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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 87a3f95 | I will even not rant about treachery. I was brought up in a sea of treachery and deceit and betrayal. I swam in it like perch in the Nile. I am completely at home in it. I shall not drown. | cleopatra | Margaret George | |
| 01873f5 | It's the forties look," she says to George, hand on her hip, doing a pirouette. "Rosie the Riveter. From the war. Remember her?" George, whose name is not really George, does not remember. He spent the forties rooting through garbage bag heaps and begging, and doing other things unsuitable for a child. He has a dim memory of some film star posed on a calendar tattering on a latrine wall. Maybe this is the one Prue means. He remembers for an.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| af623f7 | It is almost impossible to describe happiness, because at the time it feels entirely natural, as if all the rest of your life has been the aberration; only in retrospect does it swim into focus as the rare and precious thing it is. When it is present, it seems to be eternal, abiding forever, and there is no need to examine it or clutch it. Later, when it has evaporated, you stare in dismay at your empty palm, where only a little of the perf.. | Margaret George | ||
| 2a1cfcf | I thought of the "Roman way" of impaling oneself on a sword. Certainly poison seemed more civilized. And I thought the Romans were a little too eager to commit suicide. It did not take much of a setback before they were reaching for their swords, or opening their veins." | Margaret George | ||
| 15573a3 | For a man, however, it was the opposite. Alexander's beauty was not felt to detract from his generalship. Nowhere was it hinted that a handsome man could not be a good ruler, or clever, or strong, or brave. In fact, people longed for a resplendent king. But for a woman...I shook my head. It was as if beauty in a woman rendered all other traits suspect. | Margaret George | ||
| b834adb | When Deepa poured Bela some water from the urn that stood on a little stool, in the corner of the room, her grandmother reproached her. Not that water. Give her the boiled water. She's not made to survive here. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 5759008 | I think it's a hesitant book and at the same time bold. A text both private and public. On the one hand it springs from my other books. The themes, ultimately, are unchanged: identity, alienation, belonging. But the wrapping, the contents, the body and soul are transfigured. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 99649b7 | They don't understand why I want to take such a risk. These reactions don't surprise me. A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| db0cf66 | What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 3fa0db6 | Each day she removes a small portion of the unwanted things in people's lives, though all of it, she thinks, was previously wanted, once useful. She feels the sun scorching the back of her neck. The heat is at its worst now, the rains still a few months away. The task satisfies her. It passes the time. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 186adfb | He longed for sleep, but it would not immerse him; that night the waters he sought for his repose were deep enough to wade in, but not to swim. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| d7c97f1 | In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another. It had started with his father's train wreck, paralyzing him at first, later inspiring him to move as far as possible, to make a new life on the other side of the world. There was the disappearance of the name Gogol's great-grandmother had chosen for him, lost in the mail somewhere between Calcutta and Cambridge. This.. | family destiny life contingence coincidence | Jhumpa Lahiri | |
| a9b7a2a | Relax," Edith says. "The perfect name will come to you in time." Which is when Gogol announces, "There's no such thing." "No such thing as what?" Astrid says. "There's no such thing as a perfect name. I think that human beings should be allowed to name themselves when they turn eighteen," he adds. "Until then, pronouns." | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 671e020 | Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 073affb | Odd things made him love her. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| f432055 | I owed the greater apology, but at the same time I knew that was done was done, that no matter what I said now I would never be able to make it right. | regret | Jhumpa Lahiri | |
| 9f5ad17 | She felt the lurch of a head rush. The boy who had not paid attention to her; the man who'd embarked on an affair knowing she could never be his; at the last moment he was asking for more. A piece of her was elated. But she was also struck by his selfishness. | love selfishness | Jhumpa Lahiri | |
| 0419db9 | In a sense, I'm used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 412c8c9 | It's a sort of literary act of survival. I don't have many words to express myself--rather, the opposite. I'm aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| d6dc708 | She believed that he would be incapable of hurting her as Graham had. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| eb8616e | For as grateful as she feels for the company of the Nandis and Dr. Gupta, these acquaintances are only substitutes for the people who really ought to be surrounding them. Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby's birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| f9986c8 | The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol. "For Gogol Ganguli," it says on the front endpaper in his father's tranquil hand, in red ballpoint ink, the letters rising gradually, optimistically, on the diagonal toward the upper right-hand corner of the page. "The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name" is written within quotation marks." | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 934426d | Whenever I can, in my study, on the subway, in bed before going to sleep, I immerse myself in Italian. I enter another land, unexplored, murky. A | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| c52f3da | I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 3ad453e | Only then, forced at six months to confront his destiny, does he begin to cry. