1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
4023
4024
4025
4026
4027
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e069a72 | Designed from DNA to compute," I said, appalled at the thought of Core machines being given the benefit of the doubt when it came to souls." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 3e26939 | The day before the Queen's Ball, Father had a visitor--a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over-and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, 'But suppose you died before all the book was written?' [...] He spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her,.. | charles-dickens death old-age work writing | Dan Simmons | |
| 11102fc | Odd how the daily imperatives persist even in the face of collective disaster. | Dan Simmons | ||
| e74ac37 | In the months since Challenger, Baedecker had found it hard to believe that the country had ever flown so frequently and competently into space. The long hiatus of earthbound doubt in which nothing flew had become the normal state of things to Baedecker, mixing in his own mind with a dreary sense of heaviness, of entropy and gravity triumphant. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 8459210 | Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter, Rachel, whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 1b99699 | it had long been accepted that if a species put mankind on its food-chain menu the species would be extinct before long. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 810bef6 | We've been stuck in one species since our Cro-Magnon ancestors helped to wipe out the smarter Neanderthals," she said. "Now it's our chance to diversify rapidly, and institutions like the Hegemony, the Pax, and the Core are stopping it." | Dan Simmons | ||
| a5ee2b8 | Aenea heard the music of the spheres. She resonated with the Void Which Binds, which resonates in turn to sentient life and thought, and then she used the almost illimitable energy of the Void to ... to take the first step. | Dan Simmons | ||
| b607992 | But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes. | Dan Simmons | ||
| d716db4 | Thou art a dreaming thing; A fever of thyself--think of the Earth; What bliss even in hope is there for thee? What haven? every creature hath its home; Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Whether his labours be sublime or low-- The pain alone; the joy alone; distinct: Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. | Dan Simmons | ||
| aa07e04 | Here's the deal. Willi's bought the rights to a paperback best-seller called The White Slaver. It's a piece of formulized shit written for illiterate fourteen-year-olds and the kind of lobotomized housewife that lines up to buy the new Harlequin romances each month. Jack-off material for intellectual quadriplegics. Naturally it sold about three million copies. We | Dan Simmons | ||
| 80630a3 | Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter. | universe | Dan Simmons | |
| 41426a9 | To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. | Dan Simmons | ||
| c910a66 | all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live. Besides, somewhere in the basement of The Jolly Corner to this day, mildewing amidst the pages of an equally mildewed paperback, is a 3-x-5 card on which I had scribbled this quote from Flaubert: Books aren't made the way babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 8fc3e6b | For a person born and raised into a world where information was always at hand, communication with anyone anywhere a given, and no distance more than a farcaster step away, this sudden regression to life as our ancestors had known it would be like suddenly awakening blind and crippled. | Dan Simmons | ||
| c623d9b | Forcing school children to recite a national pledge doesn't sound very American to me," said James. "No," agreed Holmes. "It sounds German. Very German." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 0cc5821 | It seemed that Abraham had offered to murder his son to test a phantom. It seemed that Sol had brought his dying daughter through hundreds of light-years and innumerable hardships in response to nothing. But now, as the Sphinx loomed above him and the first hint of sunrise paled Hyperion's sky, Sol realized that he had responded to a force more basic and persuasive than the Shrike's terror or pain's dominion. If he was right--and he did not.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 676eb12 | Francis Bacon once said, "There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 29000c2 | In an interstellar society where the Church ruled all but absolutely, news awaited not only independent confirmation but official permission to exist. | Dan Simmons | ||
| f1887c7 | Tempus edax rerum. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 239eedf | Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done . . . 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world . . . Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak in time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, and not to yield. | Dan Simmons | ||
| b424ce2 | Philosophical poetry by moonlight was all right, but guns that shot straight and true were a necessity. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 25f8366 | Sometimes," said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, "dreams are all that separate us from the machines." | Dan Simmons | ||
