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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3f43b2c | Before the beginning is the void and the void belongs in neither time nor space and is therefore beyond our imagination. Nothing will come of nothing unless it's the beginning of the world. This is how it begins, with the word and the word is life. The void is transformed by a gigantic firecracker allowing time to dawn and imagination to begin. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 2741a63 | Perhaps sex was something you had to learn and then stick at until you were good at it, like hockey or the piano. But an initial lesson would be helpful. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 3261b38 | Juliet and Hartley had long ago abandoned manners with each other. It was refreshing to behave without respect towards someone. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 1c0936a | When she was little they had lived in an old farmhouse too, in the middle of nothing of but landscape. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 476ec2f | Duke was a burly, barrel-shaped Rottweiler made up of muscle and solid fat and built like a wrestler, a dog that looked like it was permanently on the verge of dying of boredom. He shook his weighty head as if he was being plagued by ear-mites and dislodged a scatter of small romantic words like a broken rope of pearls. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| b8d44ad | Secrets had the power to kill a marriage,she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said,it was secrets that could save a marriage. | secrets | Kate Atkinson | |
| 2d3703c | Sylvie was surprised by the rabid patriotism of the women on the platform, surely war should make pacifists of all women? | Kate Atkinson | ||
| e1cb48a | Everything changes and nothing remains still. PLATO, Cratylus | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 155ae75 | People always said they wanted the truth, but really they were perfectly content with a facsimile. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 83ffd43 | she could see Sylvie and her friends on the lawn below, their dresses fluttering like moths in the encroaching dusk. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 46e2e79 | it had probably been a long enough life. Yet suddenly it all seemed like an illusion, a dream that had happened to someone else. What an odd thing existence was. | illusion life life-is-a-dream reflection | Kate Atkinson | |
| ea9c004 | Life is too precious to be unhappy.' Ursula wondered how many people across London were saying the same thing that night. Perhaps in less salubrious surroundings. And there would be others, of course, who would be saying the same words to cleave to what they already had, not to discard it on a whim. Suddenly | Kate Atkinson | ||
| a1aaa72 | Lily was a Fabian, a society suffragette who risked nothing for her beliefs. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 2e49600 | Amelia envisaged that between York and the royal-infested Scottish Highlands there was a grimy wasteland of derelict cranes and abandoned mills and betrayed, yet still staunch, people. Oh and moorland, of course, vast tracts of brooding landscape under lowering skies, and across this heath strode brooding, lowering men intent on reaching their ancestral houses, where they were going to fling open doors and castigate orphaned yet resolute go.. | gothic-romance heath humor jane-eyre literary-allusions scotland york | Kate Atkinson | |
| 74894b5 | Love of fate?" "It means acceptance. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced, I suppose." | Kate Atkinson | ||
| a6c9470 | No point in thinking," she said briskly, "you just have to get on with life." (She really was turning into Miss Woolf.) "We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try." (The transformation was complete.) "What if we had a chance to do it again and again," Teddy said, "until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?" "I think it would be exhausting." | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 1a1b5e1 | Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn't even a shape left in the world where you'd been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| fe861ad | They're definitely going to declare war tomorrow. In the morning. It's probably timed so that the nation can get down on its collective knees in church and pray for deliverance.' 'Oh, yes, war is always so Christian, isn't it? | Kate Atkinson | ||
| b25bc5c | He was the perfect gentleman and, unlike the salesmen in the Fitzrovia hotel, there were no attempts at fumbling--in fact they often performed an awkward little dance around their small office to avoid touching at all, as if Juliet were a desk or a chair, not a girl in her prime. It seemed that she had acquired all the drawbacks of being a mistress and none of the advantages--like sex. (She was becoming bolder with the word, if not the act... | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 18b634a | The brooding landscape they were currently traversing, the lowering sky above their heads and the rugged terrain beneath their feet, were all conspiring to make her feel like an unfortunate Bronte sister, traipsing endlessly across the moors after unobtainable fulfillment. Perry himself was not entirely without Heathcliffian qualities--the absence of levity, the ruthless disregard for a girl's comfort, the way he had of scrutinizing you as .. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 35c484e | I want to deceive him just long enough to make him want me.. | Armistead Maupin | ||
