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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2dd48df | the beaches. In literally hundreds of instances, a vessel's ignorance of her longitude led swiftly to her destruction. Launched on a mix of bravery and greed, the sea captains of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries relied on "dead reckoning" to gauge their distance east or west of home port. The captain would throw a log overboard and observe how quickly the ship receded from this temporary guidepost. He noted the crude spee.. | Dava Sobel | ||
| f72ff83 | As earnestly as men may seek to understand the workings of the universe, they must remember that God is not hampered by their limited logic that all observed effects may have been wrought by Him in any one of an infinite number of omnipotent ways, and these ways, and these must ever evade mortal comprehension. | Dava Sobel | ||
| efd1dbb | And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to diffidence, so that when asked how sounds were created he used to answer tolerantly that although he knew a few ways, he was sure that many more existed which were not only unknown but unimaginable. | Dava Sobel | ||
| 98b33fe | Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. | James Salter | ||
| 727f12f | Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive. Accepting this rule gives me a funny flicker of peace. | Ariel Levy | ||
| 756e07c | dont wish upon a star reach for one | Catherine Marshall | ||
| c099d84 | I understood that the reason we have to accept other people is simply because God receives us just the way we are. Yes, all of us to the last person... I had never thought it should be that way. Had I been doing it, I would have arranged gradations of acceptability according to how bad or how good we were--or how hard we have tried. But... the Power who broods over our aching world has quite a different idea: He persists in receiving us and.. | Catherine Marshall | ||
| a7ffadc | His theology is mostly focused on helping people with their physical needs. All that's important, of course, but he'll hit a dry spell someday and need something more than social causes to keep him going." ... "if you're serious about writing on the deeper life, you simply cannot ignore the centrality of Jesus and the Holy Spirit." | Catherine Marshall | ||
| 65ecf2e | For years I lived in inner terror that I was, at heart, a weak and indecisive man. I think it was this fear that made me sick. Dean showed me how foolish all this was. 'Face the truth, Ken,' he told me. 'You are weak. All of us are. Come to terms with it.' "But then he pointed out I didn't have to stay this way, that God was certainly not weak. Dean has helped me understand that if I have the Spirit of God within me, then His strength would.. | Catherine Marshall | ||
| 55f99c2 | Does this smack of magic to you? Because allow me to inform you, my handsome young prince, that this be not enchantment - it be work!" With that I hurled my slipper at him, not caring if I caused his decapitation. (I did not.) Marshalling what little dignity I yet possessed, I stomped down the corridor - challenging indeed with one shoe - and around the corner." | Catherine Gilbert Murdock | ||
| 87d67e9 | Gabe, did you pray?' 'Sort of.' 'Me too. Do you believe?' 'No. Do you?' 'No.' 'I don't believe,' said Gabriel, 'But I have faith, if you know what I mean.' 'What in?' 'I don't know, life, carrying on, I suppose.' 'Yes. | faith god in-the-kitchen life monica-ali | Monica Ali | |
| 3599ff7 | A pair of schoolchildren,pale as rice and loud as peacocks,cut over the road and hurtled down a side street,galloping with joy or else with terror (p. 55). | Monica Ali | ||
| 093bac3 | Suddenly, she was gripped by the idea that if she changed her clothes her entire life would change as well. | Monica Ali | ||
| ef239bc | Sinking, sinking, drinking water. When everyone in the village was fasting a long month,when not a grain, not a drop of water passed between the parched lips of any able-bodied man, woman or child over the age of ten, when the sun was hotter than the cooking pot and dusk was just a febrile wish, the hypocrite went down to the pond to duck his head, to dive and sink, to drink and sink a little lower. p. 105 | Monica Ali | ||
| c1e2530 | Brian Wilson went to bed for three years. Jean-Michel Basquiat would spend all day in bed. Monica Ali, Charles Bukowski, Marcel Proust, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tracey Emin, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sitwell, Frida Kahlo, William Wordsworth, Rene Descartes, Mark Twain, Henri Matisse, Kathy Acker, Derek Jarman and Patti Smith all worked or work from bed and they're productive people. (Am I protesting too much?) Humans take to their beds for .. | Viv Albertine | ||
| e892092 | I wanted what she [her mother] had wanted, what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safely and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can't have it all. | Ariel Levy | ||
| aec2ca4 | If half this country feels so threatened by two people of the same gender being in love and having sex (and, incidentally, enjoying equal protection under the law), that they turn their attention--during wartime--to blocking rights already denied to homosexuals, then all the cardio striptease classes in the world aren't going to render us sexually liberated. | Ariel Levy | ||
| 41f6a60 | Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable. | Ariel Levy | ||
| ce99d8a | nature starts many more projects than she can ever finish. | Ariel Levy | ||
