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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 50f519f | Mason prefers to switch over to Tea, when it is Dixon's turn to begin shaking his head. "Can't understand how anyone abides that stuff." "How so?" Mason unable not to react. "Well, it's disgusting, isn't it? Half-rotted Leaves, scalded with boiling Water and then left to lie, and soak, and bloat?" "Disgusting? this is Tea, Friend, Cha,-- what all tasteful London drinks,-- that," pollicating the Coffee-Pot, "is what's disgusting." "Au contra.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 8397caa | It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn't been smoking much and it wasn't headlights--but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 9ef761e | Not everybody benefits from a misspent youth. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 79acc2a | Nostalgia lurks, ready to ooze from ambush. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 5927644 | Men had it so simple. When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance. | sex-and-violence | Thomas Pynchon | |
| b01f2a0 | When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 52633f1 | Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including a lye pit, land mines, a trained falcon with envenom'd talons, is employed. It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 9c8e6fb | it was luck, dumb luck, that had put them each where they were, and the best way to pay for any luck, however temporary, was just to be helpful when you could. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 6123957 | American voices, country voices, high-pitched and without mercy. He lies freezing, wondering if the bedsprings will give him away. For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non-American. Later he will recall that what surprised him most was the fanaticism, the reliance not just on flat force but on the rightness of what they planned to do...he'd been told long ago to expect this sort of thing from Nazis, and es.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 8b284ad | Yet is Dixon certain, as certain as the lightness he feels now, lightness premonitory of Flying, that far worse happen'd here, to these poor People, as the blood flew and the Children cried, - that at the end no one understood what they said as they died. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| a90bb04 | Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "Dt" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even--as Slothrop now--what you're doing here," | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| ba14851 | But should Bortz have exfoliated the mere words so lushly, into such unnatural roses, under which whose red, scented dusk, dark history slithered unseen? | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| a187bac | Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back. | truth | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 4f94977 | Oskar Schell: My father died at 9-11. After he died I wouldn't go into his room for a year because it was too hard and it made me want to cry. But one day, I put on heavy boots and went in his room anyway. I miss doing taekwondo with him because it always made me laugh. When I went into his closet, where his clothes and stuff were, I reached up to get his old camera. It spun around and dropped about a hundred stairs, and I broke a blue vase.. | oskar-schell | Eric Roth Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 321a83b | Ensuring that we have a well-informed public citizenry is important for a well-functioning democracy, and that in turn requires an active and diverse media. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 2866e94 | I think adults forget just how much faith teenagers can have in them, just how willing to believe that adults, by virtue of being adults, know absolute truths, or that absolute truths are even knowable. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 383102c | But I was living my life sideway. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else. | anxiety life | Curtis Sittenfeld | |
| e778dce | But I should note, for all my resistance to organized religion, that I don't believe Charlie could have quit drinking without it. It provided him with a way to structure his behavior, and a way to explain that behavior, both past and present, to himself. Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events? -- and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my fait.. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 9bcaf2a | she might even have felt that self-congratulatory pride that heterosexual white people are known to experience due to proximate diversity. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 951288a | Since I was a small girl, I have lived inside this cottage, shelted by its roof and walls. I have known of people suffering--I have not been blind to them in the way that privilege allows, the way my own husband and now my daughter are blind. It is a statement of fact and not a judgement to say Charlie and Ella's minds aren't oriented in that direction; in a way, it absolves them, whereas the unlucky have knocked on the door of my conscious.. | empathy ethics politics | Curtis Sittenfeld | |
