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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1393d84 | Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| faf4477 | Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 9ec7f1b | Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we're paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 9c00e2b | What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow." | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 9237e5d | But of course, without the top you can't have any sides. It's the top that defines the sides. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 8ab7cbf | Samaia bol'shaia dvoistvennost', mezhdu nim i mnoi, tak i ostalas' neraskrytoi. Razdvoenie lichnosti. Kto zhe eto sdelal? Ne ia zhe. I nikak nel'zia ispravit' etogo...Ia vsio dumaiu, naskol'ko zhe gluboko dno u okeana... | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 215df68 | Like that timber wolf on the mountain he had a kind of animal courage. He went his own way with unconcern for consequences that sometimes stunned people, and stuns me now to hear about it. He did not often swerve to right or to left. I've discovered that. But this courage didn't arise from any idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit, and there was nothing noble about it. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 72d4987 | In proportion to his intelligence he was extremely isolated. There's no record of his having had close friends. He traveled alone. Always. Even in the presence of others he was completely alone. People sometimes felt this and felt rejected by it, and so did not like him, but their dislike was not important to him. His wife and family seem to have suffered the most. His wife says those who tried to go beyond the barriers of his reserve found.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 1495181 | Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock loo.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| ef6f039 | the idea that one person's mind is accessible to another's is just a conversational illusion, just a figure of speech, an assumption that makes some kind of exchange between basically alien creatures seem plausible, and that really the relationship of one person to another is ultimately unknowable. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| dc3b73a | When one isn't dominated by feelings of separateness from what he's working on, then one can be said to "care" about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's doing." | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 9f12eae | Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn't just irritating and minor. You're stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It's absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle. This isn't a rare scene in science or technology. This is the commonest scene of all. Just plain stuck. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| d576537 | Our clients are our only assets, so we kill ourselves for them. | John Grisham | ||
| 13dda60 | Sugar's cheek was smooth and taut beneath the veil. It felt like one of these netted onions in a grocery store. | Anne Tyler | ||
| ccf700a | People always say they want to hear the truth, but they really don't | Michael Thomas Ford | ||
| 70cb081 | But the Butlerians turn fear into violence and panic into a weapon. By creating imaginary problems and raising the specter of nonexistent enemies, they transform common people into a wild herd that destroys everything they do not understand. | sci-fi | Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson | |
| fa57b36 | He calls me Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 0f8ae5f | What the-" he began, already heading toward the house, with Elizabeth walking quickly behind him. Ian opened the front door just as Jake came hurrying in from the back of the cottage. "I got some milk-" Jake began, then he stopped abruptly as the stench hit him. His gaze snapped from Ian and Elizabeth, who were just rushing inside, to Lucinda, who was sitting exactly where she had been, serenely indifferent to the smell of burning bacon and.. | Judith McNaught | ||
| 006d71c | Then they're always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can't buy what they're selling, you're a zero in the system. | society | Don DeLillo | |
| 0f961b2 | Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line, the tortoise has stopped once again by the roadside, this time to stick out his neck and nibble a bit of sweet grass, unlike the previous time when he was distracted by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower. | living mindfulness poetry | Billy Collins | |
| 5e55eef | To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon on the day you were born you would be all done in only one more year? Of course, you couldn't have done it alone, so never mind, you're fine just as you are. You are loved simply for being yourself. But did you know that at your age Judy Garland was pulling down $150,000 a picture, Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory, and.. | Billy Collins | ||
| 7ee429d | What do children know? They know who they are, she said, in ways we can't know and they can't tell us. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 3cce7d9 | Central Park It's hard to describe how that day in the park was altered when I stopped to read an official sign I came across near the great carousel, my lips moving silently like the lips of Saint Ambrose. As the carousel turned in the background, all pinions and mirrors and the heads of horses rising to the steam-blown notes of a calliope, I was learning how the huge thing was first designed to be powered by a blind mule, as it turned out.. | Billy Collins | ||
| 426c597 | The birds are in their trees, the toast is in the toaster, and the poets are at their windows. [...] The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong game of proofreading, glancing back and forth from page to page, the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes, and the poets are at their windows because it is their job for which they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon. | poets writing | Billy Collins | |
| 08a86d2 | The girl who signed her papers in lipstick | cool lipstick smoking | Billy Collins | |
| 89ecde2 | No Time In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents lie buried side by side under a smooth slab of granite. Then, all day long, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down. | Billy Collins | ||
| 693cac8 | In the freakish pink and gray of dawn I took his death to bed with me and his death was my bed and in every corner of the room it hid from the light, and then it was the light of day and the next day and all the days to follow, and it moved into the future like the sharp tip of a pen moving across an empty page. | Billy Collins | ||
| f084d36 | It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead. | life the-past | Billy Collins | |
| e53b741 | The air was so thick with testosterone that the wallpaper was getting soggy. | Nelson DeMille | ||
| 0657f3b | He had begun to have spells lately of worrying that he had died, and that everyone knew it but him. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 612b3af | They entered Pennsylvania and the road grew smooth for a few hundred yards, like a good intention, before settling back to the old scabby, stippled surface. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 14762e1 | Oh, the terrible, crushing, breath-stealing burden of people who think they own you! | Anne Tyler | ||
| 1c7366a | This was an attractive room, spacious and well designed, but it had the comfortably shabby air of a place whose inhabitants had long ago stopped seeing it. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 1d58a82 | Always have a purpose,' his father used to tell him. 'Act like you're heading someplace purposeful, and none of the low-life will mess with you.' He had also said, 'Never trust a man who starts his sentences with "Frankly,"' and 'Nine tenths of a good sidearm pitch is in the flick of the wrist,' and 'If you want to sell a person something, look off elsewhere as you're speaking, not straight into his eyes." | Anne Tyler | ||
| 074bbaf | when I get up in the morning I think, boy, only fourteen more hours and I can be back to sleep again. I | Anne Tyler | ||
| 8641ffc | Ghosts... they are the completions of the deads intended gestures, there unfinished plans still hanging in the air - something like when you forgot one thing and so you pantomime the motion. | inspirational-attitude life | Anne Tyler | |
| c02fef7 | I liked to dwell on these shortcomings now. It wasn't only that I was wondering why they had ever annoyed me. I was hoping they would annoy me still, so that I could stop missing her. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 46e6528 | those who forget the past tend to regret the future | Anne Tyler | ||
| e6583e4 | that was Julian for you: reckless. A dashing sailor, a speedy driver, a frequenter of single bars, he was the kind of man who would make a purchase without consulting _Consumer Reports_. | Anne Tyler | ||
| c646b85 | She said, 'Red, I want to learn every step of you, and dance till the end of the night. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 2ba95fe | Why do adults have to diminish everything by feeling they need to end meetings with a false positive? It's so selfish. They say it not because they believe it, but because it helps them feel some kind of accomplishment when they walk away. Like they've done their job. But what do they leave behind? It's like when teachers tell Tyler that he should be a lawyer because he's good at arguing, but meanwhile he can't pass grade nine. No one wants.. | Lesley Anne Cowan | ||
| 7dd69eb | What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others? | Don DeLillo | ||
| 25e7bea | The words were old and true, full of reassurance, comfort, consolation. Men followed such words to their death because other men before them had done the same, and perhaps it was easier to die than admit that words could lose their meaning. | Don DeLillo | ||
| c2e0482 | My life is either/or. Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium step.' 'Sounds like a boring life.' 'I hope it lasts forever,' she said. | Don DeLillo |