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 8010114 | He enjoys the passivity of sitting in a classroom again, listening to an instructor, being told what to do. He is reminded of being a student, of a time when his father was still alive. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 403fe14 | If we could talk to animals, goes the song. Meaning, if they could talk to us. But of course that would ruin everything. | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| 7ba8f63 | Strays is what a writer I recently read calls those who, for one reason or another, and despite whatever they might have wanted earlier in life, never really become a part of life, not in the way most people do. They may have serious relationships, they may have friends, even a sizable circle, they may spend large portions of their time in the company of others. But they never marry and they never have children. On holidays, they join some .. | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| 829c53a | The poet Rilke once reported seeing a dying dog give its mistress a look full of reproach. Later, he gave this experience to the narrator of a novel: He was convinced I could have prevented it. It was now clear that he had always overrated me. And there was no time left to explain it to him. He continued to gaze at me, surprised and solitary, until it was over. | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| cd27ea3 | Because it's all about the rhythm, you said. Good sentences start with a beat. | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| d6f2c13 | Nothing has changed. It's still very simple. I miss him. I miss him every day. I miss him very much. But how would it be if that feeling was gone? I would not want that to happen. I told the shrink: it would not make me happy at all not to miss him anymore. | grief love | Sigrid Nunez | |
| f21e08c | During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khmer Rouge, which had been in power from 1975 to 1979, was well known. Many of the women had been raped or tortured or otherwise brutalized. Most had seen family members murdered in front of them. .. | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| 143eed0 | A pause here to confess, not without shame: I never heard the news that you'd fallen in love without experiencing a pang, nor could I suppress a surge of joy each time I heard that you were breaking up with someone. | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| de81646 | Men with high baseline levels of testosterone marry less frequently, have more adulterous affairs, commit more spousal abuse, and divorce more often. | love testosterone | Helen Fisher | |
| e38b31e | So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books, the scholars of oneiric signs and omens, the doctors with couches for analyses-- if anything fits, it's accidental, and for one reason only, that in our dreamings, in their shadowings and gleamings, in their multiplings, inconceivablings, in their haphazardings and widescatterings | poetry | Wisława Szymborska | |
| 7263dd0 | I've wanted to write about them for a long while, but it's a tricky subject, always put off for later and perhaps worthy of a better poet, even more stunned by the world than I. But time is short. I write. | writing | Wisława Szymborska | |
| 65603b4 | But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| edba911 | shkran lk y qlby/ l'nny styqZtu mn jdyd/ wlw 'nW lywm hw l'Hd/ ywm lrH@/ l 'n tHt lDlw`/ ttwSl lHrk@ lm`td@ lm qbl l`yd | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| 0fcff9f | Four billion people on this earth, but my imagination is the way it's always been: bad with large numbers. It is still moved by particularity. It flits about the darkness like a flashlight beam, disclosing only random faces, while the rest go blindly by, unthought of, unpitied. Not even a Dante could have stopped that. So what do you do when you're not, even with all the muses on your side? Non omnis moriar--a premature worry. Yet am I full.. | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| 3be097e | Sled vsiaka voina niakoi triabva da raztrebi. "Krai i nachalo" | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| 0606ee9 | Because men are sentimental over women they will throw away military advantages, and hesitate and weigh the chances of failure when attack is their best or only hope, and lose their opportunity because they "have to think of the women and children". Men who would otherwise not dream of surrendering will make terms with an enemy in return for the safety of a handful of women. If a man is killed, it is an accident of war; but if a woman or a .. | women-and-children | M.M. Kaye | |
| 8dcca38 | Perhaps I myself am a pompous and conceited old fool. And perhaps if these fools I complain of were French or Dutch or German I would not mind so much, because then I could say 'What else can you expect?' and feel superior. It is because they are men of my own race that I would have them all good. | east-india-company | M.M. Kaye | |
| 18b9b1e | There is no particular merit in fighting for your own skin when you know that it is fight or die, but there is considerable merit in being prepared to die when you know you can escape quite easily. Put at its lowest, there is a certain stubborn foolhardy heroism in that. | war | M.M. Kaye | |
| ce75e72 | But surely Uncle Akbar could not be dead as they were dead? There must be something indestructible -- something that remained of men who had walked and talked with one and told one stories, men whom one had loved and looked up to. But where had it gone? It was all very puzzling, and he did not understand. | incomprehensible death-of-a-loved-one | M.M. Kaye |