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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 721d1ac | Since time is no longer cyclical but one-way and irreversible, personal history is now possible and an individual life can have value. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| b6a141b | What will be lost, and what saved, of our civilization probably lies beyond our powers to decide. No human group has ever figured out how to design its future. That future may be germinating today not in a boardroom in London or an office in Washington or a bank in Tokyo, but in some antic outpost or other -- a kindly British orphanage in the grim foothills of Peru, a house for the dying in a back street of Calcutta run by a fiercely single.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 94d26e8 | Other generations perceived a plethora of swords hanging over their heads. But generally what they feared were shadows, for neither they nor their gods could actually end the world. Fate might reap an individual, a family, or even a whole nation, but not the entire world. Not then. We, in the mid-twenty-first century, are the first to look up at a sword we ourselves forged, and know, with absolute certainty, it is real... | David Brin | ||
| 4e6b7c4 | It was called 'the Big Lie' technique, Johnny. Just sound like you know what you're talking about--as if you're citing real facts. Talk very fast. Weave your lies into the shape of a conspiracy theory and repeat your assertions over and over again. Those who want an excuse to hate or blame--those with big but weak egos--will leap at a simple, neat explanation for the way the world is. Those types will never call you on the facts. | David Brin | ||
| b09ba68 | Alex felt the words wash over him. He had the strange fantasy the things were seeking places within him to lay their young. | words | David Brin | |
| 010d756 | Deep down, most humans prefer living out their lives surrounded by comfortable certainties, guided by warm myths and metaphors, knowing that they'll understand their children, and their children will understand them. | David Brin | ||
| 081f7a8 | Snow and soot covered the ancient tree's broken branches and seared bark. It wasn't dead, not quite yet. Here and there tiny shoots of green struggled to emerge, but they weren't doing well. The end was near. A shadow loomed, and a creature settled into the drifts, and old, wounded thing of the skies, as near death as the tree. Pinions drooping, it laboriously began building a nest--a place of dying. Stick by stick, it pecked among the ru.. | David Brin | ||
| c946ab9 | Every time humans discovered a new resource, or technique for using mass and energy, one side effect has always been pollution. Why should the information age be any different from those of coal, petroleum, or the atom? | David Brin | ||
| 3bb65e0 | He approached the great glass barrier dividing the room, and the speaker at the end of the table. "Cyclops?" he whispered, stepping closer, clearing his tight throat, "Cyclops, it's me, Gordon." The glow in the pearly lens was subdued. But the row of little lights still flashed--a complex pattern that repeated over and over like an urgent message from a distant ship in some lost code--ever, hypnotically, the same. Gordon felt a frantic dr.. | David Brin | ||
| 2618113 | Where is it written that one should only care about big things? I fought for big things, long ago... for issues, principles, a country. Where are all of them now?... I found out something, you know. I discovered that the big things don't love you back. They take and take, and never give in return. They'll drain your blood, your soul, if you let them, and never let go. | David Brin | ||
| 96efb5f | Today you meet more folks than your ancestors could imagine ... some in passing. Some for a crucial instant. Others for tangled decades. Biology can't keep up. Our overworked temporal lobes cannot "know" the face-name-reps of ten billion people!" | David Brin | ||
| 8935ed7 | The propensity of Earthlings to get into trouble, and to learn thereby, was the reason my owners agreed to this mad venture - although no one expected such a chain of unusual calamities as befell this ship. Your talents were underrated. | humanity humor | David Brin | |
| 8165262 | But there is one more reason to protect other species. One seldom if ever mentioned. Perhaps we are the first to talk and think and build and aspire, but we may not be the last. Others may follow us in this adventure. Some day we may be judged by just how well we served, when alone we were Earth's caretakers. | David Brin | ||
| a1cee09 | Even in dying, a Thennanin ship was reputed to be not worth putting out of its misery. In battle they were slow, unmaneuverable--and as hard to disable permanently as a cockroach. | irony life simile space | David Brin | |
| af8e4d3 | Does the universe hate us? How many pitfalls lie ahead, waiting to shred our conceited molecule-clusters back into unthinking dust? Shall we count them? | David Brin | ||
| 0f331f1 | Did he kill Grandmother?" I whispered. "Don't be ridiculous," Erra's voice said in my ear. "She is already dead. Besides, your grandmother was the Shield of Assyria. Even if he committed every drop of his power to it, he couldn't stomp her out of existence. She's buying us time. He's got a busy night ahead of him." | Ilona Andrews | ||
| 7b4adeb | People never wanted to tell me their life stories. They usually scooted out of my way and said things like, "Take whatever you want; just go." | Ilona Andrews | ||
| 032e224 | He would soak in that silver glow until it shone from his eyes and sing a long song about hunting and running through the dark wood in the middle of the night. | Ilona Andrews | ||
