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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f068f50 | Oh, by the way, the plot: it almost slipped my mind. Charlie French bought my mother's pictures cheap and sold them dear to Binkie Behrens, then bought them cheap from Binkie and sold them on to Max Molyneaux. Something like that. Does it matter? Dark deeds, dark deeds. Enough. | John Banville | ||
| f244548 | I often ask myself whether my decision to pursue a life of scholarship -- if decision is the right word -- was a result of an essential poverty of the soul, or if the desiccation which I sometimes suspect is the one truly distinguishing mark of my scholarship was an inevitable consequence of that decision. | John Banville | ||
| 21890e2 | Que tienen esos momentos intemporales que luego siempre se recuerdan con una dulce melancolia? A veces me parece que es en esos intervalos de vacio, sin que fuera consciente de ello, cuando he vivido de manera mas real y autentica. | philosophy-of-life | John Banville | |
| 4986548 | I fill the time that might have been usefully devoted to sculpture with things like drinking and staring into space. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 1ee4b68 | I have ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, is slips and fluffs, will be done with and that the real drama for which I have ever and with earnestness been preparing will at last begin. It is a common delusion... Yet I anticipate an apotheosis of some kind, some grand climacteric. I am not speaking her.. | John Banville | ||
| a01864d | zashchoto spomenite mnogo d'rzhat da s'otvetstvat nap'lno i bezpogreshno na otnovo posetenite mesta i neshcha ot minaloto. | John Banville | ||
| 39431bd | Chaos is nothing but an infinite number of ordered things. | John Banville | ||
| 298d17f | Dvamata biakha bliznatsi... kogato se prestrashikh da pomolia Khloe da mi razkazhe s'vsem otkroveno, zashchoto mnogo iskakh da uznaia kak se chuvstva chovek , kakvo predstavliava tova s'stoianie na neizbezhna blizost ... tia se zamisli za mig ... - Kato dva magnita - taka kaza, - no otk'm obratnata strana, privlichat se i se otbl'skvat. | John Banville | ||
| 3fd8ea2 | There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me think of twilight and mists and dead maidens. Tonight it tinkled in my mouth like secret laughter. | John Banville | ||
| f76c676 | Yes, another April; in a way, in this story, it is always April. | John Banville | ||
| 0b1bf25 | I too could go, oh, yes, at a moment's notice I could go and be as though I had not been, except that the long habit of living indisposeth me for dying, | John Banville | ||
| b060dd5 | There is in me, deep down, as there must be in everyone-at least, I hope there is, for I would not wish to be alone in this-a part that does not care for anything other than itself. I could lose everything and everyone and that pilot light would still be burning at my centre, that steady flame that nothing will quench, until the final quenching. | John Banville | ||
| 7264c46 | Where did this absurd rule come from, and why did we so meekly obey it? Under a tyrannical regime--and the Ireland of those days was a spiritual tyranny--the populace becomes so cowed that it does the state's work for it voluntarily. And as every tyrant knows, a people's own self-censorship is the kind that works best. In the 1990s, when revelations of clerical sexual abuse and the Catholic Church's cover-ups put an end to its hegemony almo.. | self-censorship tyranny | John Banville | |
| c7a3d51 | Imagenes del pasado remoto se agolpan en mi cabeza, y la mitad de las veces soy incapaz de distinguir si son recuerdos o invenciones. Tampoco es que haya mucha diferencia, si es que hay alguna. Hay quien afirma que, sin darnos cuenta, nos lo vamos inventando todo, adornandolo y embelleciendolo, y me inclino a creerlo, pues Madame Memoria es una gran y sutil fingidora. Los pecios que elijo salvar del naufragio general --?y que es la vida, si.. | John Banville | ||
| 40c0abc | Estas cosas son faciles de decir, pues las palabras no sienten verguenza y nunca se sorprenden (14) Imagenes del pasado remoto se agolpan en mi cabeza, y la mitad de las veces soy incapaz de distinguir si son recuerdos o invenciones. Tampoco es que haya mucha diferencia, si es que hay alguna (14) Hay quien afirma, que sin darnos cuenta, nos lo vamos inventando todo, adornandolo y embelleciendolo, y me inclino a creerlo, pues Madame Memoria .. | John Banville | ||
| 641cdbd | Then they had gone outside, onto the steps, where a breeze lifted secondhand confetti | Zadie Smith | ||
| 8fa7237 | Sometimes I wonder if people don't want freedom as much as they want meaning, | Zadie Smith | ||
| edaf0d4 | Maybe nothing that happens upon stolen ground can expect a happy ending. | zadie-smith | Zadie Smith | |
| 1d7e6ac | The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 8614f1d | things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother, not at all. In her view you might as well be proud of breathing or walking or giving birth. Our | Zadie Smith | ||
| 68d58f7 | Those are my bougainvillea--I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don;t know if they will survive. But Right now they have the appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing. | survival | Zadie Smith | |
| 559a908 | She could not do distress. Anger was so much easier. And quicker and harder and better. If I start crying, I'll never stop -you hear people say that; Kiki heard people say it all the time in the hospital. A backlog of sadness for which there would never be sufficient time | Zadie Smith | ||
