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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b42b81d | No, Colonel Kota replied, stepping backwards and flipping open his Kuomintang cigarette case to proffer another cigarette | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 71736e4 | They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 865ea76 | Evans understood that if Nakamura chose, it would be indiscriminately and their number would include the sickest--and perhaps most likely the sickest, because they were of least use to Nakamura--and that all of them would die. If, on the other hand, he, Dorrigo, chose, he could pick the fittest, the ones he thought had the best chance of living. And most would die anyway. That was his choice: to refuse to help the agent of death, or to be h.. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| a542557 | Darky Gardiner loathed Tiny, thought him a fool and would do anything to keep him alive. Because courage, survival, love--all these things didn't live in one man. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 9d4324f | He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food preparation would be felt to be more than the reading of poetry; where excitement would come from paying for a soup made out of foraged grass. He had eaten soup made out of foraged grass in the camps; he preferred food. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| fdad841 | She has a particular penchant for mentally noting how much I drink, how much I eat, how much exercise I get, and the like. These specifics all fall within her purview. So in truth, I don't remember how much I drink; it's not my job. | Jack Flanagan | ||
| eb28e00 | and how if she didn't see him for another thirty years she would still love him, how she would still love him if he was dead until she was dead too. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| bbf45f1 | He looked at his foreword, written, as ever, in his customary green ink, with the simple, if guilty, hope that in the abyss that lay between his dream and his failure there might be something worth reading in which the truth could be felt. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 6ceff7f | They found him late that night. He was floating head-down in the benjo, the long, deep trench of rain-churned shit that served as the communal toilet. Somehow he had dragged himself there from the hospital, where they had carried his broken body when the beating had finally ended. It was presumed that, on squatting, he had lost his balance and toppled in. With no strength to pull himself out, he had drowned. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 08ebbed | One man's feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 1e0c07d | The imprisoning scent of jasmine that always awakened in him a desire to flee. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| e965315 | At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work--an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 7ece9a0 | The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 0d6849a | One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| d62024d | He remembered a joke he had heard in a Cairo cafe. A prophet in the middle of a desert tells a traveller who is dying of thirst that all he needs is water. There is no water, replies the traveller. Yes, the prophet agrees, but if there was you would not be thirsty and you would not die. So I will die, says the traveller. Not if you drink water, replies the prophet. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 4a12187 | All men were liars and he was no doubt no different--only one tongue and more tales than the dog pound. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| c12b812 | To die of old age...is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death. It is the last and extremist kind of dying. It encourages people to lead a life devoted to not dying, which is really another way of not living. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 24573b5 | Refugees are not like you and me. They are you and me. That terrible river of the wretched and damned flowing through Europe is my family. And there is no time in the future in which they might be helped. The only time we have is now. | syrian-refugee-quotes syrian-war | Richard Flanagan | |
| fdec0f8 | Duty to his wife. Duty to his children. Duty to work, to committees, to charities. Duty to Lynette. Duty to the other women. It was exhausting. It demanded stamina. At times he amazed even himself. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 974f587 | Darky was always looking for the good thing, no matter how small, and consequently he often found it. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 5e2d50c | He fell asleep and again dreamt of being rowed by two myrtle trees, except this time they rowed through the stars to the moon, and it was quiet, and while everything went on forever the stars were as knowable and as safe and as comforting a world as that of the rainforested rivers. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 7f9f687 | Far as I can tell, a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it. | Mary Karr | ||
| 9fdbdf8 | Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. James Wood, How Fiction Works As | Mary Karr | ||
| 44ed458 | Now try writing some pages to serve as later notes. Because you're not yet sure of voice or anything else, you're free from the need to squash in all manner of background information, explaining what year it is, etc. That stuff will just get you back in your head and drive you nuts. You're free to write as if all that stuff is in the reader's head already. It will be, by the time you get to this part of the book. You | Mary Karr | ||
| 0aeeb8c | What would you write if you weren't afraid? | Mary Karr | ||
| f992f15 | I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp's Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up supporting you after a while. | job | Mary Karr | |
| 6debb68 | I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice. | fear | Mary Karr | |
| 3dded63 | Truth works a trip wire that permits the book to explode into being. | Mary Karr | ||
| 1499610 | I threw away over 1,200 finished pages of my last memoir and broke the delete key on my keyboard changing my mind. If I had any balls at all, I'd make a brooch out of it. | Mary Karr | ||
| 6cdc1e0 | If you'd told me even a year before...that I'd wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would've laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime?Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin. I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director...a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles. | spiritual-growth | Mary Karr | |
| 9e47ed7 | Mary Karr once wrote, "In the entire history of anxiety worldwide, telling someone to calm down has worked zero times." | Jaime Lowe | ||
| b3b3ba5 | The memoirist's job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in. | Mary Karr | ||
| 9e2cc62 | Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you're shaping the past's meaning. | Mary Karr | ||
| 2d6d0d6 | The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop. Mark Twain | Mary Karr | ||
| 1c08665 | If your goal is to polish up a fake person you can sell to a public you perceive as dumb, the unexamined life will do perfectly well, thank you. | Mary Karr | ||
| 33dca45 | Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there is suffering involved." p. xx" | Mary Karr | ||
| af69b1f | our strange cynicism about truth as a possibility has permitted us to accept all manner of bullshit | Mary Karr | ||
| 3dac064 | You think you know the story so well. It's a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I've ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate-type shifts. Or it's like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside. | Mary Karr | ||
| 59f7497 | Well, what do you think I should do?" "Button raised a kindly brow. "Dow you want me to tell you if I think you should be wise, or unwise?" "Well... yes." Button smiled sadly. "But which is which?" | Celeste Bradley | ||
| 0f22f8a | How strange knowledge was. Once something was known, it could not be unknown, no matter how one might wish. | Celeste Bradley | ||
| 5354b13 | Opinion is worth nothing. Where is your evidence?" Atalanta Worthington" | Celeste Bradley | ||
| 5758cdb | Opinion is worth nothing. Where is your evidence?" (Atalanta Worthington)" | Celeste Bradley | ||
| 33fcc5b | Sometimes it slanted against her window with a pinging sound, which meant it was close to hail, and then it was visible as tiny pellets for a moment on the pane before the pellets vanished and rolled quietly down the glass, each drop leaving its own delicate trickle. At other times it fell straight down, hardly touching the window at all, but still there beyond the glass, like a delicate, beaded curtain at the entrance to another room. | Alistair MacLeod | ||
| c401a8f | The American craving for illegal, mind-altering, addictive chemicals provides a steady flow of American capital through the Texas border into Mexico and South America. Basically, the drug traffic is uncontainable as long as its U.S. market exists, but newspapers and other media virtuously trumpet feel-good headlines about "record drug busts" and arrests while the drug trade continues unabated." | crime drugs politics-of-the-united-states | William Earl Maxwell |