| a5b2986 | I have been granted the terrible privilege of deciding what would have happened with no one left to contradict me. And maybe I am absolutely wrong. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 4f64192 | As they faced each other, there was between them such a profusion of vitality that it was hard to know what to do with it; they kept making eye contact, looking away, making eye contact again. At last--surely he was thinking something similar and she was simply giving voice to the sentiment--she said, "Want to go to your place and have hate sex?" | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| f639e86 | It would in retrospect appear to be a stop on a narrative path that was inevitable, but this is only because most events, most paths, feel inevitable in retrospect. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| de5f21f | He seemed simultaneously like a stranger and someone she knew extremely well; there was either an enormous amount to say or nothing at all. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| c0e3167 | Maybe my homesickness was a form of prescience because when I look back, it's the circumstances of this very car ride that I recognize as irretrievable: the experience of driving nowhere in particular with my sister, both of us seventeen years old, the open windows causing our hair to blow wildly; that feeling of being unencumbered; that confidence that our futures would inform the way we wanted them to and our real lives were just beginnin.. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| ffbc223 | My own preferences had little bearing on the outcome of events. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 796a7c5 | There then occurred the first and only paranormal incident of my marriage. Charlie shifted in his sleep, opened his eyes, looked at me and, without preamble, said, "You have to forgive yourself for killing that boy." . . . "For your own sake but for mine, too," he was saying, and his voice was hoarse from sleep yet also certain and insistent. "If you don't forgive yourself, you're making that accident too important, you're making him too im.. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| b4c8dca | She is shocked, and also afraid to look at him. As he turns the page, he's describing a dessert whose name he cannot remember but which arrived at the table in flames. She feels utterly bewildered. This is who her father is: someone tickled by the existence of sushi. Someone who takes pictures inside a restaurant. Her father is cheesy. Even his handsomeness, she thinks, looking at one of the few photos in which he appears, is of a certain h.. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 4732ae4 | I am filled with gratitude at the astonishing fact of being married to someone I enjoy talking to, someone with whom I can't imagine running out of things to say. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 4a91769 | Profii de aici le-au vazut pe toate. Noi ne percepem ca individualitati distincte, dar in ochii lor nu suntem decat o masa de nevoi adolescentine." - Gates Medkowski" | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| d573893 | eram prea tanara atunci sa-mi dau seama cum simple considerente geografice sau temporale puteau sa separe oamenii. Acestea sunt motivele pentru care n-ar fi trebuit sa ma intreb ce m-am intrebat mai apoi, in timp ce ma uitam la reflexiile noastre sparte in oglinda - daca exista oare ceva, chiar si ghinionul, care san e tina legate una de cealalta in toti anii care aveau sa urmeze. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 5ab5bc5 | era greu sa-mi imaginez ca m-as fi putut simti vreodata ca o tipa "misto", dar ma simteam ca o persoana de care eu insami as fi fost intrigata in primii mei ani acolo." | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 25c1628 | but then I think how I grew sick of kissing him. How can you spend your life with a person you're sick of kissing? | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 6ca6d93 | I enjoyed making them, and if it's great reverence you're looking for, or earnest expressions of gratitude - well, then you don't work with kids. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 8859973 | I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I had placed them. | Amy Tan | ||
| 7e0f41d | It stayed with him, like a part of him, like a birthmark, like a limb, it was on him, in him, him, his hymn: I had to do it for myself. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 22dd267 | She said I could have a seat on the couch if I wanted to, but I told her I didn't believe in leather, so I stood. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| c13719f | Did she always have something to read in front of her so she wouldn't have to look at anything else? | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| eee0000 | there were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| e9043fb | My friends are appeased to stay in Odessa for their entire lives. They are appeased to age like their parents, and become parents like their parents. They do not desire anything more than everything they have known. OK, but this is not for me, and it will not be for Little Igor. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 265840b | What our babysitter said made sense to me, not only because it seemed true, but because it was the extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We don't hurt family members. We don't hurt friends or strangers. We don't even hurt upholstered furniture. My not having thought to include animals in that list didn't make them the exceptions to it. It just made me a child, ignorant of the world's workings. Until I wasn't. At which po.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| e1c22b0 | Killing an animals oneself is more often then not a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember. This is perhaps more harmful than ignorance. It is always possible to wake someone from sleep, but there is no amount of noise that will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep."--pg. 102." | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 2d7cb2b | I just couldn't be dead any longer. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 10f540e | He had lived in an apartment with books touching the ceilings, and rugs thick enough to hide dice; then in a room and a half with dirt floors; on forest floors, under unconcerned stars; under the floorboards of a Christian who, half a world and three-quarters of a century away, would have a tree planted to commemorate his righteousness; in a hole for so many days his knees would never wholly unbend; among Gypsies and partisans and half-dece.. | Jonathan Safran Foer |