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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 91a958e | Son, anything can happen to anyone," my father told me, "but it usually doesn't." | life happenings probability | Philip Roth | |
| 5c0fcb6 | Within five minutes of leaving the reunion, I'd undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinnamon-lined chambers microscopically studded with midget raisins and chopped walnuts. By rapidly devouring mouthful after mouthful of these crumbs whose floury richness - blended of butter and sour cream and vanilla and cream cheese and egg yolk and sugar - I'd loved since childhood, perhap.. | Philip Roth | ||
| 0dd35c4 | Where was the Jew in him? You couldn't find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief. All that he had eliminated to achieve his perfection. No striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness- just the style, the natural physical refinement of a star. | Philip Roth | ||
| 99d899c | For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit. | writing life-of-the-writer routine habits | Philip Roth | |
| 1455808 | They were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones, and he stood as close to the bones as he could, as though the proximity might link him up with them and mitigate the isolation born of losing his future and reconnect him with all that had gone. For the next hour and a half, those bones were the things that mattered most. They were all that mattered, despite the impingement of the neglected cemetery's environment of decay.. | Philip Roth | ||
| 1bc2dce | It's a big deal for working people to buy a diamond," he told his sons, "no matter how small. The wife can wear it for the beauty and she can wear it for the status. And when she does, this guy is not just a plumber -- he's a man with a wife with a diamond. His wife owns something that is imperishable. Because beyond the beauty and the status and the value, the diamond is imperishable. A piece of the earth that is imperishable, and a mere .. | Philip Roth | ||
| 3410665 | There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It's more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you're in its grip, it's as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else. | Philip Roth | ||
| f337b7b | The goal was to have goals, the aim to have aims. This edict came entangled often in hysteria, the embattled hysteria of those whom experience had taught how little antagonism it takes to wreck a life beyond repair. | Philip Roth | ||
| f911983 | Stunned by how little he'd gotten over her and she'd gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in classical Greek drama he'd never had to understood before, how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made... | love greek | Philip Roth | |
| 3d52ad3 | It's about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences." "Oh," | Philip Roth | ||
| ae3b477 | Old age isn't a battle, old age is a massacre. | Philip Roth | ||
| 34c3987 | Before that night, I'd had no idea my father was so well suited for wreaking havoc or equipped to make that lightning-quick transformation from sanity to lunacy that is indispensable in enacting the unbridled urge to destroy. | Philip Roth | ||
| 8c24c7d | Mr. Levov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, college-educated Jewish sons: a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn't as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men w.. | Philip Roth | ||
| 4c666aa | That people were manifold creatures didn't come as a surprise to the Swede, even if it was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you down. What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for | Philip Roth | ||
| 6823309 | I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves. | John Cheever | ||
| 3c4ce75 | Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot there had been turned. Then the noise of fountains came from the crowns of all the tall trees. Why did he love storms, what was the meaning of his excitement when the door sprang open and the rain wind fled rudely up the stair, why had the simple task of shutting the windows of an old house seem fitting and urgent, why did the first watery note.. | John Cheever | ||
| d3b0bfb | This shit about being fearless before death ain't got no quality. How could you say you were fearless about leaving the party, even in stir--even franks and rice taste good when you're hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch, it feels good to sleep. It's like a party even in maximum security and who wants to walk out of a party into something that nobody knows anything at all about? | prison | John Cheever | |
| d0240cb | The Westcotts differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. They went to a great many concerts--although they seldom mentioned this to anyone--and they spent a good deal of time listening to music on the radio. Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair. Neither of them understood the mechanics of radio--or of any of the other applianc.. | John Cheever | ||
| 43116c6 | the sounds next door served as a kind of trip wire: I seemed to stumble and fall on my face, skinning and bruising myself here and there and scattering my emotional and intellectual possessions. There was no point in pretending that I had not fallen, for when we are stretched out in the dirt we must pick ourselves up and brush off our clothes. This then, in a sense, is what I did, reviewing my considered opinions on marriage, constancy, man.. | John Cheever | ||
