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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9d645e6 | Dreams are just lies that we tell ourselves while we're asleep. | sleep deams false cynical fake lie nightmare | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 5322620 | Oh, I'm Chrissy Mackenzie, I'm from Vancouver but I came here to study environmental journalism," the girl exclaimed with way too much enthusiasm. "You got any advice?" "Search me," Mandy muttered, spooning another ice cube from the empty glass on the table in front of her. "I like pollution, I write in favor of it, and environmental journalism most often implies that it's in favor of all that "go green" hippie crap." "Oh, well...." Chriss.. | world joy change hope drea environmntal gol ice-cube vancouver cape-breton nova-scotia hippie journalist pollution improve friend peace drunk sad | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 1adb6c9 | People never like pollution, it has become very wrong to like pollution at all. But just like there are good and bad things about people, there are good and bad things about pollution. If people were pollution we would get rid of anyone who was different, anyone who was considered an inconvenience... but we'd be getting rid of a life, a lot of lives... because we didn't like them. If pollution was a person would we still be trying to get ri.. | earth people human death hope life hippie litter plants smog environmentalism garbage environment canada pollution animals help scary water dangerous mental-illness evil | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 2a0a0e9 | Most people are as happy as other people decide they should be. | happy people social family-drama | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 20c3944 | Selena was born in a generation that had grown up on the edge. She'd grown up knowing that the little child starlet who voiced Anne-Marie on 'All Dogs Go to Heaven', Judith Barsi, had been murdered and set on fire by her own father. She'd grown up knowing that school shootings were more common than winning the lottery. She'd grown up in an age of terror. | murder fear judith-barsi millennial-quotes school-shooting millennials growing-up terror | Rebecca McNutt | |
| f93063f | There was a heaven beyond anything he knew where there was no jet fuel, no jumping, no burning towers... but he wasn't looking beyond yet. He was still looking back. | heaven death life september-11th skyscrapers september-11-attacks terrorism new-york-city new-york | Rebecca McNutt | |
| bb6b4ba | Wendy's house, unlike many in Cape Breton, had three floors, along with a basement and attic. Aside from Wendy's bedroom, there was a laundry room. The dirty water in the sink would rush from the washer hose, bubbling up, threatening to overflow, but it never did. Next-door was a motel with a neon sign that read in turquoise and pink, "We have the best rates in town!", but the 'E' in 'rates' kept flickering on and off day and night so that .. | funny bedroom bubble inn laundry-room motel quaint rates sink cape-breton sydney best turquoise neon canada odd weird rat hotel small-town poor house rats strange pink nostalgia | Rebecca McNutt | |
| d0f338e | They think I'm not entirely 'grounded in reality', they say. They want me to go to some live-in nerdy activity ranch thing for troubled Canadian youth, that one out in Ontario where you come back programmed like some robot, dressed in a tye-dyed shirt and eating tuna sandwiches," Mandy explained, a horrified look on her face. "You're eighteen, not twelve! Would they really send you to some rat's nest like that?" Wendy questioned in mock ho.. | family friendship humor locks ontario preteen reprogramming sleepaway straight-camp tuna-sandwich nova-scotia summer-camp wiener-roast rebel pressure troubled center coming-of-age canada teen self-help nostalgia | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 615584f | On Wall Street, Clarence was a diamond in a sea of glass, never greedy, never an ambulance-chaser, never the kind of person who deserved to die in the way that he did. | morality greed wall-street september-11-attacks glass | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 6d95d6b | The Twin Towers stood out like an enormous number 11 looming over New York City, a familiar icon coupled with the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State building and the Statue of Liberty. Those towers were like the soul of lower Manhattan, alive in their own right. | skyscraper empire-state-building icon landmark twin-towers brooklyn-bridge world-trade-center statue-of-liberty manhattan | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 8e189a5 | I don't want anything else bad to happen," she whispered, her voice choked with tears. "I'm so sick to death of bad things happening, of seeing bad things that happened in the past! And I'm guilty of so many things. I'm sorry that I killed Mrs. Matthias and wrecked her stupid greenhouse back in the Eighties and I'm sorry I left you here alone while I went around the world." "I wasn't alone though, I knew you were doing what you wanted to do.. | hopelessness grief murder travel world sorrow death friendship love greenhouse eighties apart lonliness damaged bad together omen friend crying shadow smile tears trouble guilt | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 10054a5 | I've just been thinking it would be a lot of fun to live in a defunct shopping mall! Totally abandoned, Yet still frozen in time, Bright white lights shining, Artificial turquoise fountains spewing out clear water, Eerie eighties elevator music drifting by... Dancing erratically, shouting to the top, Because it's sad to see these places die. They're a testament to the hubris of modern America, which is dying in and of itself. Let's .. | life love dead-mall mall shopping eerie childhood consumerism nostalgia | Rebecca McNutt | |
| aefe25c | T]he world is richer in associations than meanings . . . and it is the part of wisdom to distinguish between the two. | wisdom | John Barth | |
| 1e67e02 | There is no way to master the fact with which I live. | John Barth | ||
| 8484a15 | more exactly in storymaking, ... Aristotle declares in effect that since real life now and then includes unlikely coincidences both idle and consequential ... a storymaker may legitimately deploy such a possible-though-improbable happenstance to begin the tale or to give its plot-screws an early turn. Thereafter, however, the Plausible (even when strictly impossible) is ever to be preferred to the Possible-but-Unlikely; and in the of a pl.. | John Barth | ||
| c0c339a | Now many crises in people's lives occur because the hero role that they've assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, or-the same thing in effect-because they haven't the imagination to distort the new situation to fit their old role. This happens to parents, for instance, when their children grow older, and to lovers when one of them begins to dislike the other. If the new situatio.. | mythotherapy | John Barth | |
