now the sun is shining Through the tall windows. The library is a quiet place. Angels and gods .. | Charles Simic | ||
| cf3cc69 | Because the light is always with us and the hush of an early morning time propitious to plain speech space between the premonition and the event | Charles Simic | ||
| a47123f | I remember," someone said, "how in ancient times one could turn a wolf into a human and then lecture it to one's heart's content." | Charles Simic | ||
| fb8fa4c | It was only the sea sounding weary After so many lifetimes Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere And never getting anywhere. | Charles Simic | ||
| 63c968d | The thing, whatever it was - and no one was ever sure afterwards whether it was a dream or a fit or what - happened at that peculiar hour before dawn when human vitality is at its lowest ebb. The Blue Hour they sometimes call it, l'heure bleue - the ribbon of darkness between the false dawn and the true, always blacker than all the rest of the night has been before it. Criminals break down and confess at that hour; suicides nerve themselves.. | fear l-heure-bleue the-blue-hour night horror | Cornell Woolrich | |
| eeec411 | First, all I could see was this beautiful face, this beautiful girl's face; like a white, slightly luminous mask, swimming detachedly against enfolding darkness. As if a little private spotlight of its own was trained on it from below. It was so beautiful and so false, and I seemed to know it so well, and my heart was wrung. There was no danger yet, just this separate, shell-like face mask standing out. But there was danger somewhere arou.. | femme-fatale nightmare | Cornell Woolrich | |
| d56e4b9 | They call this love, she said to herself. I know what it is now. I never thought I would know, but I do now. But she failed to add: if you can step back and identify it, is it really there? Shouldn't you be unable to know what the whole thing's about? Just blindly clutch and hold and fear that it will get away. But unable to stop, to think, to give it any name. Just two more people sharing a common human experience. Infinite in its complexi.. | relationships | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 74d6349 | Then the long nights, that were also days, in the hospital. And the long blanks, that were also nights. Needles, and angled glass rods to suck water through. Needles, and curious enamel wedges slid under your middle. Needles, and - needles and needles and needles. Like swarms of persistent mosquitoes with unbreakable drills. The way a pincushion feels, if it could feel. Or the target of a porcupine. Or a case of not just momentary but perma.. | needles surgery recovery | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 030c5d8 | Babette looked too good for the place tonight, but then goodness is only relative after all ("Steps Going Up" aka "Guillotine" aka "Men Must Die")" -- | moral-relativism | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 002c499 | Then the bandit turned tail and broke for the open. Greeley hit the sidewalk only seconds after him, big as he was and with a panic-stricken woman to detour around. A slice of hindmost heel was all he saw of the man. The store entrance adjoined a corner; that gave the fugitive a few added seconds of shelter, and as Greeley flashed around it in turn, again the breaks were the lawbreaker's. There was a school midway up the street toward the.. | burglary cops footchase chase police | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 2b1e133 | I took a few dragging steps toward the locker-room door. 'You're doing something to me that I wouldn't do to a dog,' I mumbled. 'What you're doing to me is worse than if you were to kill me. You're locking me up in shadows for the rest of my life. You're taking my mind away from me. You're condemning me slowly but surely to madness, to being without a mind. It won't happen right away, but sooner or later, in six months or in a year - Well, .. | madness | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 77f4209 | I think fear neutralizes alcohol, weakens its anesthetic power. It's good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist; all right then to take a drink. But for big ones it doesn't do any good. Like water on blazing gasoline, it will only quicken and compound it. It takes sand, in the literal and the slang sense, to smother the bonfire that is fear. And if you're out of sand, then you must burn up. ("New York Blues")" | fear | Cornell Woolrich | |
| e0806ce | You see, this would be a death by the imagination. And though the imagination feeds on phantoms, it needs a premise in reality to begin with. Then it can go on from there under its own power. ("Mind Over Murder")" | murder imagination | Cornell Woolrich | |
| fe81e7f | You haven't any right to expect your friends to be larger than yourself, larger than life. Just take them as they are, cut down to average size, and be glad you have them. To drink with, laugh with, borrow money from, lend money to, stay away from their special girls as you want them to stay away from yours, and above all, never break your word to, once it's been given. And that is all the obligation you have, all you have the right to expe.. | friendship friendship-tolerance friendships | Cornell Woolrich | |
| b715685 | What careful planning, what painstaking attention to detail, goes into extinguishing a man's life! Far more than the hit-or-miss, haphazard circumstances of igniting it. ("New York Blues")" | killing murder execution | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 075c0f6 | Extreme joy and extreme sorrow are indistinguishable beyond a certain point. ("Jane Brown's Body")" | sorrow joy | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 450f82b | Alexander Smollett, master; David Livesey, ship's doctor; Abraham Gray, carpenter's mate; John Trelawney, owner; John Hunter and Richard Joyce, owner's servants, landsmen--being all that is left faithful of the ship's company--with stores for ten days at short rations, came ashore this day and flew British colours on the log-house in Treasure Island. Thomas Redruth, owner's servant, landsman, shot by the mutineers; James Hawkins, cabin boy-.. | dr-livesey jim-hawkins pirates | Robert Louis Stevenson | |
| db4b6c5 | Simone de Beauvoir llamaba mujeres pelota a aquellas que, tras triunfar con grandes dificultades en la sociedad machista, se prestaban a ser utilizadas por esa misma sociedad para reforzar la discriminacion; y asi, su imagen era rebotada contra las demas mujeres con el siguiente mensaje: <> | Rosa Montero | ||
| 1f742e9 | La guerra es una porqueria no solo derriba casas, sino tambien los principios mas elevados. | Rosa Montero | ||
| c20ed80 | Lo que publicamente se entiende por normal no es lo mas habitual, sino lo normativo, lo convencionalmente obligatorio. Pero dentro del secreto de nuestra intimidad, todos nos desviamos de la regla, todos somos de algun modo heterodoxos. | Rosa Montero | ||
| 2a09abe | El desamor es topico, ridiculo, monumentalmente exagerado. Pero duele | Rosa Montero | ||
| 5f84d0b | Ni siquiera la piramide mas monumental es suficiente para defendernos de la muerte. | Rosa Montero |