| 202dd4e | Chicken began to cry then or seemed to cry, to weep or seemed to weep, until they heard the sound of a grown man weeping, an old man who slept on a charred mattress, whose life savings in tattoos had faded to a tracery of ash, whose crotch hair was sparse and gray, whose flesh hung slack on his bones, whose only trespass on life was a flat guitar and a remembered and pitiful air of "I don't know where it is, sir, but I'll find it, sir," and.. | John Cheever | ||
| 7df38a8 | She was his potchke, his fleutchke, his notchke, his motchke, his everything that the speech of St. Botolphs left unexpressed. She was his little, little squirrel. | John Cheever | ||
| ed04144 | For Rome is sometimes cold and rainy in the winter in spite of all the naked statues. | John Cheever | ||
| ec007ef | She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her. | marriage relationships love | a.s. byatt | |
| a84567d | Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation. | identity individual nation | A.S. Byatt | |
| 2a5c865 | Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977]. | time | A.S. Byatt | |
| 1058d08 | On the other side of attraction, is repulsion. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| e62330a | Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| c4be8d4 | Balzac's cynicism was always nevertheless romantic - such greed, such gusto. 'Le degout, c'est voir juste. Apres la possession, l'amour voit juste chez les hommes.' Why should that be so? Why was disgust any clearer-eyed than desire? | A.S. Byatt | ||
| b1df1fb | But if you write a version of Ragnarok in the twenty-first century, it is haunted by the imagining of a different end of things. We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into. Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness. | myth environmental-catastrophe norse-mythology loki ragnarok self-destruction end-of-the-world gods mythology | a.s. byatt | |
| 8d0d9d6 | But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with her pride or her madness, live a lie. | love pride | A.S. Byatt | |
| 851bd8e | To a dusty shelf we aspire. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 997f52c | There will always be people who will slash open the other cheek when it is turned to them. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 4afa0e3 | The class, on the other hand, buzzed and hummed with the anticipated pleasure of writing it up, one day. They were vindicated. Miss Fox belonged after all in the normal world of their writings, the world of domestic violence, torture and shock-horror. They would write what they knew, what had happened to Cicely Fox, and it would be most satisfactorily therapeutic. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| a2a8588 | She had had the idea that the mineral world was a world of perfect, inanimate forms, with an unchanging mathematical order of crystals and molecules beneath its sprouts and flows and branches. She had thought, when she started thinking, about her own transfiguration as something profoundly unnatural, a move from a world of warm change and decay to a world of cold permanence.But as she became mineral, and looked into the idea of minerals, sh.. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 0ccf306 | You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased. | self | A.S. Byatt | |
| 7d3fcb3 | No man has a right to dictate another man's inner life - the furniture inside his skull. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| ffa5db8 | All distances are the same to those who don't meet. | Penelope Fitzgerald | ||
| d1767ac | Old age is not the same thing as historical interest,' he said. 'Otherwise we should both of us be more interesting than we are. | Penelope Fitzgerald | ||
| cc1912f | The body, then, has a mind of its own. It must follow, then, that the Mind has a body of its own, even if it's like nothing that we can see around us, or have ever seen. | Penelope Fitzgerald | ||
| 310b5cd | Would you consider what I call the "inner eye" which opens for some of us, though not always when we want it or expect it - would you consider the inner eye as one of the sensory nerves?" | Penelope Fitzgerald | ||
| fcf9b18 | Dicen por ahi que esta usted a punto de abrir una libreria. Eso significa que no le importa enfrentarse a cosas inverosimiles. (...) - ?Por que cree que abrir una libreria es inverosimil? -le grito al viento-. ?La gente de Hardoborough no quiere comprar libros? - Han perdido el deseo por las cosas raras -dijo Raven mientras seguia limando-. Se venden mas arenques ahumados, por ejemplo que truchas estan medio ahumadas y tienen un sabor mas .. | Penelope Fitzgerald | ||
| cde8776 | It was defeat, but defeat is less unwelcome when you are tired. | Penelope Fitzgerald | ||
| 39bf4c1 | Take the leap, they said. Live the billionaire's myth of immortality. And why not now, I thought. What else was there for Ross to acquire? Give the futurists their blood money and they will make it possible for you to live forever. The pod would be his final shrine of entitlement. | futurists cultural-myths postmodern | Don DeLillo | |
| 7874ff6 | And so this added consideration - that she never get pregnant - contributed to the moderation of their coupling, which was almost always managed under conditions harsh enough to win the approval of New England's founding fathers | John Irving |