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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 816d20f | I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what... I knew t.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 1ba9fa5 | Moss was almost certainly dead. That left the police. Or some agent of the Matacumbe Petroleum Group. Who must think that he thought that they thought that he thought they were very dumb. He thought about that. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 46befa2 | He went among vendors and beggars and wild street preachers haranguing a lost world with vigor unknown to the sane. Suttree admired them with their hot eyes and dogeared bibles, God's barkers gone forth into the world like the prophets of old. | street-preachers suttree | Cormac McCarthy | |
| a98dc1e | She watched him with her yellow eyes and in them was no despair but only that same reckonless deep of loneliness that cored the world to its heart. | wolf | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 00c394b | The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 18e4b54 | He told how he had seen the lies run down the lawyer's tongue. Vague but of a substance, they came down like mice and looked about a moment before scuttling off. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| aa88195 | Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 9f2ab76 | One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everbody is goin to get older with you. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| dbe1fbb | It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| d625a77 | In the night as he slept Boyd came to him and squatted by the deep embers of the fire as he'd done times by the hundreds and smiled his soft smile that was not quite cynical and he took off his hate and held it before him and looked down into it. In the dream he knew that Boyd was dead and that the subject of his being so must be approached with a certain caution for that which was circumspect in life must be doubly so in death and he'd no .. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 5b61f3d | Meanin I guess that he seen somebody in a place low enough to where he ought to be ready to take a pretty big step. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 426dae3 | I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be? You aint nothin. You speak truer than you know. But I will tell .. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 5ebd431 | Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgments ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall no.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| eec8727 | His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 2588a6b | It's always stimulating to visit new places, acquire fresh knowledge and expand your portfolio of nightmares. | Pete McCarthy | ||
| 5727c50 | The man had been the head of the postwar European operation called Aliyah Bet, the clandestine resettlement of the Jewish remnant of the Holocaust in Palestine. He had come to this position as a senior member of the Palmach, the fighting arm of the Haganah, which was the underground Jewish Army in Palestine, under the British Mandate. | David Mamet | ||
| bbf43b6 | The problem play is a melodrama cleansed of invention. | David Mamet | ||
| 6b1a045 | We long ago ceased expecting that a President speak his own words. We no longer expect him actually to know the answers to questions put to him. We have, in effect, come to elect newscasters-and by a similar process: not for their probity or for their intelligence, but for their "believability." "Hope" is a very different exhortation than, for example, save, work, cooperate, sacrifice, think. It means: "Hope for the best, in a process over .. | obama politics tyranny-of-cliches | David Mamet | |
| 5bcaed8 | Roma Lingk Roma ,i>is talking to him. * * * : . . . Eh? What I'm saying, what is our life? It's looking forward or it's looking back. And that's our life. That's Where is the ? And what is it that we're afraid of? Loss. What else? The | David Mamet | ||
| 28529d9 | I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from no place rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loosen: I walk on my way. | life purpose | Annie Dillard | |
| 67c56e3 | It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting. The woods are acres of sticks: I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall, the striptease is over; things stand mute and reveale.. | philosopher-s-stone philosophy reading soul spirit walking winter wonder writing | Annie Dillard | |
| af90b4d | Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back. | writing-process | Annie Dillard | |
| acf4b5c | Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? | Annie Dillard | ||
| 869f7b2 | The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 7897dae | When I was fifteen, I felt it coming; now I was sixteen, and it hit. My feet had imperceptibly been set on a new path...there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it, or about anything. I was going to hell on a handcart, that was all, and I knew it and everyone around me knew it, and there it was. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 694249e | The creator is not puritan. A creature need not work for a living; creatures may simply steal and suck and be blessed for all that with a share--an enormous share--of the sunlight and air. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 900bb3a | And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass;.. | beauty belief consciousness creation curiosity disbelief energy enoughness epiphany exploration exultant faith fate fearless fire free freedom gaps god grace growth hallelujah humility illumination intricacy joy joyful joyfulness life-force light living-in-the-present-moment mindfulness multiplicity mystery nature philosopher-s-stone philosophy poem poet poetry power praise prayer prayers praying religion religious-diversity science seeing seeking soul spirit stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it tolerance walking watching wonder | Annie Dillard | |
