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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b2ddfcb | You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we could do better. Better? I say, in a small voice. How can he think this is better? Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always mean worse, for some. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| acde2f8 | You always do good ones. We trust you, Mr. Duke," Says Dylan. Foolish lads, thinks Felix: never trust a professional ham." -- | humorous | Margaret Atwood | |
| d1d67ef | I began to forget myself in the middle of sentences. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 2b27b06 | The living bird is not its labeled bones. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 7319c48 | Help is what they offer but gratitude is what they want, they roll around in it like cats in the catnip. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 53019c7 | It's simple,' Kat told them. 'You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You're working with the gap between reality and perception. That's why you have to hit them with something new, something they've never seen before, something they aren't. Nothing sells like anxiety. | consumerism fashion fashion-industry magazines | Margaret Atwood | |
| e40c2f6 | The human mind was the last thing to be commercialized but they're doing a good job of it now; | Margaret Atwood | ||
| d80da34 | We offered her flowers and signalled to her with our penises, but she did not respond with joy.' 'The men with the extra skins didn't look happy. They looked angry.' 'We went towards them to greet them, but they ran away.' Snowman can imagine. The sight of these preternaturally calm, well-muscled men advancing en masse, singing their unusual music, green eyes glowing, blue penises waving in unison, both hands outstretched like extras in a z.. | humour mating | Margaret Atwood | |
| a322762 | Why should the other ones in this play get a second chance at life, but not him? Why's he have to suffer so much for being what he is? It's like he's, you know, black or Native or something. Five strikes against him from Day One. He never asked to get born. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 978d649 | There's just one thing I want you to remember. You know those chemicals women have in them, when they've got PMS? Well, men have the very same chemicals in them all the time. | humor | Margaret Atwood | |
| c127d65 | The theory was that while in a Fallow state you were gathering and conserving strength, nourishing yourself through meditation, sending invisible rootlets out into the universe. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 2a60c65 | But all doors used regularly are doors to the afterlife. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 3d6a117 | As his editor put it, "Yeah, it's a piece of shit, but it's good shit." | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 522ae92 | Young love, thinks Felix wistfully. So good for the complexion. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 771a429 | Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. It was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic junk.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 3ff2eef | Fool, he tells himself. She's not here. She was never here. It was imagination and wishful thinking, nothing but that. Resign yourself. He can't resign himself. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| eb862db | But we own nothing they want, so we don't qualify as terrorists. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 8711425 | I don't give a glance to what's still on the walls, I hate those neo-expressionist dirty greens and putrid oranges, post this, post that. Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 07eae7e | By the time she was sixteen, Jane had heard enough about this to last her several lifetimes. In her mother's account of the way things were, you were young briefly and then you fell. You plummeted downwards like an overripe apple and hit the ground with a squash; you fell, and everything about you fell too. You got fallen arches and a fallen womb, and your hair and teeth fell out. That's what having a baby did to you. It subjected you to th.. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 701a02e | Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 7d61fca | The written word is so much like evidence -- like something that can be used against you later. | Margaret Atwood | ||
| e290aed | But what distressed him greatly was not having another hermit there to confess him and to receive consolation from; and so he solaced himself with pacing up and down the little meadow, and writing and carving on the bark of trees and on the fine sand a multitude of verses all in harmony with his sadness | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| 46126df | he who has the good to his hand and chooses the bad, that the good he complains of may not come to him. | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| 50770d3 | Open thine arms and receive, too, thy son Don Quixote, who, if he comes vanquished by the arm of another, comes victor over himself, which, as he himself has told me, is the greatest victory anyone can desire. | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| 061fb7e | this was the first time that he thoroughly felt and believed himself to be a knight-errant in reality and not merely in fancy, now that he saw himself treated in the same way as he had read of such knights being treated in days of yore. | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| 0cb0301 | I swear to hold my tongue about it till the end of your worship's days, and God grant I may be able to let it out tomorrow | humour | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | |
