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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 916198c | shop-bought cakes are a sign of sluttish housewifery. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 9b8251b | But I know nothing; my future is a wide-open vista, leading to an unknown country - The Rest Of My Life. | inspirational knowledge life | Kate Atkinson | |
| 2b151fe | History is all about 'what ifs | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 237f1ac | Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become. | little-boys men | Kate Atkinson | |
| 2447051 | Good news?' Gloria queried. She wondered if Emily was pregnant again (was that good news?), so she was taken aback when Emily said, 'I've found Jesus.' 'Oh,' Gloria said. 'Where was he? | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 95dbb45 | ' he said. You had to wonder about the French, how they could make a simple 'sorry' sound so extreme and forlorn. | forlorn french humor language sorry | Kate Atkinson | |
| ce4fa7b | Time isn't circular," she said to Dr. Kellet. "It's like a... palimpsest." | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 9779c13 | Hey, you look at your tits; I'll look at mine! (Michael Tolliver, Tales of the City) | Armistead Maupin | ||
| 8631f7f | It occurred to Michael that this was the great perk of being loved: someone to wait for you, someone to tell you that it will get easier up ahead. Even when it might not be true. | Armistead Maupin | ||
| babf8b2 | All right. Here's the deal, bigshot: suck my cock. Do that and I'll let you go. Straight trade." He unzipped his fly and pulled down the elastic front of his shorts. Something that looked like a dead whitesnake fell out. Johnny observed the thin stream of blood driz-zling from it without surprise. The cop was bleeding from every other orifice, wasn't he? "Speaking in the literature sense," the cop said, grinning, "this particular blowjob is.. | armistead-maupin blood blowjob drizzle-blood | Stephen King | |
| fe1b535 | We Anhedonians have adapted to long periods between good news. Our national animal is the hope camel. We have no national bird. All the birds are dead. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 01823ac | see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own--such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be at any moment. | hope slavery | Colson Whitehead | |
| 7a8d70f | They will have to destroy this city once we deliver the black box. The current bones will not accommodate the marrow of the device. They will have to raze the city and cart off the rubble to less popular boroughs and start anew. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 83190c0 | She watches the people through the sooted panes. They walk slower than they do when she reports to work and when she leaves work, and differently still from weekend strolling. They are the tin men and rag dolls who wake after hours in the toy store. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 774271d | The lobby of the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building was almost finished when she arrived. As if to distract from the minuscule and cramped philosophy of what would transpire on the floors above, the city offered visitors the spacial bounty of the lobby. The ersatz marble was firm underfoot like real marble, sheer, and produced trembling echoes effortlessly. The circle of Doric columns braced the weight above without complaint. The mural, howeve.. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 5b20fd4 | Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 669d460 | As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. "Life is a journey, not a destination." Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination." | entropy journeys ralph-waldo-emerson travel | Colson Whitehead | |
| d0752c4 | The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race--which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wished for ourselves and our children? | Colson Whitehead | ||
| b463111 | Improbable as it may be, the day still has a few indignities left. The day waters down indignity with frustration to make it last longer. Abomination, thy name is Subway. He cannot enter. They flood through turnstiles, hips banging rods, and will not let him enter. He must get home, but it's all he can do to get halfway in before another one charges at him. A fish out of school. Everybody knows how it works except for him. All of them from .. | commuting difficulties indignities subway | Colson Whitehead | |
| 95d6323 | Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with the trees up close but from the outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk.. | freedom limits outside shift space | Colson Whitehead | |
| c8b4071 | It was the softest bed she had ever lain in. But then, it was the only bed she had ever lain in. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| bddbe3f | One of my dinner companions invited me on a strip-club excursion. I demurred, spoiled by the erotic revues of Anhedonia, where the performers remain fully clothed but get emotionally naked, delivering monologues about their top-shelf disappointments, and times when they were almost happy. Hard to enjoy American-style strip clubs after that. Once you go bleak, you never go back. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 5132294 | It was the day after Sam's house collapsed, though she couldn't be sure. Best to measure time now with one of the Randall plantation's cotton scales, her hunger and fear piling on one side while her hopes were removed from the other in increments. The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| a36ae59 | Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 54a1062 | On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 82a3f21 | The Four Questions?" "As put forth by Mettleheim: How did this happen? How could this happen? Is it exceptional? How will it be avoided in the future?" | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 91a4259 | and for the second time that day he blesses the certainty of airports because he can always turn around and go someplace else. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 18caf45 | Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 46332b9 | As if these daily humiliations and sacrifices mean something, are tallied by the ones who keep the books. Tomorrow we pick up where we left off. Sleep tight. Sleep deep. Sleep the sleep of the successful because somehow you made it through the day without anyone finding out that you are a complete fraud. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| eb0c125 | People wore different kinds of chains across their lifetimes, but it wasn't hard to interpret rebellion, even when the rebels wore costumes to deny blame. | rebellion slavery | Colson Whitehead | |
| d6e30b3 | What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, because in the end, whatever goes down, whatever you get up to, your triumphs and transgressions, nobody actually understands what it means except for you. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| fa5716a | But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring? | Colson Whitehead | ||
| cfb23a7 | Everything in the garden is dying, that's what time of year it is. The leaves blaze and desiccate in their dying before twisting to the ground as ash. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 568f27a | They jostled one another, competed for space below as they did above, in a minuet of ruin and triumph. In the subway, down in the dark, no citizen was more significant or more decrepit than another. All were smeared into a common average of existence, the A's and the C's tumbling or rising to settle into a ruthless mediocrity. No escape. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| ebe3d40 | No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man's books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| cc84164 | The relevant question is not whether all Whites are racist but how we can move more White people from a position of active or passive racism to one of active antiracism. | Beverly Daniel Tatum | ||
| 0ecbf1a | Children who have been silenced often enough learn not to talk about race publicly. Their questions don't go away, they just go unasked. | Beverly Daniel Tatum | ||
| 7faa15f | Learning to spot "that stuff "--whether it is racist, or sexist, or classist--is an important skill for children to develop." | Beverly Daniel Tatum | ||
| 8d880a4 | Not that I will paint in my own way, live in my own way, speak in my own way--they don't mind that. It even excites them. But what they can't stand is that I hate them when they don't behave in their own way. | John Fowles | ||
| 9a7cbfb | Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is. | death possibilities smile | John Fowles | |
| dea445f | One writes things and the implications shriek- it's like suddenly realizing one's deaf. | John Fowles | ||
| 2e6f423 | You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight--and smile at your own past sorrows. | past secrets | John Fowles | |
| 7173e5a | I'm Emma with her silly little clever-clever theories of love and marriage, and love is something that comes in different clothes, with a different way and different face, and perhaps it takes a long time for you to accept it, to be able to call it love. | John Fowles | ||
| a0c1124 | She had only a candle's light to see by, but candlelight never did badly by any woman. | humor women | John Fowles |