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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 55d2338 | Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention? Is the Internet a kind of temporal gyre, sucking up stories, like geodrift, into its orbit? What is its gyre memory? How do we measure the half-life of its drift? | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| 2b95890 | Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation. | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| e1917f5 | So what? Few men, Miles reflected, lived so comfortably within the confines of a two.word personal philosophy. | Richard Russo | ||
| 306bfa7 | It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting. | Richard Russo | ||
| 2f847c4 | They're around back," she calls down when Julie and I get out. "Planning their strategy." "Good for them," I say, confident that no strategy that isn't grounded in chaos theory is likely to work against a man like me." | Richard Russo | ||
| ea3d14b | Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming. | Richard Russo | ||
| 12f798b | People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul. | Richard Russo | ||
| 20e8bd9 | Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know what your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two... | Richard Russo | ||
| ed09836 | My] explanation makes such immediate sense that I can give it up only reluctantly, a necessary concession to my physician's expertise. This is the way my students feel, I realize, when I suggest stylistic revisions. They like the sentence the way they wrote it. They defer to my greater knowledge and experience because they must, but they still like the way the original sentence sounded when it had a dangling modifier, and they secretly susp.. | Richard Russo | ||
| 81c18b7 | Lucy, who apparently had no idea his girlfriend's father held him in such low regard, agreed with Noonan that he was pushing the envelope, behaviorwise. Still, he was genuinely fond of the man and didn't want to believe there was anything seriously wrong. After all, he argued, wasn't Mr. Berg's lunacy born of genius? Even though Lucy loved and defended Thomaston, he had to admit that the man was out of place there. He was despised by most f.. | Richard Russo | ||
| 1269f7d | God) seemed to know everything that was in her heart and to understand that nothing dwelt there that wasn't absolutely necessary to her survival. | Richard Russo | ||
| dbe4722 | Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from His remoteness. | god sin | Richard Russo | |
| 7198a5d | Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there's but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice. | Richard Russo | ||
| 98c369f | Slow, tick decides. Thinks happen slow. she isn't quite sure why this understanding of the world's movement should be important, but she thinks it is. ...Take her parents- At the time, their separation had seemed a bolt from the blue, though she now realizes it had been a slow process, rooted in dissatisfaction and need....Mybe | Richard Russo | ||
| 4279a8d | La verdad no sirve como sustituto de una buena respuesta. | Richard Russo | ||
| db81b3d | One of the unfortunate side effects of teaching for forty years was that the task was so monumental, even in recollection, that it sometimes seemed you'd tried to teach everyone on the planet. What Miss Beryl looked for in each adult face was the evidence of some failed lesson in some distant yesterday that might predict incompetence today. | Richard Russo | ||
| f1f4d37 | It was my opinion (then and now) that two people who love each other need not necessarily have the same dreams and aspirations, but they damn well ought to share the same nightmares. | Richard Russo | ||
| 916e86e | Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own....Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do, and by then whatever we've done has already begun to sever itself from clear significance, at least for the doer. Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues .. | Richard Russo | ||
| e0d563d | Probably many people's vision of "thinking something through" is of this nature: you do precisely what you want to do--if you can." | Richard Ford | ||
| 014a035 | if sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined. | Richard Ford | ||
| 4278f5e | If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough. The other view is a lie of literature and the liberal arts, which is why I did not succeed as a teacher, and another reason I put my novel away in the drawer and have not taken it out. | Richard Ford | ||
| edf561a | My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing. | parents | Richard Ford | |
| 893ea9e | I knew you could know the words but not match them with the life. But to be able to do it right said something about you. And I didn't know if my judgment was good enough, or exactly what was good or bad. Though there must be times, I thought, when there was no right thing to know, just as there were times when there was no right thing to do. | Richard Ford | ||
| 4983396 | The longer they stayed on, and the better they knew each other, the better she at least could see their mistake, and the more misguided their lives became--like a long proof in mathematics in which the first calculation is wrong, following which all other calculations move you further away from how things were when they made sense. | Richard Ford | ||
