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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 18f4694 | Most archaeology in London these days is rescue archaeology - projects designed to preserve as much as possible from the relentless cash-driven redevelopment. It's not a new problem. Ask a medievalist about Victorian cellars or an Iron Age specialist about medieval ploughing - but take snacks, because you're going to be there for a while. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| f045e8d | Fish and chip night was a Kumar family tradition that dated back to when Jaget was courting his wife and they used to meet in the last white English-owned fish and chip shop in Wembley on the basis that none of their relatives would go in there. "It" | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 1ddad96 | When you arrive unexpectedly at someone's house you go in through the front door, often after making sure you've got a couple of mates waiting round the back. For a business, especially the kind that involves big trucks and heavy metal, it's always better to go in through the back. The customer-facing part of any modern business is purposely designed to be as politely unhelpful as possible. If you go in from the rear, the customer-facing st.. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 489f9a1 | We seem to be sitting around waiting for the next fucking disaster." he said, which went into the official log as - DCI Seawoll felt that our operational posture was too reactive." | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 82e8f05 | Years later, my father made a passing reference to the uncanny-valley response--the human aversion to things that look almost but not quite like people. The uncanny-valley response is a hard thing to define, much less to test for. But if true, it explains why the faces of chimps so unsettle some of us. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 7dd2c8a | Maybe friendship was not as big a deal as I'd thought and I actually had lots of friends. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 92fb51a | I don't remember the house so well as the barn, and remember the barn less than the creek, and the creek less than an apple tree my brother and sister would climb to get into or out of their bedrooms. I couldn't climb up, because I couldn't reach the first branch from the bottom, so about the time I turned four, I went upstairs and climbed down the tree instead. I broke my collarbone and you could have killed yourself, my mother said, which.. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 2d9a332 | What have you learned? my father asked, and I didn't have the words then, but, in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| c51b037 | The Indians did not like to see anything odd -- a white squirrel, for instance. . . . They thought such oddities were messages, were omens of evil. . . . And the Indians put a great deal of faith in dreams. | omens totems | Karen Joy Fowler | |
| 2ff8487 | You can train any animal into any behavior on cue if it's a natural behavior to begin with. Racism, sexism, speciesism--all natural human behaviors. They can be triggered any time by any unscrupulous yahoo with a pulpit. A child could do it. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 14370be | Let the wild ruckus commence. | ruckus wild | Karen Joy Fowler | |
| 036f029 | How was your day, Rosie?" Dad would ask when he came home from work and I'd tell him it was ebullient. Or limpid. Or dodecahedron. "That's good to hear," he'd say." | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| f56bc1a | Threadbare, ravaged by love - as who amongst us is not. | ravaged | Karen Joy Fowler | |
| 556bf31 | The rest of the night was an endless dream sequence directed by David Lynch | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| e0cf42a | I've read that no loss compares to the loss of a twin, that survivors describe themselves as feeling less like singles and more like the crippled remainder of something once whole. Even when the loss occurs in utero, some survivors respond with a lifelong sense of their own incompleteness. Identical twins suffer the most, followed by fraternals. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 3c78923 | You've obviously never been in love." "I have actually. And . And--always--without hope--I've never had my love reciprocated ever." | in-love iris-murdoch love painful sad the-black-prince unreciprocated-love unrequited-love | Iris Murdoch | |
| 74374f1 | There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened. The mist lifts and suddenly there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. I see how, in a family like mine, love doesn't have to be earned and it can't be lost. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 47cc65a | I've often been accused of harnessing genre strategies to mainstream ends. I do concede that relationships, characters, and introspection are my primary interest. The fanciful is of a secondary order of importance; I usually use it to approach the large issue of perception, so that my fantastical elements, while intended as real within the stories, occupy some borderland between reality and psychology. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 78e934d | My education, my father liked to point out, was wider than it was deep. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| b0db832 | You might be shown the photos of the space chimps in their helmets, grinning from ear to ear, and you might feel an urge to tell the rest of your class that chimps grin like that only when they're frightened, that no amount of time among humans will change it. Those happy-looking space chimps in those pictures are frankly terrified and maybe you just barely stop yourself from saying so. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 39a1569 | We need a sort of reverse mirror test. Some way to identify those species smart enough to see themselves when they look at someone else. Bonus points for how far out the chain you can go. Double bonus points for those who get all the way to insects. | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 5928b10 | What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now? | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 4658d28 | There's science and there's science, is all I'm saying. When humans are the subjects, it's mostly not science.) | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| ed6f34a | They really wanted to remain always in their own house and their own garden. There are such people. | iris-murdoch the-sea-the-sea | Iris Murdoch | |