| 1efd568 | This is shaping up even worse than you anticipated. Still, you feel a measure of detachment, as if you had suffered everything already and this were just a flashback. You wish that you had paid more attention when a woman you met at Heartbreak told you about Zen meditation. Think of all of this as an illusion. She can't hurt you. Nothing can hurt the samurai wh enters combat fully resolved to die. You have already accepted the inevitability.. | losing-a-job samurai zen | Jay McInerney | |
| 09f992b | The girl with the shaved head has a scar tattooed on her scalp. It looks like a long, sutured gash. You tell her it is very realistic. She takes this as a compliment and thanks you. You meant as opposed to romantic. "I could use one of those right over my heart," you say." | tattoo | Jay McInerney | |
| fe9da9a | Did you know that ninety percent of your average household dust is composed of human epidermal matter? That's skin, to you." Perhaps this explains your sense of Amanda's omnipresence. She has left her skin behind." | melancholy | Jay McInerney | |
| f8a1f31 | Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary. | Colum McCann | ||
| b6e9eb1 | At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he'd been sure that one day he'd be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you'd make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little nice and you make it your own. | Colum McCann | ||
| 24e892c | It was the dilemma of the watchers: they didn't want to wait around for nothing at all, some idiot standing on the precipice of the towers, but they didn't want to miss the moment either, if he slipped, or got arrested, or dove, arms stretched. | Colum McCann | ||
| 68e23eb | We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant. | Colum McCann | ||
| 98bc81c | Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes. Corrigan stopped him as he made his way up the stairs. 'Where d'you think you're going?'Our father gripped the bannister. His hands were liverspotted and I could see him trembling in his pause. 'That's not your room,' sad Corrigan. Our father tottered on the stairs. He took another step up. 'Don't,' said my .. | inspiration inspirational let-the-great-world-spin | Colum McCann | |
| 2d9050a | We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing mobius strip, until we come home, eventually, to ourselves. | family | Colum McCann | |
| 48d60e8 | things just happen. It was a pathetic logic, but it was, at its core, true. Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of the ashes of chance. | Colum McCann | ||
| 55c1a3f | There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water--it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea. | family | Colum McCann | |
| c873799 | Once we had filled each other with desire, not remembrance. | Colum McCann | ||
| cf2fc43 | I can still to this day hear my folks whispering and laughing before they went off to sleep: perhaps it is all I want to recall, perhaps our stories should stop on a dime, maybe things could begin and end right there, at the moment of laughter, but things don't begin and end really, I suppose; they just keep on going. | Colum McCann | ||
| 3b1f704 | It (NY) was like the city that Lot left behind and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey. | Colum McCann | ||
| 08fb1a8 | The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American slavery in place. Sometimes it withered him just to keep his mind steady. He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction. And the recognition of complexity was to be balanced against the need for simplicity. He was still a slave. Fugitive. If he returned to Boston he could be kidnapped at any time, take.. | ireland slavery | Colum McCann | |
| c223ba6 | He was not beyond knowing that they thought him - when he first arrived - a quiet patsy. The Arab. The Yank. The Judge. Your Harness. Mohammed. Mahatma. Ahab. Iron Pants. He wasn't interested in playing himself Irish or Lebanese. Not for him the simple ancestral heart: he wanted to make himself the smallest continent possible. | Colum McCann | ||
| 3d4979f | One goes up in a plane knowing, sometimes, that not all of you is going to come down. | Colum McCann | ||
| b7d5ea2 | She would want, instead, to recall him in the air, between layers of cloud. To give him back that ancient dignity. | Colum McCann | ||
| f690ead | He caught a glimpse in the mirror the other day, and how in tarnation did I acquire the face of my father's father? | Colum McCann | ||
| 651707c | myn bhm w rzsh lHZt Hyt rbThy wjwd drd, hrchh lHZt mbhmtr shwnd, bhyshn bltr myrwd. | Colum McCann | ||
| a30e868 | Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice. There are years accumulated in a sound. | Colum McCann | ||
| 92773cb | So you want to be a dancer? I asked. I want to dance better than I already do, he said. | Colum McCann | ||
| 45736f7 | The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before. | Colum McCann | ||
| 70755c6 | They say ol' man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He's the sort of man who knows the only things worth doing are the things might break your heart. | risk | Colum McCann | |
| 7817e68 | One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west. | Colum McCann | ||
| 5beed92 | The worst burden in life is what others know about us. But maybe there is one burden even worse than this. It happens when they don't know about us, it is what they think about us when, in silence, they force us to be what they expect us to be. Even worse is how we become it and I, chonorroeja, have become it. | Colum McCann |