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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 920555b | A hundred years of scholarly thinking has stretched back a million-fold the age of the Earth. But these same diviners, antiquarians and scholars are thinking now as they did a hundred years ago, when it comes to the age of civilizations; they can't even begin to concede that civilizations might have very old histories. The Earth is allowed to be millions of millions of years old, but the birth of civilization is still set somewhere between .. | Doris Lessing | ||
| f89501c | Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. | Doris Lessing | ||
| e9b23e8 | Why are women so ungenerous to other women? Is it because we have been tokens for so long? Or is there a deeper animosity we owe it to ourselves to explore? A publisher...couldn't understand why women were so loath to help each other.... The notion flitted through my mind that somehow, by helping..., I might be hurting my own chances for something or other -- I did not know. If there was room for only one woman poet, another space would b.. | feminism | Erica Jong | |
| 46a5793 | She wanted to be acknowledged, her predicament given its value. | Doris Lessing | ||
| d7aeeb3 | All those years were now seeming like a betrayal of what she really was. While her body, her needs, her emotions-all of herself-had been turning like a sunflower after one man, all that time she had been holding in her hands something else, the something precious, offering it in vain to her husband, to her children, to everyone she knew-but it had never been taken, had not been noticed. But this thing she had offered, without knowing she wa.. | Doris Lessing | ||
| 5224b7f | we were all experts at making a great deal out of very little, even while we all still had a lot, and were still being incited by advertisements to spend and use and discard | Doris Lessing | ||
| b10f632 | She brought herself to decide she would make an effort to renew that friendship with the Cohens, for there was no one else who could help her. She wanted them to tell her what she must read. For there are two ways of reading: one of them deepens and intensifies what one already knows; from the other, one takes new facts, new views to weave into one's life. She was saturated with the first, and needed the second. All those books she had borr.. | Doris Lessing | ||
| 0c12576 | Every year I try to reread Doris Lessing's slim 1987 polemic (originally a lecture series), Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. In the book, this "epicist of the female experience," as the Swedish Academy put it when awarding her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, reminds us how difficult it is to detach ourselves from the mass emotions and social conditions of the age we're born into; all of us, male and female, are "part of the great co.. | Kate Bolick | ||
| 576a5f8 | I'm not going to be like my mother. You're maniacs. You're mad." "Yes," said Kate. "I know it. And so you won't be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?" | self-determination | Doris Lessing | |
| abe52fc | I wanted to be Emma Goldman. I wanted to digest Doris Lessing's Golden Notebooks like biscuits. I felt like Harriet the Spy, looking for a dumbwaiter to hide in, scribbling down all I witnessed. | Susie Bright | ||
| c560edb | This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion - "nostalgia" is their word for it - which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined." | nostalgia | Doris Lessing | |
| 91bfe57 | I personally cannot imagine that consciousness will be fully understood without reference to Godelian loops or level-crossing feedback loops. | Douglas R. Hofstadter | ||
| 2fef7f1 | But finally I realized that to me, Godel and Escher and Bach were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence. I tried to construct the central object, and came up with this book. | Douglas R. Hofstadter | ||
| 20f66ce | How could we not believe the Lord would guide us? How could we not have faith? For the foundation had been laid in prayer and sorrow. Since that fearful night, Dad has responded with the almost impossible work of belief. He had burned with repentence as though his own hand had fired the gun. He had laid up prayer as if with a trowel. | faith prayer repentence | Leif Enger | |
| e2fc005 | The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this i.. | cells complexity evolution life materialism molecules naturalism nature science | Paul Davies | |
| e632026 | A really big question is why the universe is fit for life; it looks like it has been 'fixed up'. | Paul Davies | ||
| c5a1fc0 | is a physicist and philosopher at Williams College in Massachusetts with a lifelong interest in a time which he too thinks doesn't pass. For Park, the passage of time is not so much an illusion as a myth, "because it involves no deception of the senses.... One cannot perform any experiment to tell unambiguously whether time passes or not." This is certainly a telling argument. After all, what reality can be attached to a phenomenon that can.. | reality scientific-method spacetime time time-passing | Paul Davies | |
| 1740194 | The Toad Pee Club had taken one small step for toadkind and one giant leapfrog for humankind. | Megan McDonald | ||
| 2459f99 | Don't you ever doubt it?" Davy asked. And in fact I have. And perhaps will again. But here is what happens. I look out the window at the red farm--for here we live, Sara and I, in a new house across the meadow, a house built by capable arms and open lungs and joyous sweat. Maybe I see our daughter, home from school, picking plums or apples for Roxanna; maybe one of our sons. reading on the grass or painting an upended canoe. Or maybe Sara c.. | Leif Enger | ||