| 6f72598 | The bay was bright blue today, the hard fierce blue of a gas flame. If there was fog rolling in--and there must be, given the insistence of those horns--she couldn't see it from here. | Armistead Maupin | ||
| 0f24a3c | She lifted the book to her nose and inhaled the scent lingering in its cardboard bones: a hint of rosewater and Lysol that instantly genie-summoned the Blue Moon Lodge. It was Winnemucca condensed, this book, the only thing she owned that could still predictably take her from here to there. | Armistead Maupin | ||
| 2144dac | Such a suitable word, stroke. I'd heard it since childhood without fully understanding its meaning, but it sounded, even through a haze of sleep and dope, just like itself: abrupt and brutal and irreversible. A stroke of lightning, the stroke of midnight, the stroke of a pen. | sudden-death | Armistead Maupin | |
| 28a6a27 | we're gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists. | Armistead Maupin | ||
| 50a2c8c | You cannot be loved by someone who doesn't want to know you. | Armistead Maupin | ||
| 63d830a | He had met this sort of white man before, earnest and believing what came out of their mouths. The veracity of their words was another matter, but at least they believed them. The southern white man was spat from the loins of the devil and there was no way to forecast his next evil act. | belief evil race-relations south southerners truth white-people | Colson Whitehead | |
| db5efa5 | Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams. | neighborhoods segregation | Colson Whitehead | |
| d4c4a43 | All he felt now was envy. These people had expectations. Of the world, of the future, it didn't matter--expectation was such an innovative concept to him that he couldn't help but be a bit moved by what they were saying. Whatever that was. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 1a23a94 | His legs remembered the correct position for squatting down with toys. He played. He fit the round male studs into the round female grooves. He got some thinking done as he hunkered down on his fallen-sleep legs. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| d2b1563 | Later he decided the specifics were not important, that the true lesson of accidents is not the how or the why, but the taken-for-granted world they exile you from. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| eb3b388 | Tipple sold his success much more effectively than he did. How to get excited about, take pride in something that came so naturally? It was like being honored for breathing. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 64415ba | The Declaration [of Independence] is like a map. You trust that it's right but you only know by going out and testing it yourself. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| ab0fa00 | There are instruments and human players but sometimes a fiddle or a drum make instruments of those who play them, and all are put in servitude to the song. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| da75f16 | in the slow motion that is the speed of humiliation. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 2fe2bfc | It was nigh impossible to understand Howard's speech under normal circumstances. He favored a pidgin of his lost African tongue and slave talk. In the old days, her mother had told her, that half language was the voice of the plantation. They had been stolen from villages all over Africa and spoke a multitude of tongues. The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother .. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| a2f7a41 | It was a gorgeous and intricate delusion, Manhattan, and from crooked angles on overcast days you saw it disintegrate, were forced to consider this tenuous creature in its true nature. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 3e0ea40 | The land she tilled and worked had been Indian land. She knew the white men bragged about the efficiency of the massacres, where they killed women and babies, and strangled their futures in the crib. Stolen babies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. | american-history killing slavery | Colson Whitehead | |
| 5e935e4 | Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 1ff9e3c | The I-Remember-Whensters lumbered in with their musty catalogues of the bygone, dragging IVs of distilled nostalgia behind them on creaky wheels, | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 94e1528 | All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 9eb63ca | She is alone with an unattended desk light whose electricity is an expenditure waiting to be itemized and eliminated in the next budget of Lift magazine, Covering the Elevator Industry for Thirty Years. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| cda2b46 | Resentment was the hinge of her personality. | personality personality-traits resentment | Colson Whitehead | |
| aeee981 | There was one moment of intersection, when the topic of hate-watching came up. "Why do you watch TV shows--and keep watching them--if you don't like them?" Terrence asked. Simple: Some days, all you have is gazing upon horror, and the small comfort of being surprised that it is not yours." | horror television tv tv-shows | Colson Whitehead |