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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4b419fc | I was a gamble of Nature, a throw of the dice into an uncertain realm, leading perhaps to something new, perhaps to nothing; and to let this throw from the primordial depths take effect, to feel its will inside myself and adopt it completely as my own will: that alone was my vocation. That alone! I | Hermann Hesse | ||
| e782f17 | But be warned, oh seeker of knowledge, of the thicket of opinions and of arguing about words. | Hermann Hesse | ||
| 16ac428 | How often it is that an idea that seems bright bossed and gleaming in its clarity when examined in a church, or argued over with a friend in a frosty garden, becomes clouded and murk-stained when dragged out into the field of actual endeavor. pg. 65 | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 6e5cf65 | And now, a year has passed since I undertook to go to war, and I wake every day, sweating, in the solitude of the seed store at Oak Landing, to a condition of uncertainty. More than months, more than miles, now stand between me and that passionate orator perched on his tree-stump puplit. One day, I hope to go back. To my wife, to my girls, but also to the man of moral certainty that I was that day; that innocent man, who knew with such clea.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 9116d1d | I open the door to my cottage these evenings on a silence so thick it falls upon me like a blanket. Of all the lonely moments of my day, this is the loneliest. I confess I have sometimes been reduced to muttering my thoughts aloud like a madwoman when the need for a human voice becomes too strong. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 08613eb | So this was how it was to be, now: I would do my best to live in the quick world, but the ghosts of the dead would be ever at hand. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 11275f4 | This was no coincidence. The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. The structure is delicate. If one element fails, the edifice crumbles. In a novel you might get away with a loose line or two, a saggy paragraph, even a limp chapter. But in the joke an.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| de3fc53 | I do think he hated him as one man will hate another who draws off the affection of a beloved. | loss-of-love | Geraldine Brooks | |
| f9f38e7 | Only one god. Strange, that you English, who gather about you so many things, are content with one only. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 091f130 | Christian worship of Jesus is an idolatry much worse than the Israelites' worship of the golden calf, for the Christians err in saying something holy entered into a woman in that stinking place...full of faeces and urine, which emits discharge and menstrual blood and serves as a receptacle for men's semen. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| b7e3e98 | So, my good father, you go and write the order to burn that book, as your church requires of you. And I will say nothing to the printing house, as my conscience requires of me. Censura praevia or censura repressiva, the effect is the same. Either way, a book is destroyed. Better you do it than have us so intellectually enslaved that we do it for you. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 10b4f0c | There's a word a friend of mine coined for that feeble gesture we make as if we're going to hold the door, when in reality we've got no intention of it. He calls it "to elefain." | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 132e692 | It went on from there. One last, god-awful, no-holds-barred blue; one of those fights where you pour out every poisonous thought you've ever had, the dregs of every grievance, and you set the cup in front of the other person and force them to drink it. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| fd8a414 | I don't see her anymore. We don't even go through the motions. Ozren had been right about one thing: some stories just don't have happy endings. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 1c4b56d | I reached for her, pushing back the fall of hair-it was heavy and thick and smooth to the touch-and tilted her chin so that the moonlight shone on her wet face. We married each other that night, there on a bed of fallen pine needles-even today, the scent of pitch-pine stirs me-with Henry's distant flute for a wedding march and the arching white birch boughs for our basilica. At first, she quivered like an aspen, and I was ashamed at my lac.. | love | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 2f0a01b | I had come to think that the Wampanoag, who dealt so kindly with their babes, were wiser than we in this. What profit was there in requiring little ones to behave like adults? Why bridle their spirits and struggle to break their God-given nature before they had the least understanding of what was wanted of them? | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| fba88e1 | I bent my head and breathed the fresh new scent of her. I looked into her deep blue eyes and saw reflected there the dawn of my own new life. This little girl seemed to me, at that moment, answer enough to all my questions. To have saved this small, singular one--this alone seemed reason enough that I lived. I knew then that this was how I was meant to go on: away from death and toward life, from birth to birth, from seed to blossom, living.. | wonder vocation | Geraldine Brooks | |
| c06b2c1 | Moshup made this island He dragged his toe through the water and cut this land from the mainland." He went on then, with much animation, to relate a fabulous tale of giants and whales and shape-shifting spirits. I let hi speak, because I did not want to vex him, but also because I liked to listen to the story as he told it, with expression and vivid gesture. Of course, I thought it all outlandish. But... it came to me that our story of a bu.. | relative-truth worldview | Geraldine Brooks | |
| ff691bf | I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them. | wisdom maturity | Geraldine Brooks | |
