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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8ee4a29 | And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we'll never see each other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will. Finding my mother in my father's story and saying good-bye before I have a chance to know her better. | loss good-byes memory | Amy Tan | |
| 0f92cfb | While discussing the monster: | hawkline monster | Richard Brautigan | |
| 5cfa428 | There wasn't a single thing in there that reminded me of my existence. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| 8f875c8 | When he said this, it was not a form of criticism. It was just a simple observation that led to another bite from the movie on his plate called The Old Man and the Stew. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| 8d7fc1f | The only thing he likes better than a nice juicy homicide is a sirloin steak smothered with onions. | steak homicide noir | Richard Brautigan | |
| ea5abef | I was too young and naive then to link up the meaning of those ridiculingly defunct tennis shoes that I was forced to wear with the reality that we were on Welfare and Welfare was not designed to provide a child with any pride in its existence. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| 054759b | It's pretty hard to have faith when everybody is trying to lock you up. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| 62685f8 | I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there... I just kept getting smaller and smaller beside the pond, more and more unnoticed in the darkening summer grass until I disappeared into the 32 years that have passed since then... | Richard Brautigan | ||
| 6ce0291 | We stepped outside rather hurriedly and down the street to anonymous sanctuary among the buildings of San Francisco. "Promise me till your dying day, you'll believe that a Mellon was a Confederate general. It's the truth. That God-damn book lies! There was a Confederate general in my family!" "I promise," I said and it was a promise that was kept." | Richard Brautigan | ||
| a4c7905 | The Forgotten Works just go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. You get the picture. It's a big place, much bigger than we are. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| 2629706 | The Return of the Rivers All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. It is raining today in the mountains. It is a warm green rain with love in its pockets for spring is here, and does not dream of death. Birds happen music like clocks ticking heaves in a land where children love spiders, and let them sleep in their hair. A slow rain sizzles on the river li.. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| ffa0ddb | The river loved to tell everybody (everybody being the sky, the wind, the few trees that grew around there, birds, deer and even the stars if you can believe that) what a great river it was. "I come roaring from the earth and return roaring to the earth. I am the master of my waters. I am the mother and father of myself. I don't need a single drop of rain. Look at my smooth strong white muscles. I am my own future!" | natural-beauty rivers river | Richard Brautigan | |
| 7cdbc4b | I read the note and it did not please me and I threw it away, so not even time could find it. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| ede1831 | She had a beautiful laugh which was like rain water pouring over daffodils made from silver. | rain silver laugh | Richard Brautigan | |
| 9f3fc72 | 30 cents, two transfers, love Thinking hard about you I got on the bus and paid 30 cents car fare and asked the driver for two transfers before discovering | poetry love longing | Richard Brautigan | |
| 73a81f0 | I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon. | trout | Richard Brautigan | |
| 363a5f6 | Now it was close to sunset and the earth was beginning to cool off in the manner of eternity and office girls were returning like penguins from Montgomery Street. | sunset | Richard Brautigan | |
| a0b4e32 | After he graduated from college, he went to Paris and became an Existentialist. He had a photograph taken of Existentialism and himself sitting at a sidewalk cafe. Pard was wearing a beard and he looked as if he had a huge soul, with barely enough room in his body to contain it. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| a375eca | Moonlight drifts from over A hundred thousand miles To fall upon a cemetery It reads a hundred epitaphs | Richard Brautigan | ||
| bbc3d3f | He used sweet wine in place of life because he didn't have any more life to use. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| b343e18 | God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing. And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough. | god literary-devices novelist | Lauren F. Winner | |
| e998d3b | In Minneapolis, tires were slashed and windows smashed. A high school student getting off a bus was hit in the face and told to "go back to China." A woman was kicked in the thighs, face, and kidneys, and her purse, which contained the family's entire savings of $400, was stolen; afterwards, she forbade her children to play outdoors, and her husband, who had once commanded a fifty-man unit in the Armee Clandestine, stayed home to guard the .. | Anne Fadiman | ||
| 2f83863 | The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong." So much for the Perambulating Postbox Theory." | Anne Fadiman | ||
| 8d8658d | My life seems too fast now, so obstructions bother me less than they once did. I am no longer in a hurry to see what is around the next bend. I find myself wanting to backferry, to hover midstream, suspended. If I could do that, I might avoid many things: harsh words, foolish decisions, moments of inattention, regrets that wash over me, like water. (196) | Anne Fadiman | ||
