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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 16ac4e1 | If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 57ff1b2 | The only sin is selfishness. | sin | Iain M. Banks | |
| b7ef67c | Yet at the same time there is something about her deportment which I - and I suspect most other males - find off-putting, and even slightly threatening. A certain immodest forthrightness in her bearing is the cause of this, perhaps, plus the suspicion that while she pays flawless lip service to the facts of life which dictate the accepted and patent preeminence of the male, she does so with a sort of unwarranted humour, producing in us male.. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 555f525 | Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves | wisdom | Iain M. Banks | |
| ebb3897 | Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| d8be8a9 | At least you can say you were in on the last days of Morocco," he told her. "How's your tea? Finished? I think we ought to be going." | Paul Bowles | ||
| 66e5e4b | Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. | Paul Bowles | ||
| 94783c7 | Come one, come all! Prepare to be amazed by the one, the only - Mairelon the Magician! | Patricia C. Wrede | ||
| 573eeee | One of the previous Kings of the Enchanted Forest had been very fond of sweeping up and down staircases in a long velvet robe and his best crown, so he had added stairs wherever he thought there was room | Patricia C. Wrede | ||
| ab0885b | William!" I turned smiling. "Did they send you over?" William shook his head. "They're still arguing, and it's spreading. Your professor has opinions." I rolled my eyes, because it was William. "She's from Vinland. As far as she's concerned, wildlife is something you shoot first and study later. She's been complaining about the menagerie animals since the day she got to Mill City, especially this one." | Patricia C. Wrede | ||
| 6fcc3b8 | Men can be such provoking creatures. One would think the entire world and everything in it were made only for their enjoyment and approval. | Patricia C. Wrede | ||
| e47ea50 | Butt he isn't my lover, or my fiance, or my boyfriend or anything, and I refuse to be killed with him. | humor idiot-prince princess priorities | Patricia C. Wrede | |
| 40ef278 | Magic and music are brother and sister," he replied as Starbrow picked his way through the fog. "The bard's craft has always been half magic; in times past minstrels and magicians were often one and the same. Perhaps it is because we must sing so frequently of the old days and the magic of them that we do" | Patricia C. Wrede | ||
| be62c64 | You must have misunderstood," Keredwel said severely. "No one volunteers to be a dragon's princess. It isn't done." "Actually, Alianora's quite right," Cimorene said as she set the teacups in front of her visitors. "I did volunteer." She smiled sweetly at the thunderstruck expressions on the faces of the first two princesses. "I got tired of embroidery and etiquette." Keredwel" | Patricia C. Wrede | ||
| 9a3831e | Winter was usually the slow season at the menagerie, with so many of the animals hibernating, but that year I was busier than a hen with a double set of chicks. | Patricia C. Wrede | ||
| 1078c62 | I learned a lot about how to be frigidly polite and still leave somebody feeling like they'd been spanked. | Patricia C. Wrede | ||
| 7fe9dfa | It's a hard thing to risk what you know and are sure of, just for the possibility of something better. Even when it's a pretty strong possibility, and something that's a whole lot better. | risk | Patricia C. Wrede | |
| 90b57db | Even the smallest measure of time is greater than the greatest measure of space. Or is that a lie? Does it only seem so to us, because we can never get it back? | Paul Bowles | ||
| be5f87f | But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction. One could not even give up hope. The wind would blow, the sand would settle, and in some as yet unforeseen manner time would bring about a change which could only be terrifying, since it would not be a continuation of the present. | french-north-africa post-colonialism tags-existentialism travel-novel | Paul Bowles | |
| b4ea248 | Since Thami had the Arab's utter incomprehension of the meaning of pornography, he imagined that the police had placed the ban on obscene films because these infringed upon Christian doctrine at certain specific points, in which case any Christian might be expected to show interest, if only to disapprove. | pornography | Paul Bowles | |
| 2c4ae73 | he refused to consider the Moroccans' present culture, however decadent, an established fact, an existing thing. Instead, he seemed to believe that it was something accidentally left over from bygone centuries, now in a necessary state of transition, that the people needed temporary guidance in order to progress to some better condition. | transition | Paul Bowles | |
| 79045e0 | The key question, it seemed to him, was that of whether man was to obey Nature, or attempt to command her. | nature | Paul Bowles | |
| bd43f88 | But don't we all like to be overpowered, one time or another. | Paul Bowles | ||
