1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
4306
4307
4308
4309
4310
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6bb298a | Without this excitement they cannot have their Lyric Verse, and so they get it by any convenient means -- and with absolute sincerity -- but the Poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 0ce3a07 | We rode back from Richmond decorously side by side on the top of a bus. It was as though my left side (her side) burned and was so to speak dissolving into steam, or gases. Other people may often have experienced this secret journeying with the intention of sex at the end, but I was new to it, as I was new to what Fulla had done to my skin and bone-marrow, my fingers and toes, not to mention the most obvious part, or parts of me. I could ha.. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 7f70335 | Therefore,' said Loki the mockery, to the snake his daughter, 'we need to know everything, or at least as much as we can. The gods have secret runes to help in the hunt, or give victory in battle. They hammer, they slash. They do not study. I study. I know. | anti-intellectualism loki | A.S. Byatt | |
| a7e4836 | He muttered to himself. Why bother. Why does this matter so much. What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again. I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera-camp in Columbia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint or air on a bit of board? I could just stop. He could not. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 41019e7 | Iron bars make a cage all right, and the more you look at them or reproduce them the more you know it's a real cage. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 1351b12 | The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life... | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 8e9bf8c | A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love, indifference and dislike; also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forebears, the stones and sands of his familiar places, long-silenced battles and struggles of conscience, of the smiles of girls and the slow utterance of old women, of accidents and the gradual action of inexorable law, of all this and something else too, a single flame which .. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 057437f | The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories. The black was now in the thin child's head and was part of the way she took in every new thing she encountered. | mythology myths norse-mythology | A.S. Byatt | |
| 5add59d | Julian expected to be full of love and lust, and consequently usually was. He had an inconvenient habit of watching himself from a distance, and wondering whether the love and lust were strained and faked. He was afraid of being isolated and solitary, which he feared was his fate. He was certainly not himself an object of desire to other boys, as far as he knew--and he was knowing. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| e2d80d0 | One of you needs food,' said the Old Woman, 'and three of you need healing.' So the Princess sat down to good soup, and fresh bread, and fruit tart with clotted cream and a mug of sharp cider, and the Old Woman put the creatures on the table, and healed them in her way. Her way was to make them tell the story of their hurts, and as they told, she applied ointments and drops with tiny feathery brushes and little bone pins ... | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 2cbf8a1 | The young desired to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 883738d | Dorothy did feel threatened. Whose child was or wasn't she? Almost unconsciously, she detached her-self a little from love. She would be canny. She would not invest too much passion in loving her parents, her acting parents, in case the love turned out to be disproportionate, unreturned, the parent not-a-parent. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 3cbd240 | He began to walk into the pottery, which had been the dairy. He knew enough about the evil-tempered to know that you had to walk away from them, or they couldn't give up their wrath, even if they needed to. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 218ba9e | Did we not--did you not flame, and I catch fire? | A.S. Byatt | ||
| d7a5063 | You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was. | writing youth | A.S. Byatt | |
| bfe2682 | There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 4371128 | Everybody's possibilities solidify round them and become limitations. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| a525313 | Deep inside each of us is a part that mistrusts order and craves the relief of seeing the world shatter into the chaos it believes lies underneath all along. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| a08209f | Storyboarded by the West Coast's finest, the ceiling celebrated the exploits of that most durable of action heroes--God. | god | Michael Marshall Smith | |
| 30e6ee7 | The angel we named God banned representations of himself, even the writing of his name, trying to halt the process of literalization--but in the end it became inevitable. The angel found himself at the head of a corporation, run by Young Turks who wouldn't respect the line management structure: They rewrote his memos to make the law more rigorous, more confined, more human. He got ousted in a boardroom coup and kicked upstairs. He hadn't re.. | religion | Michael Marshall Smith | |
| b6666e7 | Everything feels like a badly designed computer game in which you fall into a pit that doesn't kill you but from which there's absolutely no escape. For a while you kick against the walls, but the walls get higher no matter how hard and fast you press all the buttons you can find. And sooner or later you'll realize there's one you haven't tried yet. The power switch.[...] So she began reaching for the button herself, but she never tried qui.. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| 7e4843b | Your story can change. Overnight. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| 9b30b9b | When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You're opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that? | objectivity taking-things-personally | Michael Marshall Smith | |
