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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| cf907c8 | It was easy to see that he was clever and well read, but he was also boring. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| f98c275 | nWk l ttwqf `n HbW shkhS fqT l'nWk tkrhh. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 91f416f | The world's full of people with unusual beliefs, Julia. Scientologists, Rastafarians, Catholics, Moonies, Mormons, Baptists, Tories, dentists, captains of industry--every madness has its cheerleader. The asylums and parliament are crammed full of delusionists, and only a madman would want to eliminate them. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| e8c4ef5 | I could have ripped at those pages with my fingernails in order to get all of the material inside me. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 050e098 | Apparently the town, a triumph of post-war socialist planning was a sewer, full of tattooed beasts and violent zombies, with vomit and blood frothing in the gutters. I couldn't wait to see it. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 6471820 | At detumescence, after all, there is conversation, that is where love begins. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 859b597 | My father had the right idea. Begin from an assumption of insanity and then laugh, where possible. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 5a38896 | Without parents who had time for her, at an early age she had made herself self-sufficient. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 3a6cc16 | Clothes and accessories were a person's creativity; how someone looked was always a free decision, like a brushstroke on a painting. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| b90ac30 | You're smart enough to recognize that the subjects of migraines and cats never fail with the women. Lead the old girl toward the mint tea. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| bedc44f | The news I bring is to say that, man being the only animal who hates himself, the likely fate of the world is total self-destruction. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| bbba74e | And if anyone manages to get their sexuality and their love lined up together, they are indeed lucky. It is as rare as a fine spring day in the country. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 3da3928 | Marriage domesticates sex but frees love. It is unsuitable as a solution to human need, but as with capitalism, the alternatives are much worse. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 88637d7 | Al capdavall, nomes vivim un o dos cops. | Quim Monzó | ||
| 191baec | Our prevailing philosophy is "you do you"--be who you were made to be, make your own decisions, and live your best life. We just want you to actually do you--not Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity--based on the experiences that you're having every day and the values that you want to infuse into your life. And we want you to do you with your friends and neighbors and fellow parishioners and colleagues. Political pundits have become fond of discus.. | Sarah Stewart Holland | ||
| e976079 | They stood in the courtyard of Swangard Palace, too cold to be comfortable despite the sun, and they looked fully on one another, knowing that they were friends, and would always be. A lot of water under this bridge too, Mark thought, with something like awe. He was growing older. Old enough to feel the current of what had been flowing under him, leading to his future. Old enough to look back over his shoulder, and see his past behind him, .. | friendship | Sean Stewart | |
| 52f187e | Memories haunted the Ghostwood, brittle as the twigs that splintered like tiny bones under Mark's boots. Sifting through drooping cedar boughs, the old wind muttered of things that waited in darkness without hope. To every question the Ghostwood had but one answer, made from sorrow, and loneliness, and time. | Sean Stewart | ||
| 429ecba | It must be nice, Queenie thought, to be one thing or another, to know where you belonged. | Michael Korda | ||
| 7ef35f2 | Some thirty-six years after the death of Leonidas, King Agesilaus of Sparta, as Plutarch recounts, showed that the essential Spartan spirit, which distinguished her citizens from all others in Greece, still had not changed. At that time there was a war between a coalition led by Athens against Sparta and her allies. The latter had been complaining to Agesilaus that it was they who provided the bulk of the army. Agesilaus, accordingly, calle.. | Ernle Bradford | ||
| 1ef1ae8 | SAIORSE From Saiorse, a name of Irish origin, Meaning 'freedom' Faces problems head on Admired for its originality, dedicated to worthy causes A kind and generous fridge It always stands firm for its principles It does not have to get its own way always Others think it is an extremely clever fridge From Matt Molloys Pub May 20th 1997 | Tony Hawks | ||
| 764b003 | He's young. He still sleeps sometimes. It's a weakness. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 5745e2a | The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behaviour. The parent has to second-guess what the cry, the kick, the grief or the anger is really about. And what marks out this project of interpretation - and makes it so different from what occurs in the averag.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 3a3627b | Love reaches a pitch at those moments when our beloved turns out to understand, more clearly than others have ever been able to, and perhaps even better than we do ourselves, the chaotic, embarrassing and shameful parts of us. That someone else gets who we are and both sympathizes with and forgives us for what they see underpins our whole capacity to trust and to give. Love is a dividend of gratitude for our lover's insight into our own con.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| fb9a1d7 | Our innate imbalances are further aggravated by practical demands. Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored. Society ends up containing a range of unbalanced groups, each hungering to sate its particular psychological deficie.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 3e0f9f1 | Shortly after her older brother died, Chloe (who had just celebrated her eighth birthday) went through a deeply philosophical stage. "I began to question everything," she told me, "I had to figure out what death was, that's enough to turn anyone into a philosopher." Chloe would put her hand over her eyes and tell the family her brother was still alive because she could see him in her mind just as well as she could see them." | Alain de Botton | ||