| 2e6a2de | The difference was principally in the invisible places toward which their respective hearts were turned. They dreamed of Cairo with its autonomous government, its army, its newspapers and its cinema, while he, facing in the same direction, dreamed just a little beyond Cairo, across the Bhar El Hamar to Mecca. They thought in terms of grievances, censorship, petitions and reforms; he, like any good Moslem who knows only the tenets of his rel.. | makkah | Paul Bowles | |
| bc5870e | Scene VI (1940) It is our fault we love only the skull of Beauty Without knowing who she was, of what she died. We have the thief's guilt, but not his booty, The liar's spasm without ever having lied. The sick locust scrapes his injured song, His thorax only partially destroyed. Retching is prohibited. It's wrong. The murderer feels no hate he can avoid. Now flies bite worst where the skin is broken. Illness triumphs. Lesions. Soon tumors s.. | Paul Bowles | ||
| 73b9e3e | Pozhalui, ogromnoe razlichie sostoialo v tom, chto Zapad okazyvalsia gumannee: on predusmatrival dlia svoikh patsientov anesteziiu, v to vremia kak Vostok, prinimaia stradanie kak nechto samo soboi razumeeshchesia, ustremlialsia navtrechu griadushchemu koshmaru s predel'nym ravnodushiem k boli. | Paul Bowles | ||
| 4c481f6 | If she could only give up, relax, and live in the perfect knowledge that there was no hope. | Paul Bowles | ||
| dbb29cb | These empty days. How do you spend them? | Paul Bowles | ||
| 00a9cee | And yet always you feel as though you understood perfectly the people and why they do everything as they do.Still you are absolutely severed from them. | Paul Bowles | ||
| 9491b71 | his behavior there was a perfect balance between gentleness and violence that gave her particular delight. | Paul Bowles | ||
| 859176e | It was one of the charms of the International Zone that you could get anything you wanted if you paid for it. Do anything, too, for that matter; - there were no incorruptibles. It was only a question of price. | Paul Bowles | ||
| a03a624 | Still, he could not think of the mass of Moroccans without contempt. He had no patience with their ignorance and backwardness; if he damned the Europeans with one breath, he was bound to damn the Moroccans with the next. No one escaped but him, and that was because he hated himself most of all. | Paul Bowles | ||
| 3cef4e0 | What a wonderful thing to be an American!" he said impetuously. "Yes," said Dyar automatically, never having given much thought to what it would be like not to be an American. It seemed somehow the natural thing to be." | Paul Bowles | ||
| d889aa7 | The rest of the world was there for her to take at any moment she wished it, but she always rejected it in favour of her own familiar little cosmos. | Paul Bowles | ||
| 4d3e77d | Tangier is a one-horse town that happens to have its own government. | Paul Bowles | ||
| 7488758 | The Hindus are busy letting themselves be seen riding in Cadillacs instead of smearing themselves with sandalwood paste and bowing in front of Ganpati. The Moslems would rather miss evening prayer than the new Disney movie. The Buddhists think it's more important to take over in the name of Stalin and Progress than to meditate on the four basic sorrows. And we don't even have to mention Christianity or Judaism. | Paul Bowles | ||
| adad2ea | You want us all to be snake-charmers and scorpion-eaters," he raged, at one point in their conversation ... "Naturally," Eunice replied in her most provoking manner. "It would be far preferable to being a nation of tenth-rate pseudo-civilized rug-sellers." | Paul Bowles | ||
| d68598c | You know, everyone here's got some little peccadillo he's hoping to hide. | Paul Bowles | ||
| e492d87 | But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction. | Paul Bowles | ||
| b67bbbb | He still felt coreless - he was no one, and he was standing here in the middle of no country. The place was counterfeit, a waiting room between connections, a transition from one way of being to another, which for the moment was neither way, no way. | Paul Bowles | ||
| 0a5ba8c | Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there all the time, but which he had never isolated and identified. The thing was in him, he was a part of it, as was the man opposite him, and it was a part of them; it whispered to them that time was short, that the world they lived in was approaching its end, and beyond was unfathomable darkness. It was the premonition of inevitable defeat and annihi.. | islam muslims | Paul Bowles | |
| 306d2fa | the Istiqlal was powerful, which did not at all coincide with his conception of it, nor with the picture the organization painted of itself: a purely defensive group of selfless martyrs who were willing to brave the brutality of the French in order to bring hope to their suffering countrymen. | Paul Bowles | ||
| 7a8b49b | how could any young man merely sit back and wait for divine justice to take its course? It was asking the impossible. | Paul Bowles | ||
| e0ffcc3 | There could be nothing, he reflected, to equal a government which was simply the honest enforcement, by means of the sword, of the laws of Islam. | Paul Bowles |