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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c489dc6 | Athens's disastrous 415 B.C. expedition against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. (A hypothetical parallel to democratic Athens's preemptive attack on the neutral, distant, far larger, and equally democratic Syracuse in the midst of an ongoing though dormant war with Sparta would be America's dropping its struggle with al-Qaeda to invade India). | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 4fe1e25 | For a capitalist system to work, the state had to protect, not regulate or interfere with, free markets. Both for political and religious reasons, this the sultan could not do: The Ottomans had then no idea of the balance of trade. . . . Originated from an age-old tradition in the Middle East, the Ottoman trade policy was that the state had to be concerned above all that the people and craftsmen in the cities in particular would not suffer .. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 3203780 | Do you know how alone I've always felt? | Alice Sebold | ||
| 0586a22 | My father was too distracted to see anything in this. Mimicking my mother, he taped it to the fridge in the same place Buckley's long-forgotten drawing of the Inbetween had been. But my brother knew something was wrong with his story. Knew it by how his teacher reacted, doing a double take like they did in his comic books. He took the story down and brought it to my old room while Grandma Lynn was downstairs. He folded it into a tiny square.. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 61c2228 | On my way home from the junior high, I would sometimes stop at the edge of our property and watch my mother ride the ride-on mower, looping in and out among the pine trees, and I could remember then how she used to whistle in the mornings as she made her tea and how my father, rushing home on Thursdays, would bring her marigolds and her face would light up in yellowy in delight. They had been deeply, separately, wholly in love- apart from h.. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 01df013 | For Lorenz, virgins were not a part of his world. He was skeptical of many things I said. Later, when the serology reports proved that what I had said was not a lie, that I had been a virgin, and that I was telling the truth, he could not respect me enough. I think he felt responsible, somehow. It was, after all, in his world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime. | Alice Sebold | ||
| ddc7193 | You save yourself or you remain unsaved | Alice Sebold | ||
| 611c36b | She was armed to the teeth for any onslaught of sympathy. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 51d550b | You can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth. | Alice Sebold | ||
| a872eed | Her brain was a storm, her usual insight gone. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 338388f | They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never reopened or reread. | Alice Sebold | ||
| 8b6ed73 | Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose to tell it, even to one person at a time. | Alice Sebold | ||
| aea9999 | The most momentous events in life--baptisms, weddings, and funerals--don't seem to take much time, but the effects of them bind up the whole of your existence. | Sharyn McCrumb | ||
| aeb42ca | Mountains have long-lost kinfolk on the other side of the Atlantic. The bloodline that marks that kinship is a vein of a green mineral called serpentine ... | Sharyn McCrumb | ||
| 613e5a5 | Wild steep mountains floating in a haze of cloud...a sea of green trees swallowing the hills and valleys, and curling around the trails and rivers, with the wind in the leaves as its tide. | ballad-novels southern-fiction | Sharyn McCrumb | |
| b5d9e3d | Every time something goes wrong, you give up on us. You're killing me, Caro ... I don't know what will happen...but neither do you. Maybe we'll make it...maybe we won't. But you're giving up before we've even tried. I don't understand. Why won't you take a chance? | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| ba1a0a8 | Here in this room, with our bodies entwined, I felt that I could trust this fierce love that had shattered and rebuilt my life. But outside, the world was a cold and dangerous place. I didn't know if love would be enough. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 2e33c6f | God, Jordan, I'd fix it for you if I could. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 9f1182b | What do you want, Lisanne?" "You," "Are you sure? You don't get to have your first time again, baby doll. This isn't how I'd imagined it." "You've imagined it... with me?" "Are you fucking kidding me? You are hot. I've wanted you since I met you, but I figured you just wanted to be friends. That's cool. I like having a friend who's a girl." "Can I just... can I touch you?" He nodded slowly, his eyes following her hand as it moved shakily to.. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 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 | ||
| 5acec87 | For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. | thoughts mindfulness possibilities perspective zen thinking questions ideas | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 8d6fd67 | the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 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.. | faith soul-searching mindfulness mountains devotion journey insight | 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.. | reason philosophy motorcycle-maintenance motorcycle rationality | Robert M. Pirsig |