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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 194444b | That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses .. | wealth freedom | Joan Didion | |
| 777ccb1 | In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you're married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but .. | Joan Didion | ||
| ff70a6f | This sense that the world can be reinvented [evokes] the Sixties in this country, those years when no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring... | Joan Didion | ||
| 1d3770e | No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely. Although the knowledge that their friends love them and sorrow for them is a great solace, the nearest afflicted must be protected from any one or anything which is likely to overstrain nerves already at the threatening point, and none have the right to feel hurt if they are told they can neither be of us.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 9108111 | Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. | Joan Didion | ||
| 95e46d7 | Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day. | Joan Didion | ||
| caf6dcb | MARIA MADE A LIST of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar's alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills. | Joan Didion | ||
| a8d974f | The difference was that all through those eight months I had been trying to substitute an alternate reel. Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead star. | Joan Didion | ||
| 2590fb9 | Philippe Aries, in a series of lectures he delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1973 and later published as Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, noted that beginning about 1930 there had been in most Western countries and particularly in the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. "Death," he wrote, "so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would b.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 0c3af5d | In both England and the United States, he observed, the contemporary trend was "to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened." | Joan Didion | ||
| f0e2ece | Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss. | Joan Didion | ||
| 3af0ea3 | Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are. | Joan Didion | ||
| a198af1 | No, baby, I'm all man," he said with a smirk, winking at her. "Want me to prove it?" | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| eaa3783 | Don't it bother you? Sittin' here with ... with someone like me? | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 31f58ff | love was not a quantifiable substance. There was always more of it somewhere, and even after one love had been lost, it was by no means impossible to find another. | Paul Auster | ||
| f720d76 | la lettura di Delitto e castigo lo cambio, Delitto e castigo fu il fulmine che si abbatte dal cielo e lo mando in frantumi, e quando riusci a riprendersi Ferguson non ebbe piu dubbi sul futuro, se un libro poteva essere questo, se un romanzo poteva fare questo al tuo cuore, alla tua mente e ai tuoi sentimenti piu profondi sul mondo, allora scrivere romanzi era senz'altro la cosa migliore che potevi fare nella vita, perche Dostoevskij gli av.. | Paul Auster | ||
| 4e46b21 | Les moments de crise produsent un redoublement de vie chez les hommes. Moments of crisis produce a redoubled vitality in men. Or, more succinctly perhaps: Men don't begin to live fully until thier backs are against the wall. | Paul Auster | ||
| b587251 | Now that you are living on such intimate terms with her, Gwyn has emerged as a slightly different person... She is both funnier and more salacious than you imagined, more vulgar and idiosyncratic, more passionate, more playful, and you are startled to realize how deeply she exults in filthy language and the bizarre slang of sex... Common twentieth-century words do not interest her. She shuns the term , for example, in favor of older, more .. | Paul Auster | ||
| 2b56a35 | It appears - because it has been the case for twenty years - that every problem is solvable...that no matter how badly the world economy slumps there is a pain-free way out of it. Once the realization dawns that there is not, and that the pain will be severe, the question is posed that has not really been posed for twenty years: who should feel it? | economics capitalism | Paul Mason | |
| f4b59e5 | No one can ever amount to anything in this life without someone else to believe in him. | life support | Paul Auster | |
| 7ae8ba0 | The whole scene had an imaginary quality to it. I knew that it was real, but at the same time it was better than reality, more nearly a projection of what I wanted from reality than anything I had experienced before. | Paul Auster | ||
| 6d05aca | There were dozens of pictures similar to the one I had found in the Brooklyn Museum; the same forest, the same moon, the same silence. The moon was always full in these works, and it was always the same: small, perfectly round circle in the middle of the canvas, glowing with the palest white light. After I had looked at five or six of them, they gradually began to separate themselves from their surrounds, and I was no long able to see them .. | Paul Auster | ||
