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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| fe52fe4 | Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death and old age and change. | Connie Willis | ||
| 9c688b2 | Movie Cliche #12: The Moral. A character states the obvious and everybody gets the point. | moral | Connie Willis | |
| ac73fe4 | Then why does every sentence beginning 'We need to talk' end in disaster? Our whole evolutionary history has been about trying to stop information from getting communicated--camouflage, protective coloration, that ink that squids squirt, encrypted passwords, corporate secrets, lying. Especially lying. If people really wanted to communicate, they'd tell the truth, but they don't. | Connie Willis | ||
| e69800e | Good. Drink your tea," he ordered. "It will make you feel better." Nothing will make me feel better, she thought, but she drank it down. It was hot and sweet. Mr. Humphreys must have put his entire month's sugar ration into it. She drained the cup, feeling ashamed of herself. She wasn't the only one who'd had a bad night." | despair humanity kindness-of-strangers scarcity tea war-rations | Connie Willis | |
| 0d382e7 | It's strange. When I couldn't find the drop and the plague came, you seemed so far away I would not ever be able to find you again. But I know now that you were here all along, and that nothing, not the Black Death nor seven hundred years, nor death nor things to come nor any other creature could ever separate me from your caring and concern. It was with me every minute. | Connie Willis | ||
| 60c07b7 | God--who in that part of London society was of course firmly held to be an Englishman--naturally approved the spread of the language as an essential imperial device; | Simon Winchester | ||
| 8410e6c | Railroads brought about lasting social effects, as well. The companies' ruthless attention to keeping time impelled passengers to carry pocket watches,* and led to the eventual establishment of time zones. | Simon Winchester | ||
| 4e9e7d1 | was the heroic creation of a legion of interested and enthusiastic men and women of wide general knowledge and interest; and it lives on today, just as lives the language of which it rightly claims to be a portrait. | Simon Winchester | ||
| fe28fba | No one had a clue what they were up against: They were marching blindfolded through molasses. And | Simon Winchester | ||
| ad2dcf3 | Minor wants desperately to know that he is being helpful. He wants to feel involved. He wants, but knows he can never demand, that praise be showered on him. He wants respectability, and he wants those in the asylum to know that he is special, different from others in their cells. Though | Simon Winchester | ||
| 729270e | The measure of (mental) health is flexibility (not comparison to some 'norm'), the freedom to learn from experience ... to be influenced by reasonable arguments ... and the appeal to the emotions ... and especially the freedom to cease when sated. The essence of illness is the freezing of behavior into unalterable and insatiable patterns. Lawrence Kubie | David Brin | ||
| 71f9dc8 | Men can be brilliant and strong, they whispered to one another. But men can be mad, as well. And the mad ones can ruin the world. Women, you must judge them . . . Never again can things be allowed to reach this pass, they said to one another as they thought of the sacrifice the Scouts had made. Never again can we let the age-old fight go on between good and bad men alone. Women, you must share responsibility . . . and bring your own tal.. | David Brin | ||
| 836d613 | How can we set up a system which encourages individuals to strive and excel, and yet which shows some compassion to the weak, and weeds out madmen and tyrants? | David Brin | ||
| 3e7d966 | Freedom was wonderful beyond relief. But with it came that bitch, Duty. | David Brin | ||
| 8950946 | The best means to an end are not always those that appear most direct. | David Brin | ||
| 86ba9d3 | Gamberge Tu gamberges. Tu regardes ta vie. Ca ne colle pas. Alors tu deprimes. Combien de vies ratees pour une vie reussie ? C'est quoi, les proportions ? Qu'est-ce que j'ai mal fait pour en arriver la ? C'est quand, que j'ai merde ? J'ai encore le temps de me rattraper ? Combien de chances il me reste pour m'en sortir pas trop mal ? Elle peut encore changer, ma vie ? Je ne suis pas fait pour cette vie-la ? Ca se change, une vie ? Je veux d.. | David Thomas | ||
| ea4bb54 | It was a strange trek -- the sullen leading the apathetic, followed by the confused, all tailed by the inveterately amused. | imagination travel | David Brin | |
| d803817 | Men can be brilliant and strong, they whispered to one another. But men can be mad, as well. And the mad ones can ruin the world. | David Brin | ||
| eef9148 | In good times, pessimism is a luxury; but in bad times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling and fatal prophecy. | David Brin | ||
| 1fc9cbf | I'm about to take a shower because I smell like an all-nighter, then I think I'll take a bath so I can have a faucet orgasm. After all, I didn't get any last night. A faucet orgasm is pretty much the same principle as a bidet orgasm except upside-down. When we were growing up we had bidets in all the bathrooms and when I was about ten I accidentally discovered one of the things they were good for. After that I used to spend hours on the dam.. | bidet orgasm self-indulgence | Jay McInerney | |
