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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ccfcbfe | Whereas some people's attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn't, Mrs. Whiting's implied that she knew everything you didn't. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her duty to bring you at least partially up to speed. | Richard Russo | ||
| ab8294f | probably horse doo had a name in french also, but that didn't mean god intended for you to eat it. | Richard Russo | ||
| 59a2be0 | Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart? | Richard Russo | ||
| 6dda29d | Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man. | sports | Richard Russo | |
| 839bfe3 | She understood perfectly that when the object of anticipation becomes paramount, trouble begins to lurk like a panther. | love panthers trouble | Richard Ford | |
| 3acc554 | It would be easy to mistake Daley's tolerance of the Outfit for simple corruption. However, the more accurate assessment appears to be that Daley understood better than most that the sooner the hoods were promoted up the social ladder, the sooner they would disappear into the landscape much the same way as the Founding Fathers who institutionalized the enslavement from the African subcontinent, or the westward explorers who orchestrated the.. | Gus Russo | ||
| 365a2c9 | Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing's worth doing unless it has the potential of to fuck up your whole life | Richard Ford | ||
| 2d67074 | First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. | opening-line-of-the-novel opening-lines | Richard Ford | |
| 90260f0 | to sit in the empty stands of a Florida ball park and hear the sounds of glove leather and chatter; | Richard Ford | ||
| c18e656 | And there is no nicer time on earth than now--everything in the offing, nothing gone wrong, all potential--the very polar opposite of how I felt driving home the other night, when everything was on the skids and nothing within a thousand kilometers worth anticipating. This is really all life is worth, when you come down to it. | Richard Ford | ||
| fdbf22b | No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings. | Richard Ford | ||
| 4389ee0 | Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her--the last part was a complete fiction, which made all the rest a joke. | Richard Ford | ||
| 26ebcfd | Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due. | Richard Ford | ||
| df01449 | It's odd how our fears, the ones we didn't know we had, alter our sight line and make us see things that never were. | Richard Ford | ||
| c720075 | For writers - even sportswriters - bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more familiar. | writers writing | Richard Ford | |
| 8e6559f | For now let me say only this: if sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined. | Richard Ford | ||
| fa691cb | Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world thinking about you. Or worse. That one has quit because of some bone-headedness on your part. It is like looking out an airplane window and finding the earth has disappeared. No loneliness can compete with that. | Richard Ford | ||
| 5562f75 | I lie back on the bed and listen to the sounds of Easter--the optimist's holiday, the holiday with the suburbs in mind, the day for all those with sunny dispositions and a staunch belief in the middle view, a tiny, tidy holiday to remember sweetly and indistinctly as the very same day through all your life. | Richard Ford | ||
| de802d2 | sharing the future with someone would certainly mean that repetitions had to be managed more skillfully. | Richard Ford | ||
| 893059c | when you're young your opponent is the future; but when you're not young, your opponent's the past and everything you've done in it and the problem of getting away from it. | Richard Ford | ||
| fba2d5d | It's shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible. | Richard Ford | ||
| 6881014 | We Communists say, if it has no practically measurable effect, it's not people's art! | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 1fec0c8 | I've come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 7c4db42 | Best listened to in a windowless room, better than best in an airless room--correctly speaking, a bunker sealed forever and enwrapped in tree-roots--the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110) is the living corpse of music, perfect in its horror. Call it the simultaneous asphyxiation and bleeding of melody. The soul strips itself of life in a dusty room. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| ce5f11c | A treble clef, for example, resembles a Muscovite or Leningrader in a bulky hooded parka. A bass clef bends as simply and painfully as a silhouetted widow in Leningrad drawing water from the whiteness of a frozen canal. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 1e2008a | As he breathed the black and grey air into his body he no longer thought of anything as lovely, the way the retiring trees of his boyhood had been; for everything was made up of dirt-clods; and you do construct a mountain from molehills or other over-codified facts. If only the cities had been dynamited before it was too late for him! -- That Pol Pot sure had the right idea, blowing down those ticky-tacky rice paper offices and illuminating.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 663190f | There was the biography of a Norwegian resistance fighter who swam through chilly oceans and got gangrene and wandered through I think it might have been Finland or Lapland in a sweet short summer and everyone took him in and the dark Finnish women made him tea with honey in it on late afternoons and it was beautiful but also horribly sad because the book was only half over and you knew that bad things were going to happen. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| fa8a75f | But, as I have said, the bugs had no interest in getting us...and no great curiosity or enthusiasm about us as such; from the cowardly cockroaches to the blind stolid ants they wanted only to be left alone to eat and breed and eat and breed, just like us. | perspective | William T. Vollmann | |