| db4b7d0 | The story was the price you paid for the rhythm. | Zadie Smith | ||
| d1c5917 | But first the endgames. Because it seems that no matter what you think of them, they must be played, even if, like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docking of passenger boats, the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 930a618 | Deal with the drops when you can see the ocean." "Another" | Zadie Smith | ||
| 31fd52f | not long ago I sat down to dinner with an American woman who told me how disappointed she had been to finally read Middlemarch and find that it was "Just this long, whiny, trawling search for a man!" Those who read Middlemarch in that way will find little in Their Eyes Were Watching God to please them. It's about a girl who takes some time to find the man she really loves. It is about the discovery of self in and through another. It implies.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 031ecc2 | Nobody can cast themselves out. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 2a89ea4 | It starts innocently. Casually. You turn up at the annual spring fair full of beans, help with the raffle tickets (because the pretty red-haired music teacher asks you to) and win a bottle of whiskey (all school raffles are fixed), and, before you know where you are, you're turning up at the weekly school council meetings, organizing concerts, discussing plans for a new music department, donating funds for the rejuvenation of the water foun.. | involvement pta school | Zadie Smith | |
| b00a0e4 | If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made. To Samad, as to the people of Thailand, tradition was culture, and culture led to roots, and.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 708baa5 | Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves - except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. | human-condition knowing-oneself | Zadie Smith | |
| 189a1dd | Silence. Ah (...) Isn't that something? Did you know this is how other families are? They're quiet. Ask one of these people sitting here. They'll tell you. They've got famillies. This is how some families are all the time. And some people like to call these families repressed, or emotionally stunted or whatever, but do you know what I say? (...) I say, lucky fuckers. Lucky, lucky fuckers. (...) What a peaceful existence. What a joy their li.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| ac0078a | to put it in the modern parlance, this is a re-run. We have been here before. This is like watching TV in Bombay or Kingston or Dhaka, watching the same old British sitcoms spewed out to the old colonies in one tedious, eternal loop. Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - something to do with that experience of moving West to East or East to West or island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going b.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 167c382 | Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does mean,' said Samad tersely, 'that it is a good idea. | Zadie Smith | ||
| a3ae558 | But dying is no easy trick. And suicide can't be put on a list of Things To Do in between cleaning the grill pan and leveling the sofa leg with a brick. It is the decision not to do, to un-do; a kiss blown at oblivion. No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It is for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. | suicide | Zadie Smith | |
| 29206c5 | Most e-mails sent in the mid-nineties tended to be long and letter-like: they began and ended with traditional greetings--the ones we'd all previously used on paper--and they were keen to describe the surrounding scene, as if the new medium had made of everybody a writer. ("I'm typing this just by the window, looking out to blue-gray sea, where three gulls are diving into the water.")" | Zadie Smith | ||
| 21b40fa | The thing I feared was no longer my parents' authority over me but that they might haul out into the open their own intimate fears, their melancholy and regrets. | Zadie Smith | ||
| e8859ed | And drunk men take dares like they take breaths. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 4ac636d | Sometimes in this life you have to take risks on other people. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 8df1f19 | While he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the music the spheres, the flap of a tiger moth's diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that Makes Shit Happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie. Somewhere, somehow, by somebody it had been decided that he would live. | Zadie Smith | ||
| b27538d | We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greetings cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time. | Zadie Smith | ||
| a08082a | It's a question of what love gives you the right to do. | Zadie Smith | ||
| f3daf4b | But it's hard, when you're at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others, | Zadie Smith | ||
| 499e874 | There's never any knowing--how am I to put it?--which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever. --E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread | Zadie Smith | ||
| b0ae8c5 | Oh, there was a certain pleasure. And don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own, from delivering bad news, watching bombs fall on television, from listening to stifled sobs from the other end of a telephone line. Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinema verite, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic s.. | Zadie Smith |