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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8350443 | Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they've become. | James Baldwin | ||
| 09af4b1 | I hoped to burn out, through Hella, my image of Giovanni and the reality of his touch--I hoped to drive out fire with fire. | James Baldwin | ||
| bc783c9 | Why are we weighed upon with heaviness, And utterly consumed with sharp distress, While all things else have rest from weariness? All things have rest: why should we toil alone, We only toil, who are the first of things, And make perpetual moan, Still from one sorrow to another thrown: Nor ever fold our wings, And cease from wanderings, Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm; Nor hearken what the inner spirit sings, "There is no joy but.. | James Baldwin | ||
| de673cd | To this day it is as if I can still hear the back of her head hit the carpet. | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | ||
| 2a307d3 | Nothing glamorous like the write-ups in the papers or the newsreels. We weren't heroes. We were only there... | war | Robert Cormier | |
| 5fc1a3b | The cheese stands alone The cheese stands alone | Robert Cormier - i Adam Farmer i | ||
| 84869a9 | She didn't want to look ahead to the days and the months and the years with him. Here, now, in this room, it was all right, but later? Again, time couldn't stop. And she saw at last that time only stopped when you were dead...Time was always moving and nothing could stay the same, everything was always changing, for better or for worse. And you had to change with time, with the seasons and the years, or you would be dead too, although your .. | Robert Cormier | ||
| ca2fa65 | How long does it last?" Said the other customer, a man wearing a tan shirt with little straps that buttoned on top of the shoulders. He looked as if he were comparing all the pros and cons before shelling out $.99. You could see he thought he was pretty shrewd. "It lasts for as long as you live," the manager said slowly. There was a second of silence while we all thought about that. The man in the tan shirt drew his head back, tucking his c.. | investment investors rentals shrewdness small-business video | Michael Dorris | |
| cc0552b | And she has been there. I know because her senior high school yearbook, the one with no Daytons, is gone from the bureau where i had left it. She's seen my things scattered about. She knows I'm still here. But she didn't wait Part of me doesn't want to give up, and makes excuses. "She'll be back =," it says. "She just didn't want to run into Aunt Ida. Now that she knows you're here..." But she knew it. Where else would I be? I have to face .. | Michael Dorris | ||
| 9963bf0 | Then in my mind's eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| f25284c | It's you young folks what's going to make the changes, y'all's the ones. You got to lead and you got to fight and move us all on up a little higher. And I tell you something else, it's the ones from the South that's got to do it, them what knows the fire and ain't forgot how it burns. Up here too many forgits. They finds a place for themselves and forgits the ones on the bottom. Oh, heap of them talks about doing things, but they done reall.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 0a44529 | During these times of indecision when all the old answers are proven false, the people look back to the dead to give them a clue, they call first upon one and then upon another of those who have acted in the past. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 97538c6 | Ah," I can hear you say, "so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave!" But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" | Ralph Ellison | ||
| e81508b | We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for something that doesn't exist? For, you see, blood and skin do not think! | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 43755c2 | I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love... too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. | love meaning | Ralph Ellison | |
| 39ef228 | If the weakness of mainstream fiction is its deliberate smallness, the weakness of sf is its puffed-up size, its gauzy immensities. SF often pays so much attention to cosmic ideas that the story's surface is vague. Too much sf suffers from a lack of tangible reality. Muzzy settings, generic characters concocted merely for the sake of the idea, improbable action plots tidily wrapped up at the end. Too much preaching, not enough concrete, cre.. | John Kessel | ||
| 36a3c22 | You see," he said turning to Mr Norton, "he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. Understand? It's worse than that. He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn't digest it. Already he is--well, bless my soul! Behold! a walking zombie! Already he's learned to repress not only his emotions but his hum.. | invisibility race-in-america | Ralph Ellison | |
| ffc376e | Tod Clifton's one with the ages. But what's that to do with you in this heat under this veiled sun? Now he's part of history, and he has received his true freedom. Didn't they scribble his name on a standardized pad? His Race: colored! Religion: unknown, probably born Baptist. Place of birth: U.S. Some southern town. Next of kin: unknown. Address: unknown. Occupation: unemployed. Cause of death (be specific): resisting reality in the form o.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| c4d5001 | I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in a circus sideshow, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination- indeed, everything and anythi.. | invisible racism | Ralph Ellison | |
| 56b8b58 | What a group of people we were, I thought. Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| d2887f9 | Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization--pardon me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I've heard)--which might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that (by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves: not like an arrow, but a boomerang. (Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.) | Ralph Ellison | ||
