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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| fa45933 | On his death bed, the eighteenth-century haiku poet Shisui had finally responded to requests for a death poem by grabbing his brush, painting his poem, and dying. On the paper Shisui's shocked followers saw he had painted a circle. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 81253d8 | Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans' earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blinding light and him toddling back and forth, in and out of its transcendent welcome, into the arms of women. Women who loved him. Like entering the sea and returning to the beach. Over and over. | church light welcome | Richard Flanagan | |
| 7f89e4c | for a moment he wondered:what if this had all been a mask for the most terrible evil? The idea was too horrific to hold on to. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| f7f4c11 | Things bled. They bled and bled and would not stop bleeding. There would be no dramatic end, she realised, only a slow withering [...] bleeding and more bleeding. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 7f20cfb | Realism is the embrace of disappointment, in order no longer to be disappointed. 4 "So I came to the city, my friend," the Doll then told Jodie, "what of it?" | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 297700d | The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead. | memoir memoirs | Mary Karr | |
| 948302d | I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant. Touching that triangle of yellowed paper toda.. | Mary Karr | ||
| 7e9e1ac | It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy--getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff---get undercut by having to play football. | Mary Karr | ||
| e035b08 | Persiflage is my nom de guerre. (Don't use foreign expressions. It's elitist.) | Mary Karr | ||
| ed74111 | When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they're absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind. | Mary Karr | ||
| ffc75a3 | Finally, put it aside. Put it out of your head at least a week. You want it to set up like jello. And when you pick it back up, ask yourself, What haven't I said? How might someone else involved have seen it differently? | Mary Karr | ||
| 401a035 | Patti proposes that I pray to accept whatever reality I'm in, staying alert for practical solutions rather than issuing orders in prayer. It takes discipline to stop beseeching the heavens for wheelbarrows of gold | Mary Karr | ||
| b536124 | The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness. | Mary Karr | ||
| cf765d2 | But most of the time, we keep memories packed away. I sometimes liken that moment of sudden unpacking to circus clowns pouring out of a miniature car trunk--how did so much fit into such a small space? | Mary Karr | ||
| 70f0a5e | Tomorrow! How sweet its prospects for a drunkard the night before. There is no better word. Before the earth hurls itself into sunshine, nothing is not possible. | memoir memoirs | Mary Karr | |
| a4f00c9 | I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are. Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me. | Mary Karr | ||
| faa1425 | Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential. | great-insight spiritual | Mary Karr | |
| a9f4ed3 | every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me--later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish. | Mary Karr | ||
| acd1e3d | The image pleases me enough : to slip from the body's tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes glow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome. | karr mary the-liar-s-club | Mary Karr | |
| 994b0e2 | KIDS IN DISTRESSED FAMILIES ARE GREAT repositories of silence and carry in their bodies whole arctic wastelands of words not to be uttered, stories not to be told. | Mary Karr | ||
| 8e3aeb1 | I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them. | Mary Karr | ||
| b2e9c05 | Four spies, a monosyllabic earl, an annoying heiress, an obnoxious young sot, two very pleasing ladies--although Olivia had scarcely spoken this evening--and the mother from hell. | Celeste Bradley | ||
| ab558a7 | I have carried that ring every moment of the last twelve years. I bought it the day after I first saw you at the ball. The ruby reminded me of the rose gleaming in your black hair." ~Lord Malcom Ashford" | romance sir | Celeste Bradley | |
| 73262f6 | Everything would work out and she wouldn't have to tell Dane that the box full of ancient ivory penises was roaming freely about Kirkall Hall. | Celeste Bradley | ||
| a66efa3 | For a giddy moment Olivia wondered how that young man's pay was entered into the palace housekeeping ledger. His Highness's First Orderly of the Stool? Royal Stepping-stoolie? | Celeste Bradley | ||
| d2aa18a | Measure twice; cut once. | Alistair MacLeod | ||
| 866f9e2 | Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn't be crossed. | William Maxwell | ||
| b063a46 | Scoundrels will be corrupt and unconcerned citizens apathetic under even the best constitution. | government suffrage voting | William Earl Maxwell | |