| ed2c26e | I'm a verb, Frank. Verbs don't answer questions. | verbs | Richard Ford | |
| 5f348dd | Athletes, by and large, are people who are happy to let their actions speak for them, happy to be what they do. As a result, when you talk to an athlete, as I do all the time in locker rooms, in hotel coffee shops and hallways, standing beside expensive automobiles--even if he's paying no attention to you at all, which is very often the case--he's never likely to feel the least bit divided, or alienated, or one ounce of existential dread. H.. | Richard Ford | ||
| a22715f | Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling, or a bout of the stares that you sometimes can not even know about except in retrospect, when the time may seem fogged. | time dreaming staring | Richard Ford | |
| 0c03178 | good counsel: generosity, longevity, acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me -- and, with these things to make a life. | Richard Ford | ||
| 517e9a2 | It's hard to go through life without killing someone. | Richard Ford | ||
| a2c5303 | I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history's continuum, just two people afloat on the world and expectant like most others in time, without a daunting conviction about their own consequence. | Richard Ford | ||
| 462ecf6 | He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express. | fatherhood | Richard Ford | |
| a3ed979 | A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain. | Richard Ford | ||
| 5302e96 | I don't, after all, know what's wrong with him, am not even certain anything is, or that wrong isn't just a metaphor for something else, which may itself already be a metaphor. Though probably what's amiss, if anything, is not much different from what's indistinctly amiss with all of us at one time or another - we're not happy, we don't know why, and we drive ourselves loony trying to get better | Richard Ford | ||
| 8a65b33 | It's odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that's lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they're otherwise neither. | Richard Ford | ||
| c3c5ff7 | The hospital bulked darkly in the darkness. | writing darkness form | William T. Vollmann | |
| 93f484a | Blue-shirt ( in Inuktitat, the Inuit language), or Mykla Jokull, now known as Gunnbjorn's Peak (12,500 feet)--the great metaphorical centerpiece in William T. Vollmann's saga-like novel --is the great glacier in Greenland used as a landmark by Erik the Red in sailing west from Snaefellsness. | blue-shirt william-t-vollmann | Alexander Theroux | |
| 8f96260 | Expressiveness in others enriched Mrs. Singer's confidence in her own interpretations, possibly because a certain fear that she had not accomplished anything in her life left her all the more desirous of discovering easy clues to less consequential questions. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 488a425 | When they'd been children there'd been a fallen log in the river, and John had walked on it, keeping his balance, instructing his brother: If you don't think about it, you won't fall.--That would be a perfect epitaph, thought Tyler malevolently, crushing the space invader raindrops with his windshield wipers. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| dd012a5 | It is the occupation of politicians to deny this ubiquity, nay, universality of corroded hearts, to discount the barren laboriousness of all paths. Reduce corporate taxes, they say, or redistribute the wealth of the parasitic class to the desperate class, and then all who matter can cross the Jordan together and enter into a new land of happiness whose prior inhabitants will dissolve into sea-colored ghosts of dust. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 79b573d | Our schools kept from us, for as long as they could, the dangerous, disruptive, upsetting knowledge of our own female nature. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| ef3bde8 | I look like a watermelon with a great slice hacked out. I say to myself, it's just another border post on the frontier between medicine and greengrocery; growths and tumour seem always to be described as "the size of a plum" or "the size of a grapefruit"." | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 740f944 | The world beyond the glass is the world of masculine action. Everything she sees is what a man has built. But at each turn-off, each junction, women are waiting to know their fate. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 5afb80f | He says, this silence of More's, it was never really silence, was it? It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as far as quibbles would serve him, it was demurs and cavils, suave ambiguities. It was fear of plain words, or the assertion that plain words pervert themselves; More's dictionary, against our dictionary. You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, hol.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 8e3e136 | They hurry in; the wind bangs a door behind them. Rafe takes his arm. He says, this silence of More's, it was never really silence, was it? It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as far as quibbles would serve him, it was demurs and cavils, suave ambiguities. It was fear of plain words, or the assertion that plain words pervert themselves; More's dictionary, against our dictionary. You can have a silence full of words. A lute retain.. | Hilary Mantel |