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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a787ce8 | It wasn't perfect: so what? Life isn't perfect: life is what happens while you're waiting for your moment in the sun and if you miss it, waiting instead for the perfect illusion that Hollywood sells, then more fool you. I'd spent half my life waiting for the right moment: I was done with waiting. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 2ea5a4c | Kes wasn't safe. He wasn't a sensible choice. He made my heart race, and swoop, and die a little. When I was near him, I burned. When he was far away, my blood moved sluggishly, reluctantly, cooling without his heat. Maybe we'd burn together. But maybe, just maybe, we'd fly. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| b61d50f | What am I going to do with you?" I smiled as he kissed along my neck. "Marry me," he said. "You could marry me." | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| ab4029b | Here, everyone knows my story and has decided I'm trash." "Except me," she said." | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 138b41e | Tall, over six foot, ripped, and with sandy-blond hair that was just a bit too long, tats running down both arms to his elbows, cheekbones you could file your nails on, and lips that were just perfect for biting. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 416bc6c | When we finished our catch up, I lay back and tried to sleep. But I kept thinking about what Kes had said: that Heaven for him was me and the carnival. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 4e245c8 | Given all of this, you'd think LeBon's work might have at some point stopped being influential. But it never did. I suppose one reason for his enduring success is that we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane. | Jon Ronson | ||
| 5acec87 | For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. | ideas mindfulness perspective possibilities questions thinking thoughts zen | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 656218a | This is the first duty of parents, and no false delicacy should keep them from the watchful care, the gentle warning, which makes self-knowledge and self-control the compass and pilot of the young as they leave the safe harbour of home. | Louisa May Alcott | ||
| 8d6fd67 | the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 8ee4c50 | Learn to know and value the praise which is worth having, and to excite the admiration of excellent people by being modest as well as pretty | Louisa May Alcott | ||
| 67c657a | To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as "the system" is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands tha.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| c3c7e55 | The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to be "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together." | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 80ec1c0 | Phaedrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents. He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage went on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn't enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn't enou.. | devotion faith insight journey mindfulness mountains soul-searching | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| f9692e5 | You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| ad94676 | Just a sort of unexplained sadness that comes each afternoon when the new day is gone forever and there's nothing ahead but increasing darkness. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| f84064a | Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| c1b2f16 | He wasn't going to send her to any hospital. He knew that now. At a hospital they'd just start shooting her full of drugs and tell her to adjust. What they wouldn't see is that she is adjusting. That's what the insanity is. She's adjusting to something. The insanity is the adjustment. Insanity isn't necessarily a step in the wrong direction, it can be an intermediate step in a right direction. It wasn't necessarily a disease. It could be pa.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 0a8f595 | To discover a metaphysical relationship between Quality and the Buddha at some mountaintop of personal experience is very spectacular. And very unimportant. If that were all this Chautauqua was about I should be dismissed. What's important is the relevance of such a discovery to all the valleys of this world, and all the dull, dreary jobs and monotonous years that await all of us in them. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| abf02b7 | grades really cover up failure to teach. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 77d9449 | metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 3f21a8b | The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| be06bb0 | An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| a3a79d9 | It's important now to just live with this and not fight it mentally...mind control.... | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| dd4a952 | Berge sollte man mit moglichst wenig Anstrengung und ohne Ehrgeiz ersteigen. Unsere eigene Natur sollte das Tempo bestimmen. Wenn man unruhig wird, geht man schneller. Wenn man zu keuchen anfangt, geht man langsamer. Man steigt auf den Berg in einem Zustand, in dem sich Rastlosigkeit und Erschopfung die Waage halten. Dann, wenn man nicht mehr in Gedanken vorauseilt, ist jeder Schritt nicht mehr bloss ein Mittel zum Zweck, sondern ein einmal.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| e4dc84e | Insanity as an absence of common characteristics is also demonstrated by the Rorschach ink-blot test for schizophrenia. In this test, randomly formed ink splotches are shown to the patient and he is asked what he sees. If he says, 'I see a pretty lady with a flowering hat,' that is not a sign of schizophrenia. But if he says, 'All I see is an ink-blot,' he is showing signs of schizophrenia. The person who responds with the most elaborate li.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| b744e02 | On an air-cooled engine like this, extreme overheating can cause a "seizure". This machine has had one...in fact, three of them. I took this machine into a shop because I thought it wasn't important enough to justify getting into myself, having to learn all the complicated details. The shop was a different scene from the ones I remembered. The mechanics, who had once all seemed like ancient veterans, now looked like children. A radio was g.. | Pirsig Robert M. | ||
| 6e8f237 | Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it's some kind of "knack" or some kind of "affinity for machines" in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process of reason, and most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a "short between the earphones," failures to use the head properly. A motorcycle functions entirely in accordanc.. | motorcycle motorcycle-maintenance philosophy rationality reason | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 0d8a7a3 | There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way. | motorcycle-maintenance motorcycles perfection philosophy rationality | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| ac513c3 | It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 985ab32 | That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind [...] I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this--that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes--pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts--all of them fixed and inviolable., and think of it as primarily physical. But a.. | foundry machining mechanics motorcycle-maintenance motorcycles philosophy steel welding | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 841d54c | So green this summer and so fresh. There are white and gold daisies among the grass in front of an old wire fence, a meadow with some cows and far in the distance a low rising of the land with something golden on it. Hard to know what it is. No need to know. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 636b35d | The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know. There's not a mechanic or scientist or technician alive who hasn't suffered from that one so much that he's not instinctively on guard. That's the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information.. | nature scientific-method | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 4c3365c | From that original perception of the Indians as the originators of the American style of speech had come an expansion: The Indians were the originators of the American style of life. The American personality is a mixture of European and Indian values. When you see this you begin to see a lot of things that have never been explained before. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 30ff25a | The solutions all are simple--after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are. | philosophy | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 2d4a698 | It should be inserted here parenthetically that there's a school of mechanical thought which says I shouldn't getting into a complex assembly I don't know anything about. I should have training or leave the job to a specialist. Thats a self-serving school of mechanical eliteness I'd like to see wiped out. [...] You're at a disadvantage the first time around it may cost you a little more because of parts you accidentally damage, and it wil.. | do-it-yourself mechanics motorcycle-maintenance motorcycles sense-of-accomplishment | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 7f0081b | You think then, that it is better to have a few duties and live a little for others, do you? | Louisa May Alcott | ||
| f2c9ca3 | Mr. Laurence. I have got a letter for the lady. | Louisa May Alcott | ||
| d7e7a8b | Think of what this planet has done to us. Dune took my Duke and my son and shattered all our hopes and dreams as a family. It people. | Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson | ||
| 5afd6b4 | She passed her on to Troy without giving them a glance; she told him she thought there was something perverted about book reviews that were longer than the books they were reviewing. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 5caaca4 | This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens-- the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the .. | living poetry time | Billy Collins | |
| 0f924e0 | In a while, one of us will go up to bed and the other one will follow. Then we will slip below the surface of the night into miles of water, drifting down and down to the dark, soundless bottom until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still, below the shale and layered rock, beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure, into the broken bones of the earth itself, into the marrow of the only place we know. | Billy Collins | ||
| 0a5fc7e | Sometimes she felt like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family's edges | Anne Tyler | ||
| 970cc65 | Like I'm a person and you're a person, which gives you the right to kill me. | Don DeLillo |