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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 77b3bee | You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. | Don DeLillo | ||
| ad757b7 | When you come [to a baseball game] in person, you direct your own focus, you know? The TV or the radio men, they might focus on the pitcher when you want to see what first base is doing; and you don't have any choice but to accept it. | Anne Tyler | ||
| fe3e425 | I too am relieved. I did not know if Kate would like me." "Well, sure she would! You're her own kind, right?" "I am her kind?" Richard suddenly looked less sure of himself, but he said, "I mean you're in that same milieu or whatever. That science milieu she was raised in. Right, Uncle Louis?" he asked. "No normal person could understand you people." "What exactly do you find difficult to understand?" Dr. Battista asked him. "Oh, you know, a.. | Anne Tyler | ||
| bd85951 | The little girls in Room 4 were playing breakup. The ballerina doll was breaking up with the sailor doll. "I'm sorry, John," she said in a brisk, businesslike voice--Jilly's voice, actually--"but I'm in love with somebody else." "Who?" the sailor doll asked. It was Emma G. who was speaking for him, holding him up by the waist of his little blue middy blouse. "I can't tell you who, on account of he's your best friend and so it would hurt you.. | Anne Tyler | ||
| fc36348 | Call to mind a person you've lost that you will miss to the end of your days, and then imagine happening up on that person out in public . . . You wouldn't question your sanity, because you couldn't bear to think this wasn't real. And you certainly wouldn't demand explanations, or alert anybody nearby, or reach out to touch this person, not even if you'd been feeling that one touch was worth giving up everything for. You would hold your bre.. | Anne Tyler | ||
| dcee61e | Disaster followed disaster... the hero stuck in there, though. Macon had long ago noticed that all adventure movies had the same moral: Perseverance pays. Just once he'd like to see a hero like himself -- not a quitter, but a man who did face facts and give up gracefully when pushing on was foolish. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 9e8a535 | Face it,' I said. 'There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got,' I said. | life-lesson | Anne Tyler | |
| 1bf7e81 | The disappointments seemed to escape the family's notice, though. That was another of their quirks: they had a talent for pretending that everything was fine. Or maybe it wasn't a quirk at all. Maybe it was just further proof that the Whitshanks were not remarkable in any way whatsoever. | Anne Tyler | ||
| e574e8f | My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new people; you haven't made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this 'we' that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes you.. | new-beginning | Anne Tyler | |
| 33de5d8 | Funny how you have to picture losing a thing before you think you might value it after all. | Anne Tyler | ||
| fdb3a67 | Let's say you had to report back to heaven at the end of your time on earth, tell them what your personal allotment of experience had been: wouldn't it sound like Poppy's speech? The smell of radiator dust on a winter morning, the taste of hot maple syrup ... | Anne Tyler | ||
| 6a09946 | He wanted to say, Muriel, forgive me, but since my son died, sex has... turned. (As milk turns; that was how he thought of it. As milk will alter its basic nature and turn sour.) I really don't think of it anymore. I honestly don't. I can't imagine anymore what all that fuss was about. Now it seems pathetic. | Anne Tyler | ||
| e1272c8 | Why wasn't there an etiquette book for runaway wives? | separation wife | Anne Tyler | |
| 8e093c4 | One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they'd felt all those years? | Anne Tyler | ||
| f27203c | But his study was so dim and close, and it gave off the salty inky smell of mental fidgeting. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 52c8bbe | It was funny, in her old age, to look back and see for how short a period her nest had NOT been empty. Relatively speaking, it was nothing - empty far longer than full. so much of herself had been invested in those children; who could believe how briefly they'd been with her. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 0b3c59f | She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them- an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her. | grandchildren grandmother grandparents | Anne Tyler | |
| e2fd820 | How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed. | Don DeLillo | ||
| f608c13 | People weren't saying Oh wow anymore. They were saying No way instead and she wondered if there was something she might learn from this. | Don DeLillo | ||
| c74c1df | Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve -- hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve -- not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us. | reason why why-writers-write writers writers-on-writing writing | Joy Williams | |