| 8feff33 | Religions understand this: they know that to sustain goodness, it helps to have an audience. The faiths hence provide us with a gallery of witnesses at the ceremonial beginnings of our marriages and thereafter they entrust a vigilant role to their deities. | Alain de Botton | ||
| cd51504 | Antik donemde filozoflar,insanin mutlu olabilmesi icin hangi maddi kosullarin gerekli hangilerinin gereksiz oldugu konusunda atesli tartismalar girmislerdir.Ornegin Epikur, insana yalnizca yemek ve barinagin yeterli oldugunu iddia ediyor, felsefeyle akil yuruten akilci insanlarin pahali evlerden ve mukellef yemeklerden kolayca vazgecebileceklerini soyluyordu.Ancak ayni konuya yuzlerce yil sonra yeniden deginen Adam Smith,Uluslarin Zenginlig.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 4f8e192 | Part of Wordsworth's complaint was directed towards the smoke, congestion, poverty and ugliness of cities, but clean-air bills and slum clearance would not, by themselves, have eradiated his critique. For it was the effect of cities on our souls, rather than on our health, that concerned him. The poet accused the cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 069712e | I was to look around me as though I had never been in this place before. And slowly, my travels began to bear fruit. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 69e4dc4 | the news should help us with mourning the twisted nature of man and reconciling us to the difficulty of being able to imagine perfection while still not managing to secure it - for a range of stupid but nevertheless unbudgeable reasons...The news currently resists giving us the single most calming response one can offer to certain problems: evidence that they are normal and that they belong to a species which is intrinsically (rather than e.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| ce2f645 | If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 368539b | Because beauty is typically the result of a few qualities working in concert, it can take more to guarantee the appeal of a bridge or a house than strength alone. (p 205) | bridge design house | Alain de Botton | |
| 8e7a974 | We were bothered by sex because it is a fundamentally disruptive, overwhelming and demented force, strongly at odds with the majority of our ambitions and all but incapable of being discreetly integrated within civilized society. | Alain de Botton | ||
| e495970 | 7. The thought was a lonely one: of the error one may find over a single word, an argument not for linguistic pedants but of desperate importance to lovers who need to make themselves understood. Chloe and I could both speak of being in love, and yet this love might mean significantly different things within each of us. We had often read the same books at night in the same bed, and later realized that they had touched us in different pl.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| ea5b738 | The signal danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings - much to their detriment - are at risk of taking psychological centre stage. They imagine themselves to be commanders of their own destinies, they trample upon nature, forget the rhythms of the earth, deny death and shy away from valuing.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| db64a6e | Applied to the news , having perspective involves an ability to compare an apparently traumatic event in the present with the experiences of humanity across the whole of its history - in order to work out what level of attention and fear it should fairly demand. With perspective in mind, we soon realize that - contrary to what the news suggests - hardly anything is totally novel, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely te.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| a146216 | Tame it though we may try, sex has a recurring tendency to wreak havoc across our lives: it leads us to destroy our relationships, threatens our productivity and compels us to stay up too late in nightclubs talking to people whom we don't like but whose exposed midriffs we nevertheless strongly wish to touch. | Alain de Botton | ||
| c111f93 | The secular are at this moment in history a great deal more optimistic than the religious - something of an irony, given the frequency with which the latter have been derided by the former for their apparent naivety and credulousness. It is the secular whose longing for perfection has grown so intense as to lead them to imagine that paradise might be realized on this earth after just a few more years of financial growth and medical research.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| f0100db | When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked what book he could give the Soviets to teach them about the advantages of American society, he pointed to the Sears catalogue. | Alain de Botton | ||
| a06c936 | Yet whatever her enthusiasm for independence, with time Chloe nevertheless began leaving things behind. Not toothbrushes or pairs of shoes, but pieces of herself. It began with language, with Chloe leaving me her way of saying not ever instead of never, and of stressing the be of before, or of saying take care before hanging up the telephone. She in turn acquired use of my perfect and if you really think so. Habits began to leak between us:.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| a6b513d | The very concept of trying to "teach" a lover things feels patronizing, incongruous, and plain sinister. If we truly loved someone, there could be no talk of wanting him or her to change. Romanticism is clear on this score: true love should involve an acceptance of a partner's whole being. It is this fundamental commitment to benevolence that makes the early months of love so moving. Within the new relationship, our vulnerabilities are trea.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 352d501 | Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 4ea858b | It may come very fast, this certainty that another human being is a soulmate. We needn't have spoken with them; we may not even know their name. Objective knowledge doesn't come into it. What matters instead is intuition: a spontaneous feeling that seems all the more accurate and worthy of respect because it bypasses the normal processes of reason. | soulmate | Alain de Botton | |
| e67f800 | He will conclude that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions; and that for his relationships to work he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm. | Alain de Botton |