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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7089d16 | When I was a child and heard about angels, I was both frightened and fascinated by the thought of these enormous, invisible presences in our midst. I conceived of them not as white-robed androgynes with yellow locks and thick gold wings, which was how my friend Matty Wilson had described them to me--Matty was the predecessor of all sorts of arcane knowledge--but as big, dark, blundering men, massive in their weightlessness, given to pranks .. | John Banville | ||
| 7dfa3a3 | It was a sumptuous, oh, truly sumptuous autumn day, all Byzantine coppers and golds under a Tiepolo sky of enamelled blue, the countryside all fixed and glassy, seeming not so much itself as its own reflection in the still surface of the lake. It was the kind of day on which, latterly, the sun for me is the world's fat eye looking on in rich enjoyment as I writhe in misery. | descriptiv | John Banville | |
| a55c777 | This is the only way another creature can be known: on the surface, that's where there is depth. | John Banville | ||
| 233513f | Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. | gods | John Banville | |
| 732f042 | I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone. | John Banville | ||
| 73c7fd1 | At first it had no name. It was the thing itself, the vivid thing. It was his friend. On windy days it danced, demented, waving wild arms, or in the silence of evening drowsed and dreamed, swaying in the blue, goldeny air. Even at night it did not go away. Wrapped in his truckle bed, he could hear it stirring darkly outside in the dark, all the long night long. There were others, nearer to him, more vivid still than this, that came and went.. | John Banville | ||
| d4ef93c | When you have once seen the chaos, you must make some thing to set between yourself and that terrible sight; and so you make a mirror, thinking that it shall be reflected the reality of the world; but then you understand that the mirror reflects only appearances, and that reality is somewhere else, off behind the mirror; and then you remember that behind the mirror there is only the chaos. | John Banville | ||
| 906bd0c | If that child dreaming by the wireless had been asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, what I had become was more or less what he would have described, in however halting a fashion, I am sure of it. This is remarkable, I think, even allowing for my present sorrows. Are not the majority of men disappointed with their lot, languishing in quiet desperation in their chains? | John Banville | ||
| 813bccd | A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 7d1495b | Michel is a good man, full of hope. Sometimes hope is exhausting. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 80b714a | The story of Janie's progress through three marriages confronts the reader with the significant idea that the choice one makes between partners, between one man and another (or one woman and another) stretches beyond romance. It is, in the end, the choice between values, possibilities, futures, hopes, arguments (shared concepts that fit the world as you experience it), languages (shared words that fit the world as you believe it to be) and .. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 97373f1 | Above all, Hurston is essential universal reading because she is neither self-conscious nor restricted. She was raised in the real Eatonville, Florida, an all-black town; this unique experience went some way to making Hurston the writer she was. She grew up a fully human being, unaware that she was meant to consider herself a minority, an other, an exotic or something depleted in rights, talents, desires and expectations. As an adult, away .. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 68300de | When you enter a beloved novel many times, you can come to feel that you possess it, that nobody else has ever lived there. You try not to notice the party of impatient tourists trooping through the kitchen (Pnin a minor scenic attraction en route to the canyon Lolita), or that shuffling academic army, moving in perfect phalanx, as they stalk a squirrel around the backyard (or a series of squirrels, depending on their methodology). | Zadie Smith | ||
| 9c96dfd | But singing isn't just about belting it out, is it? It's not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it's about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don't you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in? | singing soul | Zadie Smith | |
| 48cb25f | But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And it's about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 018e64b | as midnight inevitably came and went without the horsemen of the apocalypse making an appearance, Clara surprised herself by falling into a melancholy. For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling sea-water to retrieve the salt something is gained but something is lost. Though her friends Merlin, Wan-Si, et al. clapped her on the back and congratulated her for exorcizing those fervid dreams of perdition and redemption, Clara quietly mourned.. | end-of-the-world religion | Zadie Smith | |
| 4874b08 | an English girl might well believe that time is how you spend your love. | nick-laird poem poetry the-last-saturday-in-ulster time zadie-smith | Nick Laird | |
| ba8814a | The other cyclists used to take breaks to watch him do it. Lean their bikes against the incline and time him with the second hand of their wristwatches. 62.8 every time. That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way. | Zadie Smith | ||