| 14ba0b3 | innocence is ignorance; ignorance is illusion; and Commencement, while it certainly is a metaphor, is no illusion. Commencement's for the disillusioned, not for the innocent. | John Barth | ||
| c10440d | remember that there's always another way of seeing things: that's the beginning of wisdom. | John Barth | ||
| 72efa57 | Too late she saw: what she'd favored him with in jest he had received with adoration. | John Barth | ||
| be924b7 | the enemy you flee is not exterior to yourself | happy-playgrounds | John Barth | |
| d8c796b | The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Sometimes, therefore, a door opens onto a hallway impossibly, and the placement of our heating ducts and storage space borders on the irresponsible. I have great trouble, myself, in imagining the floor plans of split-level homes, though I feel they are important sites of the American condition. | John Updike | ||
| 76f3178 | First snow: it came this year late in November. | John Updike | ||
| 9e0bfac | Heade's calm is unsteady, storm-stirred; we respond in our era to its hint of the nervous and the fearful. His weather is interior weather, in a sense, and he perhaps was, if far from the first to portray a modern mood, an ambivalent mood tinged with dread and yet imbued with a certain lightness.The mood could even be said to be religious: not an aggressive preachment of God's grandeur but a kind of Zen poise and acceptance, represented by .. | martin-johnson-heade art | John Updike | |
| 23ef9ad | Right and wrong aren't dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably--he grows confident of his ability to negotiate long words--misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own. | John Updike | ||
| 98189a7 | Ever since, two summers ago, Joe Marino had begun to come into her bed, a preposterous fecundity had overtaken the staked plans, out in the side garden where the southwestern sun slanted in through the line of willows each long afternoon. The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of childre.. | John Updike | ||
| 0a3567a | The clangor of the body shop comes up softly. It's noise comforts him, tells him he is hidden and safe, that while he hides men are busy nailing the world down, and toward the disembodied sounds his heart makes in darkness a motion of love. | John Updike | ||
| d5873d7 | And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how t.. | John Updike | ||
| b1447b9 | When I was in power, I found that experts can't be trusted. For this simple reason: unlike tyrants, they are under no delusion that a country, a people is their body. Under this delusion a tyrant takes everything personally. An expert takes nothing personally. Nothing is ever precisely his fault. If a bridge collapses, or a war miscarries, he has already walked away. He still has his expertise. Also,---people imagine that because a thing is.. | John Updike | ||
| f75c865 | The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy. | chinese-food vegetarianism meat hypocrisy | John Updike | |
| 3a42d16 | This life is the one to be lived now, that much is crystal-clear. What did Thoreau supposedly say--'One world at a time'? | John Updike | ||
| 42d638a | Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt. | John Updike | ||
| 432cd64 | The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing t.. | acoustics priestcraft stained-glass-window rabbit-angstrom ministry wedding church | John Updike | |
| 6f1de78 | The beast is dry and mottled, shedding skin as minutes drop from life, a wristy piece of dogged ugliness, its labors meant | John Updike | ||
| 25b3e22 | We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe | identity science philosophy life-philosophy | John Updike | |
| ef24c6c | There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America. | John Updike | ||
| 452c271 | There was a time--the year after leaving, even five years after when this homely street, with its old-fashioned high crown, its sidewalk blocks tugged up and down by maple roots, its retaining walls of sandstone and railings of painted iron and two-family brickfront houses whose siding imitates gray rocks, excited Rabbit with the magic of his own existence. These mundane surfaces had given witness to his life; this cup had held his blood; h.. | John Updike | ||
| c5810f9 | Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevoc.. | futility lost-innocence lost-youth sense-memory rabbit-angstrom childhood | John Updike | |
| 645fe32 | I charge you with a phrase from the gospel of John, Updike that is: Your only duty is to give the mundane its beautiful due. You step from this moment with scripture and stole ordained to the ordinary. Ours is an existence in something more than the husk it once was but not yet the bloom it shall be; in other words, you are charged to the in-between, middle-earth, us. Yes, our lives are sewn on occasion with a texture of joy unmistakable,.. | John Blase | ||
| c5409f9 | The brontosaurus had thirty-ton body and a two-ounce brain. The anatosaurus had two thousand teeth. Triceratops had a helmet of filled bone seven feet long. Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms and teeth like six-inch razors and it was elected President. It ate everything--dead meat, living meat, old bones-- | politics humor | John Updike | |
| e6f8a7a | He showed the world what can be done against the odds, against a superpower. He showed -- and this is where Vietnam and Iraq come in, that in a war between an imperialist occupier and the people who actually live there, the people will eventually prevail. They know the terrain. They have more at stake. They have nowhere else to go. | John Updike | ||
| b9d412a | He wants to feel good, he always used to feel good at every turning of the year, every vacation or end of vacation, every new sheet on the calendar: but his adult life has proved to have no seasons, only changes of weather, and the older he gets, the less weather interests him. The house next to his old house still has the FOR SALE sign up. He tries his front door | John Updike | ||
| ccc19ce | John Updike, in that book you gave me, he said the dead make space. Do you know what I think? Updike doesn't know dick about what it's like to be a homicide cop in Baltimore. | cop updike homicide | Laura Lippman | |
| e565907 | Still, my fascination with Buchanan did not abate, nor was I able, as the Seventies set in, to move the novel forward through the constant pastiche and basic fakery of any fiction not fed by the springs of memory -- what Henry James calls (in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett) the "fatal cheapness [and] mere escamotage" of the "'historic' novel." | John Updike | ||
| 380dca9 | Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he frequently found on the floor when he lived boyishly close to the carpet. | John Updike |