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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 19eb9e8 | Kira, your leg will take a great deal out of me. I'll have to sleep, after, maybe for a whole day or even longer. And I don't have much time." She looked at him quizzically. "Time for what?" "I'll explain. But for now, I think we should start. If I do it right away, I can sleep completely through the night and almost all of the morning. You can use that time to become accustomed to being whole..." "I [i]am[/i] whole," she said defiantly." | Lois Lowry | ||
| 4adde2d | All of it was ashes now: the smooth wood, the soft edges, the memory of his hands. | Lois Lowry | ||
| 736fd6e | So," Herbalist said with a smile, "you can't dance or chew meat. But if you can hear the birds sing and watch the wind in the leaves, then you still have much pleasure left." | Lois Lowry | ||
| f34eaae | It's hard to leave the only place you've known. | places | Lois Lowry | |
| 4e78ade | But somehow the small red-painted sled had become a symbol of courage and hope. | Lois Lowry | ||
| 6a74b97 | Now, seeing the newchild and its expression, he was reminded that the light eyes were not only a rarity but gave the one who had them a certain look--what was it? Depth, he decided; as if one were looking into the clear water of the river, down to the bottom, where things might lurk which hadn't been discovered yet. | Lois Lowry | ||
| 51d7c4c | Kirsti sighed as Annemarie went to the breadbox in the kitchen. "I wish I could have a cupcake," she said. "A big yellow cupcake, with pink frosting." Her mother laughed. "For a little girl, you have a long memory," she told Kirsti. "There hasn't been any butter, or sugar for cupcakes, for a long time. A year, at least." "When will there be cupcakes again?" "When the war ends," Mrs. Johansen said. She glanced through the window, down to the.. | Lois Lowry | ||
| 1248117 | NEFARIOUS means utterly, completely wicked. The character in The Wizard of Oz could have been called the Nefarious Witch of the West but authors like to use the same beginning consonant, often. Perhaps L. Frank Baum crossed out nefarious after wicked came to his mind. Thank goodness, because Nefarious would be a terrible name for a musical. | Lois Lowry | ||
| 152816d | there were communities everywhere, sprinkled across the vast landscape of the known world, in which people suffered. Not always from beatings and hunger, the way he had. But from ignorance. From not knowing. From being kept from knowledge. | Lois Lowry | ||
| 3d77882 | To his surprise, Jean kissed him. So often in the past, teasing, she had said she would, one day. Now she did, and it was a quick and fragrant touch to his lips that gave him courage and, even before he started out made him yearn to come back home. | hope kiss love | Lois Lowry | |
| a5e57d4 | Suddenly he was aware with certainty and joy that below, ahead, they were waiting for him; and that they were waiting, too, for the baby. | Lois Lowry | ||
| 7c803aa | But his mother laughed again in a reassuring, affectionate way. "No, no," she said. "It's just the pills. You're ready for the pills, that's all. That's the treatment for Stirrings." | Lois Lowry | ||
| 2cd71ee | You suggested, Jonas, that perhaps she wasn't brave enough? I don't know about bravery: what it is, what it means. I do know that I sat here numb with horror. Wretched with helplessness. And I listened as Rosemary told them that she would prefer to inject herself. | Lois Lowry | ||
| 315a51e | The books in his own dwelling were the only books that Jonas had ever seen. He had never known that other books existed. But this room's walls were completely covered by bookcases, filled, which reached to the ceiling. There must have been hundreds--perhaps thousands--of books, their titles embossed in shiny letters. Jonas stared at them. He couldn't imagine what the thousands of pages contained. | Lois Lowry | ||
| 97fe10b | Although Genghis Khan recognized the superior leadership abilities of his daughters and left them strategically important parts of his empire, today we cannot even be certain how many daughters he had. In their lifetime they could not be ignored, but when they left the scene, history closed the door behind them and let the dust of centuries cover their tracks. Those Mongol queens were too unusual, too difficult to understand or explain. It .. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 87c43ea | Even in this high-tech age, the low-tech plant continues to be the key to nutrition and health. | plants science | Jack Weatherford | |
| 556af87 | In probably the first law of its kind anywhere in the world, Genghis Khan decreed complete and total religious freedom for everyone. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| f58c00e | The Greeks who rhapsodized about democracy in their rhetoric rarely created democratic institutions. A few cities such as Athens occasionally attempted a system vaguely akin to democracy for a few years. These cities functioned as slave societies and were certainly not egalitarian or democratic in the Indian sense. | democracy philosophy political-theory | Jack Weatherford | |
