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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 54d5c5f | She felt whatever emotions she felt, but feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter. If anything, she used her emotions to motivate her and help her concentrate. The emphasis for her was always on doing what needed to be done. | emotions | Will Schwalbe | |
| b56b62d | Reading is a respite from the restlessness of technology, but it's not only that. It's how I reset and recharge. It's how I escape, but it's also how I engage. And reading should spur further engagement. | Will Schwalbe | ||
| cc38536 | This, I finally realized, was how Mom was able to focus when I was not. It was how she was able to be present with me, present with the people at a benefit or the hospital. She felt whatever emotions she felt, but feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter. If anything, she used her emotions to motivate her and help her concentrate. The emphasis for her was always on doing what.. | Will Schwalbe | ||
| c511510 | The truth is that people never realize their lives are about to change in unforeseen ways--that's just the nature of unforeseen ways. | life truth | Will Schwalbe | |
| ef295d2 | I do think back,' Mom told me, 'on my wonderful headmistress at Brearly, the one who told us we could have everything we wanted.... And then, years later, I went back for a reunion, and I told the headmistress that I, indeed, managed to have it all--a husband, a career, three children--but that I was tired all the time, exhausted in fact. And she said, 'Oh, dear--did I forget to mention that you can, indeed, have it all, but you need a lot .. | Will Schwalbe | ||
| c2fee60 | As for me, I'm on a search and have been, I now realize, all my life - to find books to help me make sense of the world, to help me become a better person, to help me get my head around the big questions that I have and answer some of the small ones while I'm at it. | Will Schwalbe | ||
| 4004185 | One of the things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. Sure, sometimes they'll elude you by hiding in improbable places: in a box full of old picture frames, say, or in the laundry basket, wrapped in a sweatshirt. But at other times they'll confront you, and you'll literally stumble over some tomes you hadn't thought about in weeks or .. | Will Schwalbe | ||
| 9477e2b | I wished I could get up in the morning and look at the day the way I used to when I was a child. I wished I could walk down the streets and not hear those constant, abrasive sounds from the mouths of the opposite sex. Damn, I wished the world would let me be myself. | Rita Mae Brown | ||
| 34e01c7 | The most revolutionary thing you can do is to be yourself, to speak your truth, to open your arms to life including the pain. Passion. Find your passions. The | Rita Mae Brown | ||
| 7f49eed | The tax code will never be simplified in our lifetime because it's not about taxes; it's about congressmen distributing the pork. | Rita Mae Brown | ||
| 8e007cb | I don't care whether they like me or not. Everybody's stupid, that's what I think. I care if I like me, that's what I truly care about. | Rita Mae Brown | ||
| 34e8002 | When the corpses are cleared no new order will emerge. Power, society, relationships, will descend in all their confusion on a new generation. The old, who started this conflagration, will retreat, worn out, the survivors and the young will continue the dance. | Rita Mae Brown | ||
| cf6de4b | Whenever a young thing wants to be free minus serious thought, she gets pregnant and then gets married. Voila! | youth | Rita Mae Brown | |
| 1aedc60 | Eyes Fastened With Pins" How much death works, No one knows what a long Day he puts in. The little Wife always alone Ironing death's laundry. The beautiful daughters Setting death's supper table. The neighbors playing Pinochle in the backyard Or just sitting on the steps Drinking beer. Death, Meanwhile, in a strange Part of town looking for Someone with a bad cough, But the address somehow wrong, Even death can't figure it out Among all the.. | Charles Simic | ||
| 0846130 | Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist. | Charles Simic | ||
| 9562996 | A Short Ode To Sausage "Sad to say, there are people who regard lovers of sausages as relics from a kind of nutritional Dark Ages"...---Charles Simic, poet. Theologically, I'd say I was predestined to eat animals carefully stuffed inside their own intestines. I'm the first to eat knockwurst, and the last in a cholesterol tsunami to relinquish my salami to the authorities. Whether beef, lamb or pork-- it will end up on my fork. (I'm cl.. | Daniel Klawitter | ||
| 3fa801b | The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who's to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket. | Charles Simic | ||
| 1141c14 | History is a cookbook. The tyrants are chefs. The philosophers write menus. The priests are waiters. The military men are bouncers. The singing you hear is the poets washing dishes in the kitchen. | Charles Simic | ||