| af6e6af | The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. | Annie Dillard | ||
| eb9e0b7 | No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. If the mockingbird were chirping to give us the long-sought formula for a unified field theory, the point would be only slightly less irrelevant. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? | Annie Dillard | ||
| 6cc1d2d | The thousands of wealth have fallen with wonders, said Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov. Do you find this unclear? It certainly sounds like the sort of thing thousands of wealth do. They fall. Does anyone know what the rabbi meant by wonders? | Annie Dillard | ||
| c246e89 | There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading--that is a good life. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 7fedebf | In Pliny I read about the invention of clay modeling. A Sicyonian potter came to Corinth. There his daughter fell in love with a young man who had to make frequent long journeys away from the city. When he sat with her at home, she used to trace the outline of his shadow that a candle's light cast on the wall. Then, in his absence she worked over the profile, deepening, so that she might enjoy his face, and remember. One day the father slap.. | fairy-tale folk-tale legend muslim myth shadow story tale | Annie Dillard | |
| 3c01487 | Goethe's Faust risks all if he should cry to the moment, the 'augenblick', "Verweile doch!" "Last forever!" Who hasn't prayed that prayer? But the 'augenblick' isn't going to 'verweile'. You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless." | Annie Dillard | ||
| 469c7fb | Chloroplasts bear chlorophyll; they give the green world its color, and they carry out the business of photosynthesis. Around the inside perimeter of each gigantic cell trailed a continuous loop of these bright green dots. They spun . . . they pulsed, pressed, and thronged . . . they shone, they swarmed in ever-shifting files around and around the edge of the cell; they wandered, they charged, they milled, raced . . . they flowed and troope.. | biochemistry biology chemistry fact know lifeblood nature page-127-8 plant science | Annie Dillard | |
| b8e2ac6 | An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind. Even ten square miles of wheat gladdens the hearts of most . . . No, in the plant world, and especially among the flowering plants, fecundity is not an assault on human values. Plants are not our competitors; they are our prey and our nesting materials. We are no more distressed at their proliferation than an owl is at a population explosion among field mice . . . but in the an.. | gross human life nature page-164 perspective plants | Annie Dillard | |
| f869b92 | Their song reminds me of a child's neighborhood rallying cry--ee-ock-ee--with a heartfelt warble at the end. But it is their call that is especially endearing. The towhee has the brass and grace to call, simply and clearly, "tweet". I know of no other bird that stoops to literal tweeting." | birdcall birdsong forest listen natural-world nature page-251-2 pride stereotype unique | Annie Dillard | |
| 004db93 | Evidently, a given object took no particular amount of time to draw; instead the artist took the time, or didn't take it, at pleasure. And,similarly, things themselves possessed no fixed and intrinsic amount of interest; instead things were interesting as long as you had attention to give them. How long does it take to draw a baseball mitt? As much time as you care to give it. Not an infinite amount of time, but more time than you first ima.. | drawing interest interesting | Annie Dillard | |
| cc60924 | I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. | wonder | Annie Dillard | |
| 22e0ef0 | What can an artist use but materials, such as they are? What can he light but the short string of his gut, and when that's burnt out, any muck ready to hand? | Annie Dillard | ||
| d6062ca | It was one of those jolly, peaceful mornings that make a chappie wish he'd got a soul or something | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| cc6c1c6 | Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil.... Pretty soon all twenty of us - our class - would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I'd been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of .. | awakening college poetry | Annie Dillard | |
| d058023 | A great physicist taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He published many important books and papers. Often he had an idea in the middle of the night. He rose from his bed, took a shower, washed his hair, and shaved. He dressed completely, in a clean shirt, in polished shoes, a jacket and tie. Then he sat at his desk and wrote down his idea. A friend of mine asked him why he put himself through all that rigmarole. 'Why,' he s.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 5056b39 | Dedicate (donate, give all) your life to something larger than yourself and pleasure - to the largest thing you can: to God, to relieving suffering, to contributing to knowledge, to adding to literature, or something else. Happiness lies this way, and it beats pleasure hollow. | Annie Dillard | ||
| d44f5b3 | Van Gogh is utterly dead; the world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty. | Annie Dillard |