| b783770 | The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss--an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.--is sure to be noticed. --Soren Kierkegaard The Sickness Unto Death | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| 2192179 | I can't do this anymore, I think, my own voice almost lost in the storm. I can't do this anymore. I can't face this on my own. I am drowning in this river and I am haunted in this house my father built and my mind is breaking. | T.J. Klune | ||
| f8c7fd8 | A man gets used to riding on at the break of day. Comes to think that movement and noise is where life is, when after all there's life in stillness and quiet too. | stillness | Kate Elliott | |
| 5ce01d7 | But in the midst of the monstrous assembly that is slave to fortune, each solitary small figure who linked her hand to another built a chain of loyalty and trust. We make ourselves into the net that we throw across the ocean. | Kate Elliott | ||
| 44e9ecd | When you have a full and eager heart in you, you must not go to a man whose heart is empty and weak. | Kate Elliott | ||
| 2386051 | Annoyance and pathos warred in my breast, and after a short struggle, annoyance punched pathos in the snout like the voracious shark it was. | pathos punching-a-shark | Kate Elliott | |
| c56ceaa | The young who are male can never resist showing off their knowledge, no doubt because they possess so little. | Kate Elliott | ||
| d5e454b | I don't know how long I had been sniffing and snorting there on my broken bunk (and I didn't care who heard me) when I became aware of furtive little sounds from the corridor. Nothing loud--no more than a slight scrape--then a soft grunt of surprise. I looked up, saw nothing in the darkness. A voice whispered, "Countess?" A voice I recognized. "Azmus!" "It is I," he whispered. "Quickly--before they figure out about the doors." "What?" "I've.. | Sherwood Smith | ||
| 226da1d | The traffic increased when I reached the village, and when I walked into the market square I saw a large crowd gathered at one end. For a few moments I stood uncertainly, wondering whether I ought to leave or find out what the crowd was gathered for. Suddenly they parted, and without warning two soldiers in brown and green rode side by side straight at me. Dropping my gaze to my dusty feet, I pressed back with the rest of the people on the .. | Sherwood Smith | ||
| 58e4c6e | We're to have no communication with anyone outside of our own people," she said. My first reaction was disbelief. Then I thought of that letter of thanks I'd planned on writing, and even though I had not told anyone, humiliation burned through me, followed by anger all the more bright for the sense of betrayal that underlay it all. Why betrayal? Shevraeth had never pretended to be on my side. Therefore he had saved my life purely for his ow.. | Sherwood Smith | ||
| 1f6a0f5 | When I did come to again, it was to the slow recognition of patterned movement. Next I realized that I was more or less upright, kept in place by the uncompromising grip of an arm. And at last I saw that I was on horseback and someone was with me. "Bran?" I murmured hopefully. The arm did not slacken its grip as its owner hesitated, then said, "It desolates me to disappoint you, but your brother is not here. Despite two really praiseworthy .. | Sherwood Smith | ||
| 05de375 | Beyond those to another hall, with four doors--not woven doors, but real colorwood ones--redwood, bluewood, goldwood, greenwood--beautifully carved and obviously ancient. The servants opened one and bowed me into a round-walled room that meant we were in a tower; windows on three sides looked out over the valley. The room was flooded with light, so much that I was dazzled for a moment and had to blink. Shading my eyes, I had a swift impress.. | Sherwood Smith | ||
| 2bb62be | Choose the duty that you can most effectively execute: that is, finally, all we can do in life. | Sherwood Smith | ||
| 1718c62 | Wondering how I would make it through a hand-to-hand duel, I glanced around--and just then I saw one of Galdran's equerries fall from his saddle, his banner-spear spinning through the air toward me. Instinctively my free hand reached up and I caught the spear by the shaft. Ignoring the sting in my hand, I jammed my sword into its sheath and started whirling the spear round and round, making the banner snap and stream as my prancing, sidling.. | Sherwood Smith | ||
| 6546e97 | He said the proclivities for indulging in gossip stems from the same impulse as the reading of novels, only gossip touches on real people. Therein lies the harm. | Sherwood Smith | ||
| cc92542 | Who in the universe halts when the enemy tells them to? | crown enemy funny war wise | Sherwood Smith | |
| 62d1458 | But I will never ask anyone from our village-from any village in Tlanth-to risk his or her life unless I'm willing to myself. | life morals war | Sherwood Smith | |
| aa3ffd6 | Oria and I walked into the kitchen to find Julen staring at a handsome young man with curly black hair and fine new livery in Astiar colors. His chin was up, and he swept a cool glance over us all as he said, "My errand is with my lady, the Countess of Tlanth." "I am she." I stepped forward. He gave me one incredulous look, then hastily smoothed his face as he bowed low. In the background, Julen clucked rather audibly. Next to me Oria had h.. | Sherwood Smith | ||
| 77a68fd | He pulled one of his brands out of the fire and stepped toward me, raising it. The sharp smell of red-hot metal made me sneeze--and when I looked up, the man's mouth was open with surprise. My gaze dropped to the knife embedded squarely in his chest, which seemed to have sprouted there. I thought hazily, as the torturer fell heavily at my feet. I turned my head, half rising from the chair-- And saw the Marquis of Shevraeth standing frame.. | Sherwood Smith | ||
| 0a9758d | Interest in alchemy seems to be nowadays on the rise. Whereas the educated public at large remains no doubt skeptical and indeed disdainful of the ancient discipline, there is today a deepening awareness among the better informed that what stands behind many an "exploded superstition" may be in fact a long-forgotten wisdom. Although Carl Jung was obviously exaggerating when ! he suggested that four centuries after being expelled from our un.. | Wolfgang Smith | ||
| 2ef08af | One thing I still remembered from my war days was how to move in shrubbery. | Sherwood Smith |