| c70ffc4 | Freedom, we find out, is not an inconsequential chucking of one's weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self. Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it is self-less respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| a91317c | The sun shone calm and bright on the grass, refreshed by the rain, on the border of pretty stones, on the sparkling yellow rocks. It was a caricature of a happy scene. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| f827565 | Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| b424be9 | While the light remains,' said Carde, speaking slowly in his high deliberate voice, 'only do not forsake the joy of life. If you shall have given all your kisses, you will give too few. And as leaves fall from withered wreaths which you may see spread upon the cups and floating there, so for us, who now as lovers hope for so much, perhaps tomorrow's day will close the doom. | joy kisses light tomorrow wreaths | Iris Murdoch | |
| bed4ecf | But jealousy is a dreadful thing, Jessica. It is the most natural to us of the really wicked passions and it goes deep and envenoms the soul. It must be resisted with every honest cunning and with the deliberate thinking of generous thoughts, however abstract and empty these may seem in comparison with that wicked strength... There is no merit, Jessica, in a faithfulness which is poison to you and captivity to him. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 9a419b7 | Odd I should have said those words before and forgotten them. It makes one feel that human beings are just machines after all. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| f8053ff | But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it. | life life-and-death | Iris Murdoch | |
| 2e68132 | Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 58fa943 | Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 70dc658 | The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he had been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond our conception in their nature and their multiplicity and their power. God was at least the name of something which we thought was good. Now even the name has gone and the spiritual world is scattered. There is nothing any more to prevent the magnet.. | god goodness | Iris Murdoch | |
| e916ed4 | Things, things, they outlive us and go to scenes that we know nothing of. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| bfdd615 | In a world without a redeemer only clarity was the answer to guilt. He would make it all clear to himself, shirking nothing, and then he would decide. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 27c0a69 | A love without reservation ought to be a life force compelling the world into order and beauty. But that love can be so strong and yet so entirely powerless is what breaks the heart. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 3c99cd6 | moreto pred men po-skoro sveti, otkolkoto iskri pod laskavoto maisko sl'ntse. S's zapochvaneto na priliva to krotko se obliaga na sushata, pochti neobezpokoiavano ot g'nkite na v'lni ili piana. Tam neide pri khorizonta tsvet't mu e raztochitelno lilav, ravnomerno nabrazden s ivitsi smaragdovo zeleno. Samiiat khorizont e violetov. Blizo do brega, k'deto zrenieto mi se ogranichava ot nadigashchite se gramadi g'rbati zh'lti skali, ima lenta ot.. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 0f95e6b | The idea of attention or contemplation, of looking carefully at something and it before the mind, may be conveyed early on in childhood. 'Look, listen, isn't that nice?' Also, 'Don't touch!' This is moral training as well as preparation for a pleasurable life. It need not depend on words, but can also be learnt from patterns of behaviour which should in any case back up the words. The far reaching idea of is included in such teaching. T.. | respect | Iris Murdoch | |
| de0d30a | We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 90322de | The lover readily imagines that he and his mistress are one. He feels he has love enough for both and that his loving will can swathe the two of them together like twin nuts in a shell. But what one loves is, after all, another human being, a person with other interests, other pains, in whose world one is oneself an object among others. | relationships | Iris Murdoch | |
| 71e40f1 | One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness. | past | Iris Murdoch | |
| 5e6da05 | It happens that in our phase of civility, the novel is the central form of literary art. It lends itself to explanations borrowed from any intellectual system of the universe which seems at the time satisfactory. Its history is an attempt to evade the laws of what Scott called 'the land of fiction'-the stereotypes which ignore reality, and whose remoteness from it we identify as absurd. From Cervantes forward it has been, when it has satisf.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| 98b659c | And do stop sneezing. It annoys me so much when people sneeze. | Iris Murdoch |