| c823247 | Her breasts were big and sad like owls' eyes. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 2dc17ee | There was no one as good as he at using the ovens of logic to bake agreeable results. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 1462a23 | As surely as the town of Rochelle is Protestant I can see you now becoming impatient. The covers of my book are between your relentless palms. A single hint of insolence on this page, the faintest shine of gloating over all these delays, and you will slam the volume shut - don't claim I can't predict it! | William T. Vollmann | ||
| f977cfc | Life is an extended camping trip. With a leaky, inferior tent one runs no more risk of rain than anyone else; but if it does rain, the person in the cheap tent chances soaking in his sleeping bag, and possibly dying of hypothermia. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| ea636bb | Thus the protagonist of this Dream of mine is ooze, here and forever call'd | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 96745ac | Women are sewers just like we are, the once pure boys recognize with a start; it's raw sewage that produces fertilization; once you understand that you can be fond of yourself and members of the Opposite Sex, but you can never quite see them again as ice cream bars. I, the author, don't really mind this, for I love all girls and love to hug and kiss them and cheer them up when they cry, and have them perform all the same services for me; an.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 2818a97 | But the remarkable thing about the beetles was their sensitivity to all the grammar and directives and slogans and even unstated desires of the ant world, which they learned to manipulate. They first memorized the proper antenna-vibration and foreleg-tap which the ants themselves used to request food. The poor workers, busy going here and there and back again all day and never getting a chance to think, automatically assumed that these fear.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 6511c94 | Looking at her, thinking of her transported him, which struck him as vile because now it was hard for him not to despise the icy serenity of their earlier relations. And he knew that he should not love her, for she had been someone else whom he was supposed to love differently. -What is loneliness? Does the lonely space between two rocks vanish when spanned by a spider web? | love | William T. Vollmann | |
| 4c7f013 | Evil is one thing. Evil's only subjective. Illegal is another. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 4869eaa | Mr. Norris knew this hoard to be worth much less than the tall man believed, but as long he believed it, he'd stay honest. Thus ran Mr. Norris's theory, which was not only philosophical but also empirically scientific in the best sense. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| c857903 | Nothing, brother. Everything's about nothing. You know that, but you prefer to pretend otherwise. We both do. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 47104b7 | What do you get when you cross a nymphomaniac with a kleptomaniac? A rapist, said Tyler. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| bcde586 | So you cheat on your wife and you want me to give you a gold star for it, said Domino. Well, mister, I pity your wife and I don't give a fuck about you. Now I've got to go outside for a minute and see a man about a dog. When I come back, if you want a flatback or a blow, you just lay down your money in my hand. But no more of your hypocritical bullshit. Who the hell do you think you are? You're just a kid in the candy store that can't decid.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 37215ee | Perhaps the sallow drunk should have taken the hint. But he needed to feel confident in his life. It was only when he drank that he felt he could be anything. He felt this precisely because his perceptions had grown so constricted that he could no longer be cognizant of his limitations, like those old people who when sight, hearing and memory slip away make unflattering remarks in loud voices about others who are still present but out of th.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 1ba885b | Even Tyler would be infected by this surprising outbreak of sadness, which he certainly would not have felt had he simply never happened to see Lily again. This taught him the vanity and egotism of grief, which so often compromises nothing except childish rebellion against the closing off of possibilities. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 22e4b50 | Todos os rios correm para o mar, e o mar nao se enche. | Hilary Mantel |