| 806ae9e | Since all is plenum, all matter is connected and all movement in the plenum produces some effect on the distant bodies, in proportion to the distance. Hence every body is affected not only by those with which is in contact, and thus feels in some way everything that happens to them; but through them it also feels those that touch the ones with which it is in immediate contact. Hence it follows that the communication extends over any distanc.. | Paul Auster | ||
| 7666495 | what at first had seemed to be no more than a small bump in the road was turned into a full-scale misfortune | Paul Auster | ||
| e1dc1b0 | n`m, hnk 'shy kthyr@ 'sh`r blkhjl mnh. 'Hyn l tbdw ly Hyty 'kthr mn slsl@ mn lndmt, wln`Tft lkhTy'@, wl'khT lty l tuGtafar. hdhh hy lmshkl@ `ndm tbd' blnZr l~ lwr. nka tr~ nfsk km kunta, wtsh`r blr`b. lknaW l'wn qd ft lan `l~ l`tdhr, 'n 'drku hdh. ft l'wn `l~'y shy m `d mwSl@ m '`ml. | Paul Auster | ||
| 20df577 | That's how it is with want. As long as you lack something, you yearn for it without cease. If only I could have that one thing, you tell yourself, all my problems would be solved. But once you get it, once the object of your desires is thrust into your hands, it begins to lose its charm. Other wants assert themselves, other desires make themselves felt, and bit by bit you discover that you're right back where you started. | wisdom knowledge | Paul Auster | |
| 4284d02 | The difference was not that one was a pessimist and the other an optimist, it was that one's pessimism had led to an ethos of fear, and the other's pessimism had led to a noisy, fractious disdain for Everything-That-Was. One shrank, the other flailed. One toed the line, the other crossed it out. Much of the time they were at loggerheads, and because Willy found it so easy to shock his mother, he rarely wasted an opportunity to provoke an ar.. | rebellion optimism son pessimism | Paul Auster | |
| 492db7e | una vida rota por el exceso y la escasez de este mundo | exceso vida | Paul Auster | |
| fb53d7d | They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. Yes, says Blue to himself, that's what it feels like: like nothing at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange enough - to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others. | reader | Paul Auster | |
| 5e48825 | She seemed perfect to you, and even during her first attack of vertigo, which you happened to witness when you were six (the two of you climbing up the inner staircase of the Statue of Liberty), you were not alarmed, because she was a good and conscientious mother, and she managed to hide her fear from you by turning the descent into a game: sitting on the stairs together and going down one step at a time, asses on the rungs, laughing all t.. | Paul Auster | ||
| 11e62bd | He realized that for Ponge there was no division between the work of writing and the work of seeing. For no word can be written without first having been seen, and before it finds its way to the page it must first have been part of the body, a physical presence that one has lived with in the same way one lives with one's heart, one's stomach, and one's brain. Memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our lif.. | Paul Auster | ||
| b70eb8d | Hjm kfyh wljld ldhy khshwshn Hwl mfSlh y'kl lqshr@ lmtkwn@ `l~ sTH lshwkwl lskhn@ lshy bllymwn 'kwbh lmwz`@ Hwl lmnzl, 'kwbh blHwf lswd, Hwl HwD lGsyl, `l~ lTwlt. mshhdth yl`b ltns. lTryq@ lty tTqTq bh rkbth 'Hyn wjhh. shbhh bbrhm lynkn. shj`th m` lklb. wjhh mn jdyd. wjhh. lsmk@ lstwy'y@. | Paul Auster | ||
| 9d64f24 | I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand. | Paul Auster | ||
| 42da4c3 | Everything is connected to everything else, every story overlaps with every other story. | Paul Auster | ||
| 528442f | At fifty-seven, I felt old. Now, at seventy-four, I feel much younger than I did then. | Paul Auster | ||
| c550a29 | The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. | Paul Auster | ||
| ec07e69 | Such were the contradictions of manhood, Ferguson discovered. Your heart could be broken, but your gonads kept telling you to forget about your heart. | Paul Auster | ||
| fa1588c | I'm not going to apologize for things that need no apology. | Paul Auster | ||
| fdc77fb | And that's finally all anyone wants out of a book- to be amused | Paul Auster | ||
| ba422b5 | Schools themselves aren't creating the opportunity gap: the gap is already large by the time children enter kindergarten and does not grow as children progress through school. The gaps in cognitive achievement by level of maternal education that we observe at age 18-powerful predictors of who goes to college and who does not - are mostly present at age 6when children enter school. Schooling plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating.. | opportunity gaps schooling | Robert D. Putnam | |
| a92257d | We must abandon our belief that human choice denigrates the Rule of Law. | Philip K. Howard | ||
| 5d18265 | Overthrow the bureaucracy, and return to a system based on human responsibility. | Philip K. Howard | ||
| 60d32f0 | Human nature turns out to be more complicated than the idea that people will get along if only the rules are clear enough. Uncertainty, the ultimate evil that modern law seeks to eradicate, generally fosters cooperation, not the opposite. | law uncertainty government rules | Philip K. Howard | |
| e2d08ac | if Westerners deem themselves too smart, too moral, or too soft to stop aggressors in this complex nuclear age, then--as Socrates and Aristotle alike remind us--they can indeed become real accomplices to evil through inaction. | Victor Davis Hanson |