| 0871108 | During the late 1910s and early '20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory "Americanization" classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was "I am a good American." During their graduation ceremony they gathered next to a gigantic wooden pot, which their teachers stirred with te.. | Anne Fadiman | ||
| 10473ab | like a good Spaniard he needed words as much as he needed money, and the words he wanted had to be the most expansive and inflated available. In Spain words form a kind of currency which must be spent freely, and to do this is not easy for an American, yet not to do it in Spain is to miss the spirit of human relationships. | James A. Michener | ||
| b04d989 | Poets are simply people who see things two ways. Like children, as if they had never seen them before. Like old men, as if they would never see them again. | James A. Michener | ||
| f210b61 | We will get you a dress with magic, just as in the stories," he said seriously. "But they're only stories, Gillie, Magic isn't real." "We will make it real." | fairytale | Shirley Rousseau Murphy | |
| 279b711 | He found that love is never to be defined, that it grows and changes with every year of life, that each person knows it as a different miracle... Nothing can shame it. Nothing can make it more splendid than it already is. Shared, wantoned or hidden forever, it can fill a life. There is no understanding love, and there is no defeat so precious as trying. No aspect of life is more complex, and none so simple. A look, a word, and the heart is .. | James A. Michener | ||
| c6770c0 | The South Pacific is not a paradise, in the sense that Eden wasn't either. There are always apples and snakes. But it is a wonderful place to live. The green vales of Tahiti, the hills of Guadalcanal, the towering peaks about Wau, and the noonday brilliance of Rabaul have enchanted many white travelers who have stayed on for many years and built happy lives. Often on a cool night when the beer was plentiful and the stories alluring, we have.. | travel | James A. Michener | |
| 9fd1ad7 | Lincoln, who had a personal aversion to blacks and feared they could never be absorbed into a white society, wanted to see them settled somewhere out of the country. He had prudently refrained from liberating those living in important border states like Kentucky and Maryland, whose governments sided with the North; only slaves in states like Alabama and Louisiana were freed. | James A. Michener | ||
| 65284df | This is the greatest evil that grows out of a wrong act. Somebody always remembers it ... in an evil way. | James A. Michener | ||
| ad48af8 | The city of Los Angeles is now some twenty-four hundred miles south of central Alaska, and since it is moving slowly northward as the San Andreas fault slides irresistibly along, the city is destined eventually to become part of Alaska. If | James A. Michener | ||
| 4d353ce | Maybe books are best, because you don't have to have money to read... A man can travel all over the world and come back the same kind of fool he was when he started. You can't do that with books. | James A. Michener | ||
| 62f6589 | In a dog's life, some plaster would fall, some cushions would open, some rugs would shred. Like any relationship, this one had its costs. They were costs we came to accept and balance against the joy and amusement and protection and companionship he gave us. We could have bought a small yacht with what we spent on our dog and all the things he destroyed. Then again, how many yachts wait by the door all day for your return? How many live for.. | John Grogan | ||
| ffaba66 | The rhythm of solitude, once so intimidating, began to feel comfortable. Aloneness, I was learning, does not have to equal loneliness. | solitude loneliness learning comfortable | John Grogan | |
| fee108b | Still, his question, "If there is only one model of individuation, can there be true individuality?" | Margot Adler | ||
| cd0b926 | Vampires let us play with death and the issue of mortality. They let us ponder what it would mean to be truly long lived. Would the long view allow us to see the world differently, imagine social structures differently? Would it increase or decrease our reverence for the planet? Vampires allow us to ask questions we usually bury. | vampire-bibliography vampires | Margot Adler | |
| 494ca59 | The warm afternoon, the garden, the tray of empty glasses on the grass, succeeded in conveying foreboding and dissatisfaction; even the roses seemed to threaten violence, brimming over their plots of earth or arrested, scarlet, on the white wall of the house. | Shirley Hazzard | ||
| 7534200 | Her eyes were enlarged and faded with discovering what, by common human agreement, is better undivulged. | Shirley Hazzard | ||
| c3b72d6 | Caro was coming round to the fact of unhappiness: to a realization that Dora created unhappiness and the she was bound to Dora. | Shirley Hazzard | ||
| 0aaa14a | They lived under supervision, a life without men. Dora knew no men. You could scarcely see how she might meet one, let alone come to know. | Shirley Hazzard | ||
| b6825e4 | We take our bearings from the wrong landmark, wish that when young we had studied the stars - name the flowers for ourselves and the deserts after others. When the territory is charted, its eventual aspect may be quite other than what was hoped for. One can only say, it will be a whole - a region from which a few features, not necessarily those that seemed prominent at the start, will stand out in clear colours. Not to direct, but to solace.. | Shirley Hazzard | ||
| daf4810 | Yet her physical beauty was as strong a part of her character ... Its first and lasting impression was one of vitality and endurance. That is to say, of power: a power as self-contained, as unoppressive as that of a splendid tree. [p. 10] | Shirley Hazzard |