| d30eb8a | let his sin be his punishment, let him eat it with his bread, and let that be an end to it. | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| ec16339 | In the shadow of feigned cripples and false wounds come the strong arms of thieves and very healthy drunkards. | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| d9d4bc7 | He tried his luck again, and things went so smoothly that with no more noise or disturbance than the last time, he found himself rid of the burden that had caused him so much grief. But since Don Quixote had a sense of smell as acute as his hearing, and Sancho was joined so closely to him, and the vapors rose up almost in a straight line, some unavoidably reached his nostrils, and as soon as they did he came to the assistance of his nostril.. | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| 4d41572 | When a rich man is hurt, his wail goeth heavens high. (Sancho Panza) | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| 6244eeb | also saw that the number of simpleminded men is greater than that of the prudent, and though it is better to be praised by a few wise men and mocked by many fools, | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | ||
| c52f3da | I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 3ad453e | Only then, forced at six months to confront his destiny, does he begin to cry. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 8010114 | He enjoys the passivity of sitting in a classroom again, listening to an instructor, being told what to do. He is reminded of being a student, of a time when his father was still alive. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| bfa4a31 | A fear of the unknown: what was that called? Worse yet: a fear of the known. | literature | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| efb5718 | My fist flew forward. "Nicely done!" said Eldric, although it had glanced off of his palm like a pebble. "Why aren't you begging for mercy?" "I make a point never to do so," said Eldric. It puts one at a disadvantage." -- | Franny Billingsley | ||
| 1efcad3 | Remember: You're the girl with nothing below the surface. Scratch it and what do you find? More surface. | Franny Billingsley | ||
| 42bfa66 | How many bones did he set?" I cared about it much less than they did. It's my Florence Nightingale calm, I suppose. There was a pause. "Twenty-seven," said Father. There was a question mark in that pause. "How many bones are in the hand?" Another pause. "Twenty-seven," said Eldric." | Franny Billingsley | ||
| 6922e4e | She loved him for his own sake, and therefore she would rather have suffered his absence if he flourished than to have enjoyed his presence if he languished; her sorrow over his avoidable languishing would overshadow her delight in his presence. For a lover, it is more blessed to give than to receive, even when giving pierces the lover's heart. | Miroslav Volf | ||
| dd95f42 | Here is what we do as worshipers of a Santa Claus God: We embrace the conviction that God is an infinitely generous source of all good, but conveniently forget that we were created in God's image to be in some significant sense like God - not like God in God's divinity, for we are human and not divine, but like God "in true righteous ness and holiness" (Ephesians 4:24), like God in loving enemies (Matthew 5:44). To live well as a human bein.. | Miroslav Volf | ||
| 9177faa | In his early text, somewhat cumbersomely titled 'Towards a Critique of Hegel's PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT,' the young Karl Marx famously noted that religion - the Christian faith, he meant primarily - is 'the opiate of the people.' It's a drug, and it's a 'downer' or 'depressant' insulating people from the pain of oppressive social realities and consoling them with a dream world of heavenly bliss. Alternatively, religion can function as an 'upper,.. | opiate-of-the-people religion | Miroslav Volf | |
| 9984194 | Two false images of God are particularly irresistible to many of us - mostly unconsciously. The first I'll designate as God the negotiator and the other, God the Santa Claus. Though we have fashioned both to serve our interests, they are each other's opposites. With one, we want to make advantageous deals. From the other, we want to get warm smiles and bagfuls of goodies. We run from one to the other. Some of their features are reminiscent .. | Miroslav Volf | ||
| 7128c8b | The sufferings of Christ on the cross are not just his sufferings; they are "the sufferings of the poor and weak, which Jesus shares in his own body and in his own soul, in solidarity with them" (Moltmann 1992, 130). And since God was in Christ, "through his passion Christ brings into the passion history of this world the eternal fellowship of God and divine justice and righteousness that creates life" (131). On the cross, Christ both "iden.. | Miroslav Volf | ||
| ce4ffe5 | Love is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope and to endure whatever comes. | John O'Donohue |