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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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. | perfection philosophy motorcycle-maintenance motorcycles 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.. | philosophy foundry machining welding motorcycle-maintenance motorcycles steel mechanics | 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.. | sense-of-accomplishment do-it-yourself motorcycle-maintenance motorcycles mechanics | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 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 .. | time poetry living | 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 | ||
| 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? | wife separation | 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 grandparents grandmother | 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. | writing reason why-writers-write writers-on-writing why writers | 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. | perceptions-of-reality perception | 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 |