| 68b561f | Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well. | William Maxwell | ||
| fbf232d | They had stopped shouting at each other and put their faith in legal counsel. With the result that how things could be made to look was what counted, not how they actually were. | reality | William Maxwell | |
| 00efa9a | Basically people who love horror movies are people with boring lives. They want to be stimulated, and they need to reassure themselves, because when a really scary movie is over, you're reassured to see that you're still alive and the world still exists as it did before. That's the real reason we have horror films--they act as shock absorbers--and if they disappeared altogether it would mean losing one of the few ways we have to ease the an.. | Ryū Murakami | ||
| 784122e | That was with me for years--feeling I wasn't myself. And I do think I wasn't my real self then. Of course, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking for the real you and never find it--slice yourself open and all you'll find is blood and muscle and bone. . . . | Ryū Murakami | ||
| 9d91c4b | What a weird place this was, I thought. It felt completely isolated and, partly because of the cold, like being on another planet. I wondered if there were planets where it's okay to murder people. I decided there must be, reminding myself that in war, after all, killers are heroes. | Ryū Murakami | ||
| d1bdf8f | Hey, take a good look, isn't the world still under your feet? I'm on this ground, and on this same ground are trees and grass and ants carrying sand to their nests, little girls chasing rolling balls, and puppies running. This ground runs under countless houses and mountains and rivers and seas, under everywhere. And I'm on it. Don't be scared, I'd told myself, the world is still under me. | Ryū Murakami | ||
| 85dc856 | The fragment of glass with the blood on its edge, as it soaked up the dawn air, was almost transparent. It was a boundless blue, almost transparent. I stood up, and as I walked toward my own apartment, I thought, I want to become like this glass. And then I want to reflect this smooth white curving myself. I want to show other people these splendid curves reflected in me. | Ryū Murakami | ||
| 3ed41ea | Rachel got up and did this happy little shuffle, like she was some cheerful farmer chick who'd just stepped outside to find the hick she was in love with coming up the road with a calf under his arm or whatever. | dancing happiness humor | George Saunders | |
| 873a729 | In spite of the strife the stars were bright as crystal. | George Saunders | ||
| fff8574 | He didn't like the thought of them knowing he'd been scared. Didn't like the thought of them knowing what a fool he'd been. Oh, to hell with that! Tell everyone! He'd done it! He'd been driven to do it and he'd done it and that was it. That was him. That was part of who he was. | George Saunders | ||
| a419ee0 | A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possibl, and as cautiously, because it knows its girth and the tight confines of the china shop it's blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well prepared it is -- no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny -- the place it is headed for is going to very different from the place it im.. | complexity ethics george humility intelligence morality saunders | George Saunders | |
| 36c43d7 | What I'm putting forth," he said, "is that the four of us make some memories, become fast friends and abandon starchy old mind-sets about monogamy. The world's gone crazy. Let's do the same." "The answer is no," Dad said. "And I'm surprised I'm not punching you." | monogamy polyamory | George Saunders | |
| 6ef194d | O Lord I cannot bear the thought of Philip lying still in such a place as this and when that thought arises must hum some scrap of tune energetically while praying No no no take that cup away Lord let me go first before any of them I love (before Philip Mary Jack Jr before dear Lydia) only that's no good either since when they reach their end I will not be there to help them? | George Saunders | ||
| a5e608f | That's what a book is: a failed attempt that, its failure notwithstanding, is sincere and hard-worked and expunged of as much falseness as he could manage, given his limited abilities, and has thus been imbued with a sort of purity. | George Saunders | ||
| d681dbe | And I don't know, it is one thing to look out a window, but when you are Out, actually Out, that is something very powerful, and how embarrassing was that, because I could not help it, I went down flat on my gut checking out those flowers, and the feeling of the one I chose was like the silk on that Hermes jacket I could never seem to get Reserved because Vance was always hogging it, except the flower was even better, it being very smooth a.. | page-55 | George Saunders | |
| e4395e3 | They were both so scared they weren't talking at all, which made me feel the kind of shame you know you're not going to cure by saying sorry, and where the only thing to do is: go out, get more shame. | George Saunders |