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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1e83500 | The truck looked just like a Civil War truck if they'd had trucks back in those times. But the truck ran, even though it didn't have a gas tank. There was an empty fifty-gallon gasoline drum on the bed of the truck with a smaller gasoline can on top of it, and there was a syphon leading from that can to the fuel line. It worked like this. Lee Mellon drove and I stayed on the back of the truck and made sure everything went all right with the.. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| e6b5b9c | I guess some people lived like Reader's Digest, but I hadn't met any and at that time it seemed doubtful that I ever would | Richard Brautigan | ||
| 648a90a | The girl was very pretty and her body was like a clear mountain river of skin and muscle flowing over rocks of bone and hidden nerves. | muscle pretty-girls river skin | Richard Brautigan | |
| 83898bc | He looked as if he'd got a lot of pleasure out of going ten rounds with your grandmother and making sure she went the whole distance. | noir | Richard Brautigan | |
| 41d33bc | Congratulations," I said. "It's so wonderful to write a book." "I walked all the way here," she said. "I started at midnight. I would have gotten here sooner if I weren't so old." "Where do you live?" I said. "The Kit Carson Hotel," she said. "And I've written a book." Then she handed it proudly to me as if it were the most precious thing in the world. And it was. It was a loose-leaf notebook of the type that you find everywhere in America... | Richard Brautigan | ||
| 936eca7 | Vida was sound asleep when I went back to my room. I turned on the light and it woke her up. She was blinking and her face had that soft marble quality to it that beautiful women have when they are suddenly awakened and are not quite ready for it yet. "What's happening?" she said. "It's another book," she replied, answering her own question. "Yes," I said. "What's it about?" she said automatically like a gentle human phonograph. "It's about.. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| 7cf7e8a | The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| e0adac8 | You're a romantic. What's romantic about a guy wanting to go somewhere and actually getting there? | Anne Fadiman | ||
| 194a0fc | And there lay the essential differences between reading and rereading, acts that Henry and I were preforming simultaneously. The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about the latter was that it the former: even while, as wi.. | rereading | Anne Fadiman | |
| f133fd7 | It was also true that if the Lees were still in Laos, Lia would probably have died before she was out of infancy, from a prolonged bout of untreated status epilepticus. American medicine had both preserved her life and compromised it. I was unsure which had hurt her family more. | Anne Fadiman | ||
| 622c359 | I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishman admire heroic failure. Given a choice -- at least in my reading -- I'm un-American enough to take quixotry over efficiency any day. | Anne Fadiman | ||
| 8c1e3f4 | After they returned home, a performed the ritual chant that accompanied his journey to the realm of the unseen. During the chant, the cow's severed head was sitting on the Lees' front stoop, welcoming Lia's soul. When I asked the Lees whether any American passersby might have been surprised by this sight, Foua said, "No, I don't think they would be surprised, because it wasn't the whole cow on the doorstep, only the head." Nao Kao added, .. | Anne Fadiman | ||
| 647ce8a | It is worth noting that the standard American tests of success that they have flunked are almost exclusively economic. If one applied social indices instead--such as rates of crime, child abuse, illegitimacy, and divorce--the Hmong would probably score better than most refugee groups (and also better than most Americans), but those are not the forms of success to which our culture assigns its highest priority. | Anne Fadiman | ||
| f2babd6 | During the late 1910s and early '20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory "Americanization" classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was "I am a good American." | Anne Fadiman | ||
| 425aaea | A sponsoring pastor in Minnesota told a local newspaper, "It would be wicked to just bring them over and feed and clothe them and let them go to hell. The God who made us wants them to be converted. If anyone thinks that a gospel-preaching church would bring them over and not tell them about the Lord, they're out of their mind." | Anne Fadiman | ||
| 3381527 | When they returned, they discovered that their entire library had been reorganized by color and size. Shortly thereafter, the decorator met with a fatal automobile accident. I confess that when this story was told, everyone.around the dinner table concurred that justice had been served.) | Anne Fadiman | ||
| fb213d5 | One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you'd opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are 'pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, .. | Anne Fadiman | ||
| 204d6c8 | If you're independent-minded in school, you're probably going to get in trouble very early on. That's not the trait that's being preferred or cultivated. | education | Noam Chomsky | |
| 6f20fc3 | Our philosophy is to rob everything as much as possible and forget about tomorrow...But it makes a certain sense if the sole human value is making as much wealth as you can tomorrow. You don't care what happens down the road and you don't care what happens to anybody else. It makes perfect sense. If it destroys the world, well, it's not my problem. | chomsky climate-change republicans | Noam Chomsky | |
| db24c3d | In fact, most of what they're calling crime is a kid caught with a joint in his pocket. Why do people think of that as the problem? | war-on-drugs | Noam Chomsky | |
| 8ae7eee | If it occurred to Thursey that there was really no relationship between marrying your own true love and having a fortune showered upon you, she didn't bother about that. In a story you might as well have both, it was make-believe anyway. But if I had to choose, she thought. If I had to choose . . . she stared at her ragged dress hanging from its hook, and her ragged mended sandals on the shelf, then put the books away. How would I ever have.. | fairytale | Shirley Rousseau Murphy | |
