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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 01d328d | I do not believe home is where we're born, or the place we grew up, not a birthright or an inheritance, not a name, or blood or country. It is not even the soft part that hurts when touched, that defines our loneliness the way a bowl defines water. It will not be located in a smell or taste or talisman or a word... Home is our first real mistake. It is the one error that changes everything, the one lesson you could let destroy you. It is fr.. | Anne Michaels | ||
| 3c80b89 | To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into? | survival | Anne Michaels | |
| 41e780c | History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue. | Anne Michaels | ||
| 1e2dcdd | Cole envisioned the next few weeks passing as a sort of painless montage: there'd be music, and different moments of the townspeople hard at work building a defensive wall around the perimeter of the town, and digging holes to serve as traps, and training with the few weapons they had. There'd be a wiping of perspiration and drinks raised to one another and the exchange of friendly smiles between comrades, and perhaps deeper, more meaningfu.. | defensive-fortifications montage real-time seven-samurai-homage strategy | Michael Rubens | |
| 34123a1 | There was no energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy. | Anne Michaels | ||
| 5e4cbe0 | At night, a few lights marked port and starboard of these gargantuan industrial forms, and I filled them with loneliness. I listened to these dark shapes as if they were black spaces in music, a musician learning the silences of a piece. I felt this was my truth. That my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence; the moment I looked into the room and took in only what was visible, not vanished. The moment I failed to see .. | Anne Michaels | ||
| d42fd7c | If the truth is not in the face, then where is it? In the hands! In the hands. | Anne Michaels | ||
| d5256eb | Life might throw crap at you, but there's always a silver lining. | Barbara Haworth-Attard | ||
| 2afc1d4 | One day he would finish the job of dying he'd begun in childhood/ | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 4a73cb6 | Your life story is really about how the hands of history caught you up, played with you, and you with them. History plays for keeps; individuals play for time. When | Gregory Maguire | ||
| a95f3e6 | Marmalade has to make its own way in life, like the rest of us, she thought. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 0302406 | The toys can help in the battle." "Mother Ginger? I doubt it!" "Never underestimate the value of a mother in wartime. She has the most to fight for." | toys wartime | Gregory Maguire | |
| 4a70be0 | I was quite a looker in my time," she said. Was she reading his mind, or only being smart, to know she must be hideous? "Oh, had they invented time as long ago as that?" | old-age | Gregory Maguire | |
| 69b1623 | What goes unnamed remains hard to correct. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 16994d4 | I am a woman who slept with my father the Pope. They say I did, at least, and so does he. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 55dec47 | and Ama Clutch was gone, and the overly subordinate pillowcase took a small spill of human juice from the edge of her slackened mouth. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| dc1ec9e | this girl who seemed, increasingly, to be interested in learning to read everything except how human beings talked to one another. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 12b4d09 | My job is to protect you, Lady Glinda even if you are loosing your mind. | protection | Gregory Maguire | |
| 7563791 | One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her-is it ever the right choice? | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 7496eaa | Only he with the hobbled foot fully knows the beauty of running. Only he with the severed ear can apprehend what the sweetest music must sound like. Our ailments complete us. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| df1bb41 | You know our Alice. She plays hide-and-seek but sometimes forgets to ask someone to look for her. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| ffc4511 | I know this: The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness, she said. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 039ad0e | The unvisited grannies, in stone houses by the wheat field, can't remember their husbands or children. They worry their hands, though, hands that could do with a rinsing. The grannies think: We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is cor.. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 4f4bb4e | The boy does well enough," said Vicente. "A goose does not ask much of life, after all." "No," she admitted. "Those who ask much are more likely disappointed. We should all be as simple as the goose." | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 5165d31 | We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 1e60a25 | Aren't these the finest treasures? Each one springs up, and becomes more red than rubies, more fine than diamonds adn more valuable, so we are told; and before you can run back here again to look, the petals have begin to drop and the leaves to yellow. Look, they sag, they fall. Are they the more wonderful because they live such a short time. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 4aa2453 | But I must pay attention now, she thinks, because what other choice is there? Maybe when I die my soul will fly to meet God, but when that time comes I won't have the use of clever hands, nor the burden of an ugly face; hands and face will be planted like bulbs in the soil, while only the bloom of the spirit emerges elsewhere. So let my hands and my face make their way in the world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| c92fd76 | How truly novel. The emotional life of furniture. I never. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| e621cc9 | To look into the mirror is to see the future, in blood and rubies. | munchkinland turtle-heart wicked | Gregory Maguire | |
| f90cc8e | The surface of the shoes seemed to pulse with hundreds of reflections and refractions. In the firelight, it was like looking at boiling corpuscles of blood under a magnifying glass. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 3aa3d00 | She found her regard for Mr. Winter turning to something like suspicion--though notice how often we lower suspicion upon others to avoid putting ourselves under scrutiny. Now | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 34fa793 | But there was the mirror in which I would glimpse his handsome form, because mirrors don't lie about men, only women. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 5c2154c | What's missing from the literature of our species are the stories of the peasants. The filthy illiterate. Those with no firm address, no surname. No one to impress, nothing to lose. But the poor tell stories, too. | literature nutcracker poor-people stories stories-of-people | Gregory Maguire | |
| b5d57ba | Furniture!" bellowed the witch. "Tables, bathtub, the lot of you. It's time to go out in the world and seek your fortunes, if that's your hope." There was a crashing sound as all the furniture went and tried to hide under the bed, and the bed tried to hide under itself." | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 939430b | I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral," said the Wizard. "In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early warning sign of apoplexy. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the most, it is hypocritical." | morality | Gregory Maguire | |
| 7e7bedf | When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil, and maybe splits apart and multiplies. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| e2aaf96 | Always you were drawn to the composite creatures, the broken and reassembled, for that is what you are. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| eb4a0b7 | Elena had always felt like the center of her own world - who doesn't? The world arranged itself around her like petals around the stem of a flower. This way the meadows, that way the woodland. Over here, the baryn's estate, out there, the hills that hug the known world close and imply a world at beyond. She could never come up with the edge of a world, because it always kept going on beyond. She moved the center of the world as she walked. .. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 2d939e7 | For one short wet month early in the next year the drought lifted. Spring tipped in like green well water frothing at the hedges bubbling at the roadside splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of ivy and stringflower | Gregory Maguire | ||
| c17a45e | How children love the broken thing! And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 8bc7bad | And a more foolish notion can scarcely be imagined, it being obvious that the reader is only informed of what the writer wishes him to know, and is thus seduced into believing almost anything. | Iain Pears | ||
| 312bf5e | He had volunteered early, rather than waiting to be conscripted, for he felt a duty and an obligation to serve, and believed that ... being willing to fight for his country and the liberty it represented, would make some small difference. ... His idealism was one of the casualties of the carnage [of Verdun]. | war wwi | Iain Pears | |
| 9a4b42f | Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious. | doctrine education freedom freedom-of-religion freedom-of-thought good-sense independent-thought inquisition persecution philosophy rationality reason schooling | Iain Pears | |
| ea80093 | Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely. | cloud-cuckoo-land desires dreams futility imagination irrationality irreality phantasy wishes wishful-thinking | Iain Pears |