| f3675bc | lt`ql lbTwly fy mwjh@ l`bth hw tqryban kl m nmtlk. | Charles Simic | ||
| 6bdfe82 | Dear Friedrich, the world's still false, cruel and beautiful... | Charles Simic | ||
| c7c11e1 | It was dark now, and broodingly sluggish. Like something supine waiting to spring, with just the tip of its tail twitching. Leaves stood still on the trees. An evil green star glinted in the black sky like a hostile eye, like an evil spying eye. ("For The Rest Of Her Life")" | evil night omen ominous star threat | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 222ebac | And he's alone there, with the unconscious pilot lying a little way off for company, and some other guy he's never even seen, only spoken to over the radio. He wants to sleep so badly - dying they call it - and he can't. Something's bothering him to keep him awake. ("Jane Brown's Body")" | dying noir shot | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 7bce4b2 | When she comes down to supper I don't like her any better; in fact, a hell of a lot less. She's put on a shiny dress, all fishscales, like this was still India or the boat. On her head she's put a sort of beaded cap that fits close-like a hood. A mottled green-and-black thing that gleams dully in the candlelight. Not a hair shows below it, you can't tell whether she's a woman or what the devil she is. Right in front, above her forehead, the.. | sexy slinky snake | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 829899b | And I still say it was just a coincidence;' he muttered pugnaciously. 'You say it too! Look at me and say it! It was just a coincidence. That happened to be the nearest place on the dial where they both met exactly, those two hands. My blows dented them. They got stuck there just as the works died, that was all. Stay sane whatever you do. Say it over and over. It was just a coincidence!' Outside the tall French windows, in the velvety night.. | curse desitny fate sanity | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 7232bf4 | Maldonado's face was ghastly. 'That' she said, pointing below the bed where the cat lurked, 'and that' - pointing to what lay on the floor - 'prove it was no dream. Do dreams leave marks behind them?' ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")" | nightmare nightmares | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 6f2c837 | The sightseers would have been disappointed, as the real thing always makes a poorer show than the fake. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")" | authenticity fake | Cornell Woolrich | |
| bafbb06 | After that there was silence for a while, only the sound of the shovel biting into the earth and the hissing splatter of the loose dirt. They stood him up, his back to the well. | death night night-sky sky | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 05d0f5d | As the bartender struck a match to light her cigarette, she put her hand on his wrist to steady it. Travis saw him jump, draw back. He held his wrist, blew on it, looked at her reproachfully. Travis said: 'Why, you scratched him, Sarah.' 'Did I?' And as she turned and looked at him, he saw her hand twitch a little, and drew still further away from her. 'What - what's got into you?' he faltered. There was some kind of tension spreading all a.. | femme-fatale uneasy | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 00a3707 | It wasn't an attack. We'd been together too many times before, made love together too many times before, for it to be that. It was just that fear had suddenly entered, and made us dangerous strangers. ("New York Blues")" | fight | Cornell Woolrich | |
| cc78551 | There was nothing the matter out there. It was in here, with me. I decided I'd better go to work, maybe that would exorcise me. I fled from the room almost as though it were haunted. It was too late to stop off at a breakfast counter now. I didn't want any, anyway. My stomach kept giving little quivers. In the end I didn't go to work, either. I couldn't, I wouldn't have been any good. I telephoned in that I was too ill to come, and it was.. | darkness nighmare night shadow shadows | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 308dd47 | It isn't dying I'm afraid of, it isn't that at all; I know what it is to die, I've died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That's what I can't stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don't you? ... I really loved to write. | dying writer writers writing | Cornell Woolrich | |