| a6b133b | I did note this, and set it down as yet one more of life's injustices: that the man who has been wealthy is dunned more civilly than the fellow who has ever been poor. My creditors would come to me most graciously, diffident, if not downright apologetic, for asking what was theirs. It was as if I would be doing them a great, unlooked for kindness if only I would pay them a trifling sum on my outstanding debts. I would give them tea, and pol.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| a2c465b | I need you to forgive me. And then perhaps I can begin to forgive myself. There is no one but you who can do that either. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| c164aaa | I was simultaneously elated and depressed, a common enough state of mind these days when people are offered a great deal of money to do something repugnant. | James Hamilton-Paterson | ||
| b9fb024 | When you open your mind and hands and heart to the knowing of a thing, there is no room in you for fear. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 429a54d | In that place things begin to wear away even as they are built; the living die a little more each day. The sun is too far away; light slides endlessly into night; fire and love consume themselves; the heart tries to warm itself with ashes. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 3187efc | Do you want a half-truth or truth?" "Truth." "Then you will have to trust me." His voice was suddenly softer than the fire sounds, melting into the silence within the stones. "Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope. Trust me." Morgon" | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 3b122e2 | It was no warning, no judgment, simply her name, and she could have wept at the recognition of it. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 52d59d8 | She was a sweet, warm wind in my heart, a resting place, a place of peace where I could forget so many things . . . | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 18ade59 | Sorrow was like sleeping on stone,he (Brenden)decided. You had to settle all its bumps and sharp edges, come to terms against them,fit them around until they became bearable, and then carry your bed wherever you went. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 65a4914 | Be patient, as you must always be patient with new pale seeds buried in the dark ground. When you are stronger, you can begin to think again. But now is the time to feel. | feelings patient healing | Patricia A. McKillip | |
| 5e205d9 | He knew he was going to die but he thought this little thing might provide him with a nothing stool way off in the corner of heaven reserved for fools, people too stupid to come out of the rain. People got to that corner by heaven's back door. | Edward P. Jones | ||
| a5d6f4b | Priscilla watched her husband as he slowly drifted into sleep, and once he was asleep, she took hold of his hand and put it to her face and smelled all of the outside world that he had brought in with him and then she tried to find sleep herself. | Edward P. Jones | ||
| 7072787 | Some miners' wives take in washing and make more money than their husbands do. In every gold rush from this one to the Klondike, the suppliers and service industries will gather up the dust while ninety-nine per cent of the miners go home with empty pokes. | John McPhee | ||
| 69f1ffd | Despite the recurrence of events in which the debris-basin system fails in its struggle to contain the falling mountains, people who live on the front line are for the most part calm and complacent. It appears that no amount of front-page or prime-time attention will ever prevent such people from masking out the problem. | los-angeles | John McPhee | |
| e9d4892 | We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark, raving mad. | John McPhee | ||
| d39ff5f | He said, "Americans look upon water as an inexhaustible resource. It's not, if you're mining it. Arizona is mining groundwater." | John McPhee | ||
| ae90743 | Only once in the historical record has a jump on the San Andreas exceeded the jump of 1906. In 1857, near Tejon Pass outside Los Angeles, the two sides shifted thirty feet. | John McPhee | ||
| c66859a | If basketball was going to enable Bradley to make friends, to prove that a banker's son is as good as the next fellow, to prove that he could do without being the greatest-end-ever at Missouri, to prove that he was not chicken, and to live up to his mother's championship standards, and if he was going to have some moments left over to savor his delight in the game, he obviously needed considerable practice, so he borrowed keys to the gym an.. | hard-work | John McPhee | |
| db0529d | Geologists on the whole are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional story, a proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth and through the surrounding terrane. | John McPhee | ||
| 9bbfb8a | The only guarantee in life is death, and the only guarantee in death is its shocking unpredictability. | Brian Herbert | ||
| fd8d6fc | The mannequins are not fitted with full simulation mechanics, so you will have to imagine the next part. Apparently it is a necessary procedure in proper courtship ritual. The man will kiss her ear, lick it, and promise his everlasting love. Traditionally, this causes the woman to go into heat." He looked sternly at the boy. "Do you understand this so far?" Gilbertus nodded. Somewhat to Erasmus's consternation, the boy displayed a detached .. | Brian Herbert | ||
| a4d7d21 | Brilliant, Piter! I'm glad I didn't execute you all those times when you were so annoying.' 'So am I,' de Vries said. | Brian Herbert | ||
| b4fb229 | You carve wounds upon my flesh and write there in salt! | Brian Herbert | ||
| ab035be | What is this Love that so many speak of with such apparent familiarity? Do they truly comprehend how unattainable it is? Are there not as many definitions of Love as there are stars in the universe? | Brian Herbert | ||
| f4c71fe | Though death will cancel it, life in this world is a glorious thing. | Brian Herbert |