| ceb5a95 | Achilles pauses, looks over his shoulder at the masses of men behind him, turns back, looks past Zeus toward Olympos and the masses of gods in front of him, and then crooks his neck to look up again at towering Zeus. "Surrender now", says Achilles, "and we'll spare your goddesses' lives so they can be our slaves and courtesans." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 2454d5a | In his twenties, John Bridgens most identified with Hamlet. The strangely aging Prince of Denmark--Bridgens was quite sure that the boy Hamlet had magically aged over a few theatrical weeks to a man who was, at the very least, in his thirties by Act V--had been suspended between thought and deed, between motive and action, frozen by a consciousness so astute and unrelenting that it made him think about everything, even thought itself. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 1f0b473 | Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. | Dan Simmons | ||
| c2334df | Seduction, he knew, was both science and art--a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 7cd6c0d | He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton. | Dan Simmons | ||
| b60217c | Blue peter. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| dcb768d | Flattery is as important a machine as the lever, isn't it, Saxonberg? Give it a proper place to rest, and it can move the world. | machine | E. L. Konigsburg | |
| 873d148 | should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| f0c62db | Mrs. Olinski was the first teacher Epiphany ever had who taught from a wheelchair. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| abc4d93 | Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years--about twelve of them--to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted brain to take. Some of the parts must be sculpted at critical times. One cannot, after all, carve out toes unless he knows where the foot will go. We need tools to do some of the fine work. The tools are our childhood experiences. And I'm convinc.. | brains childhood children children-s-books children-s-lit children-s-literature development experiences life life-experiences literature reading | E.L. Konigsburg | |
| 05b7021 | It is sometimes necessary to use unnecessary words like thank you and please just to make life prettier. | pretty thank-you words | E.L. Konigsburg | |
| b012adc | Having words and explanations for things is too modern | E. L. Konigsburg | ||
| fdeec9d | I chose a brunette, a redhead, a blond, and a kid with hair as black as print on paper. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| 83361e6 | I am truly anxious to get on with my life. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| 04787da | Some people spend all their time on a vacation taking pictures so that when they get home they can show their friends evidence that they had a good time. They don't pause to let the vacation enter inside of them and take that home. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| 2a48fda | I was conscious, then, of a different ache, deeper and more sharp than the feeling of bereavement that a hangover will sometimes uncover in the heart. | love | Michael Chabon | |
| 8b5ca9e | This song always kills me, I said. She sighed, and then gave up. Why? Oh, I don't know. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasn't even alive. That's what I do to you too, she said, I'll just bet. I was what everything I loved did to me. | nostalgia | Michael Chabon | |
| 7e08de9 | He's writing his name in water," I said. "What's that?" It was the half-regretful term--borrowed from the headstone of John Keats--that Crabtree used to describe his own and others' failure to express a literary gift through any actual writing on paper. Some of them, he said, just told lies; others wove plots out of the gnarls and elf knots of their lives and then followed them through to resolution. That had always been Crabtree's chosen g.. | Michael Chabon | ||
| b80951c | It was on the steamer carrying him through the Golden Gate that he happened to reach down into the hole in the lining of the right pocket of his overcoat and discover the envelope that his brother had solemnly handed to him almost a month before. It contained a single piece of paper, which Thomas had hastily stuffed into it that morning as they all were leaving the house together for the last time, by way or in lieu of expressing the feelin.. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 88b23ed | There was a kind of autumnal stain in the air that reminded me of the smell of leather work gloves, a high-school locker room at homecoming, the inside of an ancient canvas tent. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 8e575c1 | Fue siendo alumno de este hombre cuando empece a preguntarme si los literatos no sufren alguna variedad de desequilibrio mental, desequilibrio que, pensando en el trepidante balanceo nocturno de Albert Vetch, he denominado "el mal de la medianoche". Este mal es un insomnio de origen emocional: el paciente se siente solo en todo momento -aunque escriba al amanecer o a media tarde- como si estuviese echado en un asfixiante dormitorio, con la .. | Michael Chabon |