| f35489f | That's a man's vital spot, the helpless thing he loves. ("Jane Brown's Body")" | man men weakness | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 603333a | Fear! Fear again, for the first time since his 'teens. Fear, that he thought he would never know any more. Fear that no weapon, no jeopardy, no natural cataclysm, has ever been able to inspire until now. And now here it is running icily through him in the hot Chinese noon. Fear for the thing he loves, the only fear that can ever wholly cow the reckless and the brave. ("Jane Brown's Body")" -- | fearless fearlessness | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 2a27a58 | A raging, glowering full moon had come up, was peering down over the side of the sky well above the patio. That was the last thing she saw as she leaned for a moment, inert with fatigue, against the doorway of the room in which her child lay. Then she dragged herself in to topple headlong upon the bed and, already fast asleep, to circle her child with one protective arm, moving as if of its own instinct. Not the meek, the pallid, gentle moo.. | moon night | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 62f5333 | On hands and knees the figure comes pacing along beside the wall that flanks the patio, lithe, sinuous, knife in mouth perpendicular to its course. In moonlight and out of it, as each successive archway of the portico circles high above it, comes down to join its support, and is gone again to the rear. The moon is a caress on supple skin. The moon of Anahuac understands, the moon is in league, the moon will not betray. ("The Moon of Montezu.. | moon murder night | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 08839a7 | I turn my head a little. The radio's caroling "Tonight," velvety smooth and young and filled with plaintive desire. Maria's song from West Side Story. I remember one beautiful night long ago at the Winter Garden, with a beautiful someone beside me. I tilt my nose and breathe in, and I can still smell her perfume, the ghost of her perfume from long ago. But where is she now, where did she go, and what did I do with her? Our paths ran along s.. | relationships romance | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 5dfbfa5 | I must have roamed dementedly about for a time in the streets. When I at last got back to my own place, Faustine was again there ahead of me, coiled torpid in the bed like a loathsome boa-constrictor. She was already in the never-never land where ghouls like her belonged. I covered her face with one of the pillows, pressed down upon it with the weight of my whole body, held it there until she should have been dead ten times over. Yet when I.. | Cornell Woolrich | ||
| 6540685 | So much for the recreational side of night life in the upper-bracket-income hotels of Manhattan. And in its root-origins the very word itself is implicit with implication: re-create. Analyze it and you'll see it also means to reproduce. But clever, ingenious Man has managed to sidetrack it into making life more livable. ("New York Blues")" | Cornell Woolrich | ||
| 5585986 | The massive bronze gates were wide open now, too late. Inside, the cemetery had been turned into a grotesque place gleaming with high-powered searchlights, blue flashlight flares, winking pocket torches. Uniformed men were already swarming about. Red cigarette-embers showed oddly amidst the headstones here and there. ("The Street Of Jungle Death")" | cemetery-gates crime-scene crime-scenes | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 422dae6 | But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of.. | alone | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 55ac53d | She had signed her own death-warrant. He kept telling himself over and over that he was not to blame, she had brought it on herself. He had never seen the man. He knew there was one. He had known for six weeks now. Little things had told him. One day he came home and there was a cigar-butt in an ashtray, still moist at one end, still warm at the other. There were gasoline-drippings on the asphalt in front of their house, and they didn't own.. | concussion crime cuckold homicide jealousy murder | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 9017673 | The honky-tonk bartender, who doubled as bouncer, waiter, and cashier, was in no mood to compromise. Mercy was not in him. He came out around the open end of the long counter, waddled threatening across the floor in a sullen, red-faced fury and began to shake the inanimate figure lying across the table with its head bedded on its arms. "Hey, you! Do your sleeping in the gutter!" If you gave these bums an inch; they took a yard. And this o.. | barfly bartender bum-s-rush bums drunk | Cornell Woolrich | |
| d575219 | Three o'clock in the morning. The highway is empty, under a malignant moon. The oil drippings make the roadway gleam like a blue-satin ribbon. The night is still but for a humming noise coming up somewhere behind a rise of ground. Two other, fiercer, whiter moons, set close together, suddenly top the rise, shoot a fan of blinding platinum far down ahead of them. Headlights. The humming burgeons into a roar. The touring car is going so f.. | car drive driving night | Cornell Woolrich | |
| 06161e0 | All guys are scared of each other, didn't you know that? I'm not the only one. We're all born afraid. ("New York Blues")" | fear maculinity noir | Cornell Woolrich |