| c51f291 | While words may be altered or censored, the truth endures, even when not properly recorded. Truth can be forgotten, misplaced, or lost, but never annihilated. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| c4f4a75 | Three of her sisters became queens along the Silk Route, ruling over the grand Turkic nations of Onggud, Uighur, and Karluk. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 5c98f71 | The apartment was entirely, was only, for her; a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books...which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children's books...that conjured for her an earlier, passionately .. | Claire Messud | ||
| c74e6a6 | I'm angry enough to set fire to a house just by looking at it...I'm angry enough, at last, to stop being afraid of life, and angry enough...before I die to fucking well live. | Claire Messud - The Woman Upstairs | ||
| 13f036d | Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are. | Claire Messud | ||
| 9c5cc17 | It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly, or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they're lying to you, but as often because they're lying to themselves. | Claire Messud | ||
| fbcd11e | It all came down to entitlement, and one's sense of it. Marina, feeling entitled, never really asked herself if she was good enough. Whereas he, Julius, asked himself repeatedly, answered always in the affirmative, and marveled at the wider world's apparent inability to see the light. he would have to show them - of this he was ever more decided, with a flamelike conviction. But he was already thirty, and the question was how? | Claire Messud | ||
| b7db2a9 | But the shadow settled on them, obliquely, and was shuffled off only when Danielle rose to put on music, a Spanish soprano singing Cantaloube, her pure, agonized strains floating, their minor harmonies wavering in the small room, as if to remind them both that beauty and loss were inseparably entwined. | Claire Messud | ||
| e87bd32 | You could control what you did, if you wanted to....Was it efficient? Was it productive? ...So many people didn't bother -- a kind of stupidity...a lack of vision, or purpose. Anyone who said they just woke up and found themselves in the place they'd always wanted to be was lying; and anyone who believed such a person was a fool. It was all a matter of will. | Claire Messud | ||
| d87e3ac | it took me a long time to realize that she, too, was cautious and bourgeois, frightened of the unknown and so uncertain of herself that she could hardly bear to make a mark. | Claire Messud | ||
| 1642995 | I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense. | Claire Messud | ||
| 16b94f3 | You get to middle school, and you think about these things. The world opens up; history stretches behind you, and the future stretches before you, and you're suddenly aware of the wild, unknowable interior lives of everyone around you, the realization that each and every person lives in an unspoken world as full and strange as your own, and that you can't ever hope entirely to know anything, not even yourself. | Claire Messud | ||
| d4cea2b | a strangely prolonged lunch involving lobster, that infernally overrated food.... | Claire Messud | ||
| 98f5d92 | what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, | Claire Messud | ||
| dc90357 | Life is about deciding what matters. It's about the fantasy that determines the reality. Have you ever asked yourself whether you'd rather fly or be invisible? | Claire Messud | ||
| 8ea9f6a | Reza, in spite of the tears caught in his lashes like raindrops on a spider's web, did not cry. | Claire Messud | ||
| f18a4d3 | you wouldn't want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are. | Claire Messud | ||
| 7dfb3e1 | All our stores are more or less made up, after all. | Claire Messud | ||
| f63ce99 | How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? | Claire Messud | ||
| 2594370 | But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop. | migration nostalgia | Claire Messud | |
| 94c7046 | was suddenly aware, almost in a panic--a joyful panic--of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself. | Claire Messud | ||
| 8fb6c30 | it rained as if the gods were disconsolate, as if spring were a sorrow, | Claire Messud | ||
| bbe6276 | This, I told myself, this is the way I shall be condemned to pass my days, turning over words, stray lines, fragments of memory, to see what might be lurking underneath them, as if they were so many flat stones, while I steadily faded. | John Banville | ||
| f95d27c | Together they will spend a happy hour seated side by side..., while Ivy's tender hand guides Duffy's as he traces out laboriously, in pencil, over and over until he has them off pat, the magic letters of his name. More than the wedding itself, that little ceremony there under the lamp, all silent save for the soft scratching of graphite on paper, will mark the true beginning of their life together. | letters love wedding | John Banville | |
| 6f4b503 | From earliest days I wanted to be someone else. The injunction nosce te ipsum had an ashen taste on my tongue from the first time a teacher enjoined me to repeat it after him. I knew myself, all too well, and did not like what I knew. Again, I must qualify. It was not what I was that I disliked, I mean the singular, essential me--although I grant that even the notion of an essential, singular self is problematic--but the congeries of affect.. | John Banville | ||
| 7486894 | Recordais como era abril cuando eramos jovenes, esa sensacion de liquida impetuosidad y el viento extrayendo cucharadas azules del aire y los pajaros fuera de si en los arboles que ya habian echado brotes? | John Banville |