| 506a25f | The swamp roses, Gillie. It was the mare found them. She--if she hadn't run off--it was almost as if she meant me to see them." "Are you saying? . . ." "I don't know what I'm saying. Yes," she cried, a gay silliness taking her. Drunk with the music and the dancing, drunk with his closeness, she laughed up at him. It was just as in the stories, a kind of magic just like . . ." and then she stared at him, confounded. "Just like what?" "But .. | fairytale | Shirley Rousseau Murphy | |
| 3e3837a | Khorata obichat da im se kazva kakvo da praviat, no oshche poveche obichat da se boriat da ne v'rshat tova, koeto im e kazano da napraviat, i taka namrazvat choveka, koito im go e kazal | Carlos Castaneda | ||
| 870b4e6 | The aim of sorcerers is to reach a state of total awareness in order to experience all the possibilities of perception available to man. This state of awareness even implies an alternative way of dying. | Carlos Castaneda | ||
| 5a621e8 | For of this world one never sees enough and to dine in harmony with nature is one of the gentlest and loveliest things we can do. | James A. Michener | ||
| f96fd90 | Always remember, John, that you and I live on a minor planet attached to a minor star, at the far edge of a minor galaxy. We live here briefly, and when we're gone, we're forgotten. And one day the galaxies will be gone, too. The only morality that makes sense is to do something useful with the brief time we're allotted. | James A. Michener | ||
| fde2cf6 | Simple. Judaism had its day, and if the Jews had been smart, when Christianity came along they'd have joined up. Christianity has had its day, and if you were intelligent you'd both join the newest religion. Islam!" He bowed low and said, "Soon all Africa will be Islamic. And all Black America. I see India giving up Hinduism while Burma and Thailand surrender Buddhism. Gentlemen, I represent the religion of the future. I offer you salvation.. | James A. Michener | ||
| ff04a92 | The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants. | writting | James A. Michener | |
| 1fbdcd9 | MOST NATIONS HAVE AT ONE TIME OR OTHER BOTH condoned and practiced slavery. Greece and Rome founded their societies on it. India and Japan handled this state of affairs by creating untouchable classes which continue to this day. Arabia clung to formal slavery longer than most, while black countries like Ethiopia and Burundi were notorious. In the New World each colonial power devised a system precisely suited to its peculiar needs and in co.. | James A. Michener | ||
| c5ccbcc | At last he found the branching stream that flowed down from Blue Valley, and now he was guided by the little stone beaver that climbed the cliff. | James A. Michener | ||
| aebdbfc | Afghanistan, one of the most inconspicuous nations on earth. In 1946 it was just emerging from the bronze age, a land incredibly old, incredibly tied to an ancient past. At the embassy we used to say, "Kabul today shows what Palestine was like at the time of Jesus." | James A. Michener | ||
| 704ad88 | Don't put off what you can do today because if you enjoy it today you can do it again tomorrow. | James A. Michener | ||
| 7f0b2f3 | For this is the journey that men make: to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much what else they find. Money, position, fame, many loves, revenge are all of little consequence, and when the tickets are collected at the end of the ride they are tossed into the bin marked FAILURE. But if a man happens to find himself--if he knows what he can be depended upon to do, the limits of his courage, the positions from which he w.. | James A. Michener | ||
| 5169524 | I nostri animali hanno vite molto brevi da trascorrere con noi, e ne trascorrono la maggior parte ad aspettare che torniamo a casa ogni giorno. | John Grogan | ||
| b822c47 | Warriors are incapable of feeling compassion because they no longer feel sorry for themselves. Without the driving force of self-pity, compassion is meaningless. | Carlos Castaneda | ||
| 8f46e68 | Okhotnik znaet, chto on zamanit dich' v svoi lovushki eshche i eshche, poetomu on ne trevozhitsia. Trevozhit'sia, znachit stanovit'sia dostupnym, bezrassudno dostupnym. I kak tol'ko ty nachinaesh' trevozhit'sia, ty v otchaianii tsepliaesh'sia za chto-nibud'. A kak tol'ko ty za chto-nibud' utsepilsia, to ty uzhe obiazan ustat' ili utopit' togo ili to, za chto ty tsepliaesh'sia. | Carlos Castaneda | ||
| 29d1aa8 | Upon learning to see a man becomes everything by becoming nothing. He, | Carlos Castaneda | ||
| 1bce6de | We gaze up at the same stars, the sky covers us all, the same universe encompasses us. What does it matter what practical system we adopt in our search for the truth? Not by one avenue only can we arrive at so tremendous a secret. --SYMMACHUS, 384 C.E. | Margot Adler | ||
| 658a25d | Playlist 1. Wild Honey - U2 2. Like Real People Do - Hozier 3. Colorblind - Counting Crows 4. Oh Darling - Gossling 5. Breathing Underwater - Metric 6. Let It Die - Foo Fighters 7. I'm Sorry - Imagine Dragons 8. Fools - Troye Sivan 9. Don't Mess Me Around - Clare Maguire 10. Heal - Tom Odell 11. Unbreakable - Jamie Scott 12. I'm The Man Who Loves You - Wilco 13. Creep - Radiohead | B.L. Berry | ||
| 9a051b0 | Matasaip who | Scott O'Dell | ||
| d60e907 | It was a hard task catching fish every day, especially if the wind was blowing and the waves were high. Once when I could catch only two and dropped them into the pool, Mon-a-nee ate them quickly and waited for more. When he found that was all I had he swam around in circles, looking at me reproachfully. The | Scott O'Dell | ||
| e53f046 | For a long time I called it Otter as I had called Rontu, Dog. Then I decided to give the otter a name. The name was Mon-a-nee, which means Little Boy with Large Eyes. | Scott O'Dell | ||
| a9a3f84 | a league, | Scott O'Dell | ||
| 715c9b5 | He was familiar enough with pleasure to know it might become jaded or reluctant; but joy was literally foreign to him, a word he would never easily pronounce, an exhilaration that had some other reckless nationality. For this reason, Caro's wholeness in love, her happiness in it, made her exotic. | love pleasure | Shirley Hazzard |