| 68124ee | Pregnancy--we were taught, if we were privileged--was something awful that went with sex, just as AIDS and genital warts went with sex, unless you used condoms (and even then, be really careful). It was made clear that sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy were simply not for us: We were to use birth control and go to college and if we somehow got pregnant too soon or with the wrong guy, we were to abort. There was no mention of .. | Ariel Levy | ||
| ea10d0e | The whole point is that everybody gets to marry the person they love. | Ariel Levy | ||
| d76198a | The counselor says that we are "at the beginning of a long, uphill journey." She says, "Relapse is a part of recovery." I think, You have got to be fucking kidding me. I say, "Do I look like someone who's ready for a long, uphill journey?" Lucy snickers for a second, and I love her. I lover her much more than I want to. But I am worn down and out. The thought of another trip crushes me. I tell Lucy, You are my family. But I'm not coming wi.. | Ariel Levy | ||
| 966ff11 | To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life. Your questions were answered, your freedom was gone, your path would calcify in front of you. And yet it still pulled at me. Being a professional explorer would become largely impossible if I had a child, but having a kid seemed in many ways like the wildest possible trip. | Ariel Levy | ||
| cac6a30 | A real editor isn't just someone you work with; he's your guide. | Ariel Levy | ||
| a202347 | But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. -Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue | loss love miscarriage motherhood parenthood | Ariel Levy | |
| 1be4514 | Life was a struggle with ourselves more than with a spear-wielding Satan; that belief was a choice for our conscience always to be sharpened. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 75b0c65 | It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it all the time believing they would scale the rod. And they did. It was different for Jaja and me. We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn't. | parenting | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | |
| 671c863 | When he undressed at night he was like a diplomat or a judge. A white body, gentle and powerless, emerged from his clothes, his position in the world lay tumbled on the floor, fallen from his ankles... | James Salter | ||
| 5875fa4 | He walks toward the river, placing his feet carefully. His suit is too warm and tight. He reaches the water's edge. There is the dock, unused now, with its flaking paint and rotten boards, its underpilings drenched in green. Here at the great, dark river, here on the bank. It happens in an instant. It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore. Yes, he thought, I am ready, I have always been ready, I am.. | James Salter | ||
| 71eb6e5 | Anne-Marie Costallat, born October 8, 1944. I was beginning high school and masturbating twice a day, curling over it like a dead leaf, when she was born, in a bed of violets, as she says--all French mothers tell their children that. | James Salter | ||
| d898e0e | It's ahead of us. All I can tell you is, not even courage will help." "Are you reading Alma Mahler again?" "No." Her voice was even and knowing. The underground river. The ceiling lowers, grows wet, the water rushes into darkness. The air becomes damp and icy, the passage narrows. Light is lost here, sound; the current begins to flow beneath great, impassable slabs." | James Salter | ||
| 264f878 | I have not forgotten those days, I have only forgotten how simply they seemed to occur ... | James Salter | ||
| 3e4b8cb | incandescent afternoons in Spain, the shutters closed, a blade of sun burning into the darkness. | James Salter | ||
| 681b330 | The heart is in darkness, unknowing, like those animals in mines that have never seen the day. It has no loyalties, no hopes; it has its task. | James Salter | ||
| 142853a | I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love. | James Salter | ||
| 30a738e | The only light was a standing lamp by his chair, near his elbow was a drink. He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him. | James Salter | ||
| 89d3849 | A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page. | writing-philosophy writing-process | James Salter | |
| c5f7744 | He lived in it helplessly as we live in our bodies when we are older. | James Salter | ||
| 023d4ec | Dean is still asleep. His clothes are strewn about. The shutters are closed. He never dreams. He's like a dead musician, like a spent runner. He hasn't the strength to dream, or rather, his dreams take place while he is awake and they are marvelous for at least one quality: he has the power to prolong them. | James Salter | ||
| 032801c | All men must die, it was their single common heritage. But a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| 1ba762c | We always trotted everywhere at Camp Arthur Currie. I never did find out who Currie was, but he must have been a trackman. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| bab2caa | Can a machine be so frightened and hurt that it will go into catatonia and refuse to respond? While ego crouches inside, aware but never willing to risk it? No, can't be that; Mike was unafraid - as gaily unafraid as Prof. | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| b90fd67 | We necessarily sift a great many pebbles, much sand, for each nugget--but the nuggets | Robert A. Heinlein | ||
| cca534d | Live with the consequences of your deeds and enjoy the warmth they create. The only warmth in the cold, indifferent universe is that which we create ourselves. And that is what a work of art is, it is what a constructed life is, a fulfilled life, the warmth of acts. | existentialism | Peter Watson |