| defcd93 | Romance was beyond me: it required a form of personal mystery I couldn't manufacture and disliked in others. I couldn't pretend that my legs do not grow hair or that my body does not excrete a variety of foul substances or that my feet aren't flat as pancakes. I could not flirt and saw no purpose in flirting. I did not mind dressing up for strangers - when out at college parties or if we went up to London for the clubs - but in our rooms, w.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 66e691c | Forster] quotes approvingly from this discussion, from The Magic Flute [by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson] "Lord Buddha was your gospel true?" "True and False." "What was true in it?" "Selflessness and Love." "What false?" "Flight from Life." | Zadie Smith | ||
| 0f3894f | We are split people. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 939ea04 | They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. In North London, where councillors once voted to change the name of the area to Nirvana, it is not unusual to walk the streets and be suddenly confronted by sage words from the chalkfaced, blue-lipped, or eyebrowless. From across the street or from the other end of a tube carriage they will use their schizophrenic talent for seeing connections in th.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 1e28265 | And underneath it all, there remained an ever-present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere. It | Zadie Smith | ||
| 9c5ac87 | I couldn't imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 43712ec | Getting anything out of my husband is like trying to squeeze water out when you're stoned. | Zadie Smith | ||
| c8fd837 | or at least I felt that within the lie there was a deeper truth. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 30acfa6 | Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts;... Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul. | personality | Zadie Smith | |
| 7e3c624 | On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can't. On both occasions, the man breathes. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 98cecb3 | My evidence--such as it is--is almost always intimate. I feel this--do you? I'm struck by this thought--are you? | Zadie Smith | ||
| 5dbc636 | You want to believe there are limits to what money can make happen, lines it can't cross. | Zadie Smith | ||
| ce93fa0 | This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. | daughters girls | Zadie Smith | |
| 4bb4530 | A man is a man is a man. His family threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world coming to an end - he will kill. Make no mistake. He won't let the new order roll over him without a struggle. | way-of-life | Zadie Smith | |
| b555d2a | she believed in her own good timing, in timing itself, as a mystical force, a form of fate, operating at the global and cosmic level as much as at the personal. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 5e4010f | When my little group get together, if we disagree about something, we can sort it out. Example: Mohona Hossain hates Divargiit Singh. Hates all his movies. Hates him with a passion. She likes that other fool with the eyelashes like a lady! But we compromise. Never once have I burned a single video of hers. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 57d2948 | Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power--local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic--on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But power does that everywhere. The world is saturated in blood. Every tribe has their blood-soaked legacy: here was mine. I waited for whatever cathartic feeling people hope to experience in such places, but I couldn't make myself believe the pai.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 7f31bc0 | When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue. . . . the cosmic Zora emerges. . . . How can anybody deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me! | Zadie Smith | ||
| 4824589 | he] had become the bloke in the joke: the last man on earth | Zadie Smith | ||
| 5e6884f | The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation... | Zadie Smith | ||
| e718134 | The fundamental skill of all mothers--the management of time--was beyond her. She measured time in pages. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 9ea799a | Unlike many others around this time, Joyce felt no shame about using the term 'middle class'. In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, it's hard to say.) | Zadie Smith | ||
| b110c7a | If you would understand the present, you must come to know the past. | present understand understanding | Libba Bray | |
| 0057ae2 | Didn't they teach you how to go about research in that school of yours?" "No. But I can recite 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' while making martinis." "I weep for the future." "There's where the martinis come in." | Libba Bray | ||
| 909cca9 | Miss New Mexico stared, dumbfounded. "Stand out? Stand out? I have a freaking tray stuck in my forehead!" She broke into fresh sobs. Taylor clapped for attention. "Miss New Mexico, let's not get all down in the bummer basement where the creepy things live. There are people in heathen China who don't even have airline trays. We have a lot to be grateful for." | beauty-queens head-wounds miss-teen-dream satire | Libba Bray | |
| 5da7fa7 | Very well, Your Ladyship Brooding St. Petulant, | Libba Bray |