| f2bf9f7 | She was plain except when she laughed. She was someone on the subway. She wore loose skirts and plain shoes and was full-figured and maybe a little clumsy but when she laughed there was a flare in nature, an unfolding of something half hidden and dazzling. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 70c5c1b | We still want what we want. We want a haircut. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 1d6d3f8 | They passed out of the shade beneath the eaves and flew into sunglare and silence and it was an action she only partly saw, elusive and mutely beautiful, the birds so sunstruck they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something sheer and fleet and scatter-bright. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 976a950 | It was the kind of day in which you forget words and drop things and wonder what it is you came into the room to get because you are standing here for a reason and you have to tell yourself it is just a question of sooner or later before you remember because you always remember once you are here. The thing is communicated somehow. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 88fd400 | You don't believe in heaven? A nun?' 'If you don't, why should I?' 'If you did, maybe I would.' 'If I did, you would not have to. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 0863346 | Her eyes had to adjust to the night sky. She walked away from the house, out of the spill of electric light, and the sky grew deeper. She watched for a long time and it began to spread and melt and go deeper still, developing strata and magnitudes and light-years in numbers so unapproachable that someone had to invent idiot names to represent the arrays of ones and zeros and powers and dominations because only the bedtime language of childh.. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 9f4fdb9 | This is what long journeys are for. To see what's back behind you, lengthen the view, find the patterns, know the people, consider the significance of one matter or another and then curse yourself or bless yourself or tell yourself, in my father's situation, that you'll have a chance to do it all over again, with variations. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 42015ae | What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years. | perception perceptions-of-reality | Don DeLillo | |
| 86c1a8e | If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought," he said, "the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy." | Don DeLillo | ||
| 01cfbd5 | He was thinking about automated teller machines. The term was aged and burdened by its own historical memory. It worked at cross-purposes, unable to escape the inferences of fuddled human personnel and jerky moving parts. The term was part of the process that the device was meant to replace. It was anti-futuristic, so cumbrous and mechanical that even the acronym seemed dated. | Don DeLillo | ||
| b5ee305 | That night, after the movie, driving my father's car along the country roads, I began to wonder how real the landscape truly was, and how much of a dream is a dream. | driving | Don DeLillo | |
| 170f641 | Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not. [...] To plot, to take aim at something, to shape time and space. This is how we advance the art of human consciousness. (WN 291-2) | Don DeLillo | ||
| b3bfff3 | We must be equal to the largeness of things. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 05b0606 | Is there a fungus that speaks to you? I'm serious. People hear things. They hear God." He meant it. He was serious. He wanted to mean it, to hear anything the man might say, the whole shapeless narrative of his unraveling." | Don DeLillo | ||
| dc45a70 | It's the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape, makes it sadder and lonelier and places a vague sad subjective regret at the edge of your response--not regret so much as a sense of time's own esthetic, how strange and still and beautiful a chunk of concrete can be, lived in fleetingly and abandoned, the soul of wilderness signed by men and women passing through. | Don DeLillo | ||
| da928a5 | If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired Cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystic light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially. | Don DeLillo | ||
| beb980c | This is not a story about your disappointment at my silence. The theme of this story is my pain and my attempts to end it. | Don DeLillo | ||
| dd6a75e | I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 6976b2a | How does a successful television commercial affect the viewer?" "It makes him want to change the way he lives." "In what way?" I said. "It moves him from first person consciousness to third person. In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is .. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 20bc1ea | We drove in silence behind a motorboat being towed by a black pickup. I thought of his remarks about matter and being, those long nights on the deck, half smashed, he and I, transcendence, paroxysm, the end of human consciousness. It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega. A million years away. The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man's grand themes funneled down to local grief,.. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 3122a7e | To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity. It seemed a worthwhile goal for prospective saints and flagellants. The new asceticism. All the visionary possibilities of the fast. To feed on the plants and animals of earth. To expand and wallow. I cherished his size, the formlessness of it, the sheer vulgar pleasure, his sense of being overwritten prose. Somehow it was the opposite of death. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 0161f5e | His stillness was commanding. I felt myself getting whiter by the second. What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in? I was scared to the marrow. I was cold and hot, dry and wet, myself and someone else. The fist clenched in my chest. I went to the staircase and sat on the top step, looking into my hands. So much remained. Every word and thing a beadwork of bright creation. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 989ffeb | What do we have to live for, but each other. What do we have to die for, but our love? | Don DeLillo | ||
| 28ba77b | Lekarskite priemni me potiskat poveche i ot bolnitsite zaradi l'khashchata ot tiakh minusova prod'lzhitelnost na zhivota i zaradi sluchainiia patsient, koito si tr'gva s dobri novini, razt'rsva antiseptichnata r'ka na doktora i se smee visoko, smee se na vsiaka negova duma, shche se pr'sne ot smiakh, ot prostashko mog'shchestvo, pokazno ignorira drugite patsienti, preminavaiki prez chakalniata s vse taka d'rz'k smiakh - toi se e ot'rval ot .. | Don DeLillo |