| b9a68e8 | My weary old ground was broken and watered, and what sprang up was a generalized longing. | Leif Enger | ||
| 7c4c273 | I was drawn on. Conscious now that something needed doing, I moved ever higher on the land. Here entering an orchard of immense and archaic beauty. I say orchard: The trees were dense in one place, scattered in another, as though planted by random throw, but all were heavy trunked and capaciously limbed, and they were fruit trees, every one of them. Apples, gold-skinned apricots, immaculate pears. The leaves about them were thick and cool a.. | Leif Enger | ||
| 09f455b | The evidence of my life lay before me, and I was unconvinced. | Leif Enger | ||
| ca38537 | Do you know who is up at four in the morning? Dairy farmers. Paperboys. Lunatics. | Leif Enger | ||
| 7c55d82 | I experienced an unspooling sense of freedom--genuine antagonism is something I've rarely encountered, and it felt good to respond with honesty instead of obsequious scraping. | Leif Enger | ||
| 6296da5 | Many a night I woke to the murmur of paper and knew he was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James--oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder. | Leif Enger | ||
| a99be49 | You know how it is--you grow up with a story all your life, it can transmute into something you neither question nor particularly value. It's why we have such bad luck learning from mistakes. | Leif Enger | ||
| 620662a | He stood and nodded at the great whitening sky. "We're sure small, wouldn't you say? Takes the onus off, somehow." | Leif Enger | ||
| cc85e7a | SOON, he replied, which makes better sense under the rules of that country than ours. VERY SOON! he added, clasping my hands; then, unable to keep from laughing, he pushed off from the rock like a boy going for the first cold swim of spring; and the current got him. The stream was singing aloud, and I heard him singing with it until he dropped away over the edge. | god heaven paradise | Leif Enger | |
| 08196b1 | Avoiding my eyes he said a rumor had started that I didn't make it, that I died in the lake, so he drove out to where it happened and sure enough someone had hung a twist of flowers on the torn fence. Carnations and baby's breath. There was a white plastic cross and a laminated photo saying, "Virgil Wander RIP." While he poked around, a little scorched-haired lady arrived in a Chevy pickup and marched to the brink with a rosary. When Tom re.. | Leif Enger | ||
| 4408ff8 | No one looks up. No one pauses. No one even questions. Easy as falling off a log. I | Phyllis Reynolds Naylor | ||
| 5b63e0c | Funny how one lie leads to another and before you know it, your whole life can be a lie. I sit on the porch swing later, not even | Phyllis Reynolds Naylor | ||
| e3d4489 | You get a dog on your mind, it seems to fill up the whole space. Everything you do reminds you of that dog. When | Phyllis Reynolds Naylor | ||
| e63c8b5 | His face looked almost as gray as his suit, and the pouches beneath his eyes looked like little bags for holding all the sadness that his head couldn't hold. | broken-hearted funeral grief lonely memorial sadness suit | Phyllis Reynolds Naylor | |
| 9626d75 | Do we have a hand mirror?' I asked from the kitchen doorway. 'Never use one,' said Lester, examining the date on a carton of sour cream. 'Naturally, you're a male. What you see is what you've got,' I said resentfully. 'Huh?' said Lester. | brother confusion funny genitals girl gross hand-mirror humorous mirror random resentful sexuality sibling sour-cream teenage-boy teenage-girl weird woman | Phyllis Reynolds Naylor | |
| e781403 | For your information, Lester, there are at least five wonderful parts of the female body that can be viewed by the owner only with a hand mirror. | brother-sister-relationships female five genitals growing-up human human-body mirror puberty sexuality sister teenage-girl teenager woman womanhood wonderful | Phyllis Reynolds Naylor | |
| e7b0d14 | The Strip was still lit by a million neon lights, though the crowds on the sidewalk had greatly decreased by this hour. Still, Bosch was awed by the spectacle of light. In every imaginable color and configuration, it was a megawatt funnel of enticement to greed that burned twenty-four hours a day. Bosch felt the same attraction that all the other grinders felt tug at them. Las Vegas was like one of the hookers on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywo.. | greed las-vegas nevada sex | Michael Connelly | |
| aea2372 | But too much going with the flow is heading us into the sewer... | Michael Connelly | ||
| 18e701c | You see, the past is what you make of it. You can use it to hurt yourself or others or you can use it to make yourself strong. | Michael Connelly | ||
| d62e2df | why don't you just Uber your ass out of here. | Michael Connelly | ||
| 410e581 | Writing does for me what you got in that glass does for you. If I can write about it, I can understand it. And I can put it in the ground. That's all I want to do. | Michael Connelly | ||
| 40907b8 | When you find the one that you think fits, then grab on for dear life. | Michael Connelly | ||
| 156262b | Reasonable Doubt for a Reasonable Fee. Call the Lincoln Lawyer. Bosch | Michael Connelly | ||
| e0948b1 | Everybody has a jury, the voices they carry inside. | Michael Connelly | ||
| 718ddb5 | I have waited twenty years for this phone call . . . and all this time I thought it would go away. I knew I would always be sad for my sister. But I thought the other would go away." "What is the other, Henrik?" Though he knew the answer. "Anger . . . I am still angry, Detective Bosch." Bosch nodded. He looked down at his desk, at the photos of all the victims under the glass top. Cases and faces. His eyes moved from the photo of Anneke .. | death life mission | Michael Connelly |