| d7be0d7 | Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less--a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force-- | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 2a5f82c | Above the decorous walking around me, sounds of footsteps leaving the verandas of far-flung buildings and moving toward the walks and over the walks to the asphalt drives lined with whitewashed stones, those cryptic messages for men and women, boys and girls heading quietly toward where the visitors waited, and we moving not in the mood of worship but of judgement; as though even here in the filtering dusk, here beneath the deep indigo sky,.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 17f6858 | Having judged, condemned, abandoned his cultural forms, his language, his food habits, his sexual behavior, his way of sitting down, of resting, of laughing, of enjoying himself, the oppressed flings himself upon the imposed culture with the desperation of a drowning man. Developing his technical knowledge in contact with more and more perfected machines, entering into the dynamic circuit of industrial production, meeting men from remote re.. | Frantz Fanon | ||
| 5ef7524 | I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting g.. | civil-rights-movement invisible-man literature ralph-ellison | Ralph Ellison | |
| 0cce132 | Especially in a world that doesn't need homemade anything.That's when we need homemade everything. | Kate Jacobs | ||
| acedf70 | As the final decade of the millennium dawned, there would be no greater expression of the cultural, economic, and social revolutions to come than fashion. What rock 'n' roll was to the '50s, drugs to the '60s, film to the '70s, and modern art to the '80s, fashion was to the '90s: the fuse, then the filter. | culture fashion fashion-industry history | Maureen Callahan | |
| 75aefc0 | Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the hypothetical idea itself is actually used to cut diamonds. | John Green | ||
| 7fc4bb5 | Some individuals have the courage to make it, even feel the need to do so; for them the quest is a necessity, not an option. Most people setting out on such journeys are never heard from again, but part of the romance of any field lies in keeping the dream alive, in not settling for what is familiar and comfortable. | dream inspirational journey journeys leadership motivation motivational success | Gino Segre | |
| d52bce4 | You can't let your past write the future | past | Janny Wurts | |
| e833ab3 | They were very upset when I said that the thing of greatest importance to mathematics in Europe was the discovery by Tartaglia that you can solve a cubic equation-which, altho it is very little used, must have been psychologically wonderful because it showed a modern man could do something no ancient Greek could do, and therefore helped in the renaissance which was the freeing of man from the intimidation of the ancients-what they are learn.. | Richard Feynman | ||
| d82618b | No phenomenon directly involving a frequency has yet been detected above approximately 10^12 cycles per second. We only deduce the higher frequencies from the energy of the particles, by a rule which assumes that the particle-wave idea of quantum mechanics is valid. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| a387ef8 | So the librarians at UCLA worked very hard to find another copy of Villacorta's rendition of the Dresden Codex, and lent it to me. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 9686d48 | I believe, therefore, that although it is not the case today, that there may some day come a time, I should hope, when it will be fully appreciated that the power of government should be limited; that governments ought not to be empowered to decide the validity of scientific theories, that that is a ridiculous thing for them to try to do; that they are not to decide the various descriptions of history or of economic theory or of philosophy... | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| f3e3db0 | You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| fcbbc71 | The first is the matter of judging evidence-well, the first thing really is, before you begin you must not know the answer. So you begin by being uncertain as to what the answer is. This is very, very important, so important that I would like to delay that aspect, and talk about that still further along in my speech. The question of doubt and uncertainty is what is necessary to begin; for if you already know the answer there is no need to g.. | Richard Feynman | ||
| 32506d3 | Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?" No, I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it; that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is. ... My interest in science is to simply find out more about the.. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| fb8e733 | RICHARD FEYNMAN LETTER TO ARLINE FEYNMAN, 1946 Richard Feynman (1918-1988) shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum electrodynamics. Unrivaled in his generation for his brilliance and innovation, he was also known for being witty, warm, and unconventional. Those last three qualities were particularly evident in this letter, which he wrote to his wife Arline nearly two years after her death from tuberculosis. Feynman an.. | Lisa Grunwald | ||
| 2d51f48 | Hate has no ears. | Janny Wurts | ||
| 50fa512 | And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn't so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 809d930 | When I asked her once why she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. "Because I have a program for the treadmill," she explained. "It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty." It hadn't occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard." | Bill Bryson | ||
| add3f9a | I had never really stopped to consider what an extraordinary thing the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is. Think about it. A troubled ship calls for help, and eight people - teachers, plumbers, the guy who runs the pub - drop everything and put to sea, whatever the weather, asking no questions, imperilling their own lives, to try to help strangers. Is there anything more brave and noble than that? | Bill Bryson | ||
| e2f1112 | Although the Principia has been called 'one of the most inaccessible books ever written'7 (Newton intentionally made it difficult so that he wouldn't be pestered by mathematical 'smatterers', as he called them), it was a beacon to those who could follow it. It not only explained mathematically the orbits of heavenly bodies, but also identified the attractive force that got them moving in the first place - gravity. Suddenly every motion in t.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ddabd08 | Eventually, mercifully, the waitress prised the spoons out of our hands and took the dessert stuff away, and we were able to stumble zombielike out into the night. | humor | Bill Bryson |