| ec74443 | You are the kind of guy who always hopes for a miracle at the last minute. | Jay McInerney | ||
| fb6fbf8 | The intercom buzzes while you're changing your shirt. You push the Talk button: "Who is it?" "Narcotics squad. We're soliciting donations for children all over the world who have no drugs." | funny | Jay McInerney | |
| c64fc2c | You feel that if only you could make yourself sit down at a typewriter you could give shape to what seems merely a chain reaction of pointless disasters. | Jay McInerney | ||
| eda0089 | It was America, after all. The sort of place where you should be allowed to walk as high as you wanted. But what if you were the one walking underneath? What if the tightrope walker really had fallen? It was quite possible that he could have killed not just himself, but a dozen people below. Recklessness and freedom - how did they become a cocktail? | Colum McCann | ||
| 73f3afd | The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy. | Colum McCann | ||
| dc3acae | I could tell from Anna's face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. She had told a secret and now had the sadness of wondering how much deeper she might dig in order to keep the first secret fed. | secrets sorrow | Colum McCann | |
| 6d2a682 | Claire wants to say: Well, I'd say fuck too, if I were me. I'd say it backward and forward and around the block, fuck this and fuck that and fuck it all once, twice, three times. But all she does is smile at Marcia and give her what she hopes is a nod that understands that it's absolutely no problem to say fuck, on Park Avenue, on a Wednesday, at a coffee morning, in fact it's probably the best thing to say, given the circumstances, maybe t.. | Colum McCann | ||
| adbea2d | A writer is an explorer. She knows she wants to get somewhere, but she doesn't know if the somewhere even exists yet. It is still to be created. A Galapagos of the imagination. A whole new theory of who we are. Don | Colum McCann | ||
| bf15011 | He has heard once that a man knows where he is from when he knows where he would like to be buried. | Colum McCann | ||
| f7f94fe | gr bh zndgy mhlt khfy bdhy hmh mshkhltt r Hl khwhd khrd, Hty mshkhl zndhbwdn r. | Colum McCann | ||
| 5760d76 | The short sharp shock of three thousand mother two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son's bed sheets by hand. The ones who kept an extra teacup at the end of the table, in case of miracles. The elegant ones, the angry ones, the clever ones, the ones in hairnets, the ones exhausted by all the dying. They carried their sorrow - not wi.. | the-troubles | Colum McCann | |
| c6b6f63 | The ticking was gone from my mind and all was quiet everywhere in the world and I held the curtain like I held the sound of the bullets going into the draft horse, his favourite, in the barn, one two three, and I stood at the window in Stevie's jacket and looked and waited and still the rain kept coming down outside one two three and I was thinking oh what a small sky for so much rain. | Colum McCann | ||
| 0256102 | We are being bought off by our affair with the contemporary drug of choice: ease. | complacency societal-decay | Colum McCann | |
| 10e4fee | For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways. | Colum McCann | ||
| 4dfc695 | a domino line of laughter, but with an edge to it, a longing, an awe, and many of the watchers realized with a shiver that no matter what they said, they really wanted to witness a great fall, see someone arc downward all that distance, to disappear from the sight line, fail, smash to the ground, and give the Wednesday an electricity, a meaning, that all they needed to become a family was one millisecond of slippage | Colum McCann | ||
| 2a1fd2e | She has come to stay, to be with Claire for a day or two. To sleep in the spare room. To accompany her dying, the same way she accompanied Gloria's dying six years ago. The slow car journey back to Missouri. The smile on Gloria's face. Her sister, Janice, in the front seat, driving. Playing games with the rearview mirror. Both of them pushing Gloria in a wheelchair along the banks of the river, Up a lazy river where the robin's song wakes a.. | Colum McCann | ||
| e97d279 | What is it about wine, Harry? --What d'ya mean? --What is it that cures us? --Made to glorify the gods. And dull the idiots. | idiots wine | Colum McCann | |
| f3c8645 | I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City. | electricity new-york-city | Colum McCann | |
| 4ae7c9b | You are a dancer for only a part of your life. The rest of the time you are walking around, thinking about it! | Colum McCann | ||
| 212e4c9 | A brand-new thought: She tests the phrase, scratching it out on the paper, over and over, The distance finally broken. | Colum McCann | ||
| e0ff87b | What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. | Colum McCann | ||
| e34befa | The over examined life, Claire, it's not worth living. | Colum McCann | ||
| 3b641a3 | Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew. | Colum McCann | ||
| 0a17888 | His body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own people to whom he was pledged. Three million. They were the currency of his freedom. | slavery | Colum McCann |