1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
4423
4424
4425
4426
4427
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 |
| b9c1903 | To explain this Matter, and to wind up Time so that I am returned to my present State: Beside my Church at Limehouse there had antiently been a great Fen or Morass which had been a burying-place of Saxon times, with Graves lined with chalk-stones and beneath them earlier Tombs. Here my work men have found Urns and Ivory Pins once fasten'd to wooden Shrouds, and beside them Ashes and Skulls. This was indeed a massive Necropolis but it has Po.. | occult occult-architecture occultism | Peter Ackroyd | |
| 1fcc0ce | The bell of Limehouse Church rang as each of them, in this house, drifted into sleep - suddenly once more like children who, exhausted by the day's adventures, fall asleep quickly and carelessly. A solitary visitor, watching them as they slept, might wonder how it was that they had arrived at such a state and might speculate about each stage of their journey towards it: when did he first start muttering to himself, and not realise that he w.. | homelessness | Peter Ackroyd | |
| 8e0e684 | Glass is material sea. | Peter Ackroyd | ||
| 2eb647c | He walked back to St George's-in-the-East, which in his mind he had now reduced to a number of surfaces against which the murderer might have leaned in sorrow, desperation or even, perhaps, joy. For this reason it was worth examining the blackened stones in detail, although he realised that the marks upon them had been deposited by many generations of men and women. It was now a matter of received knowledge in the police force that no human.. | clues detective | Peter Ackroyd | |
| 97ecd82 | If you look from a distance, you observe a sea of roofs, and have no more knowledge of the dark streams of people than of denizens of some unknown ocean. But the city is always a heaving and restless place, with its own torrents and billows, its foam and spray. The sound of its streets is like the murmur from a sea shell and in the great fogs of the past the citizens believed themselves to be lying on the floor of the ocean. | Peter Ackroyd | ||
| 4259c31 | But didn't you know? Everything is made up. | made-up | Peter Ackroyd | |
| 42617fd | On his thirteenth birthday he had seen a film in which the central character was a painter who, unable to sell his work, grew cold and hungry as he went from one unsuccessful interview to the next; eventually he had become a vagrant, sleeping in the streets of the city where once he had walked in hope. Hawksmoor left the cinema in a mood of profound, terrified apprehension and, from that time, he was filled with a sense of time passing and .. | anxiety goals life oblivion time | Peter Ackroyd | |
| 2a8b0e0 | It's difficult to know where to begin, sir.' 'Yes, the beginning is the tricky part. But perhaps there is no beginning, perhaps we can't look that far back.' He got up from his desk and went over to the window, from where he could see thin pillar of smoke rising into the clouds. 'I never know where anything comes from, Walter.' 'Comes from, sir?' 'Where you come from, where I come from, where all this comes from.' And he gestured at the off.. | pattern patterns rationality reason | Peter Ackroyd | |
| eb404d6 | There is nothing in England more constant than the inconstancy of dress. | Peter Ackroyd | ||
| c243f3a | I would have no need for the Memory Of Things past if those which were Present were more agreeable | past present | Peter Ackroyd | |
| 9979d32 | I have long been of the Opinion, says he, that the Fire was a vast Blessing and the Plague likewise; it gave us Occasion to understand the Secrets of Nature which otherwise might have overwhelm'd us. (I busied my self with the right Order of the Draughts, and said nothing.) With what Firmness of Mind, Sir Chris. went on, did the People see their City devoured, and I can still remember how after the Plague and the Fire the Chearfulnesse soon.. | humanity mankind plague rationality terror | Peter Ackroyd | |
| 3adb63a | It is one of the greatest Curses visited upon Mankind, he told me, that they shall fear where no Fear is: this astrological and superstitious Humour disarms men's Hearts, it breaks their Courage, it makes them help to bring such Calamities on themselves. Then he stopped short and looked at me, but my Measure was not yet fill'd up so I begg' d him to go on, go on. And he continued: First, they fancy that such ill Accidents must come to pass,.. | logic nature rational rationality science superstition time | Peter Ackroyd | |
| ae290f7 | Who can give more heat to the fire, or joy to heaven, or pain to hell? A ring upon a nun is like a ring in a sow's nose. Your best friend is still alive. Who is that? You. The sun is none the worse for shining on a dunghill. He must needs swim that is borne up to the chin. An hour's cold will suck out seven years of heat. | Peter Ackroyd | ||
| 6175ad0 | Hawksmoor had often noticed how, in the moments when he first carne upon a corpse, all the objects around it wavered for an instant and became unreal- the trees which rose above a body hidden in woodland, the movement of the river which had washed a body onto its banks, the cars or hedges in a suburban street where a murderer had left a victim, all of these things seemed at such times to be suddenly drained of meaning like an hallucination. | Peter Ackroyd | ||
| 4841230 | In the summer of that year two women were stripped and beaten with rods, their ears nailed to a wooden post, for having said that 'queen Katherine is the true queen of England | Peter Ackroyd | ||
| 32b8373 | Generally he knew by instinct the likely length of an investigation, but on this occasion he did not: as he fought to get his breath he suddenly saw himself as others must see him, and he was struck by the impossibility of his task. The event of the boy's death was not simple because it was not unique and if he traced it backwards, running the time slowly in the opposite direction (but did it have a direction?), it became no clearer. The ch.. | detective murder | Peter Ackroyd | |
| 4ca2f96 | The music of a popular song now came from the radio as Hawksmoor gazed out of the window; and he saw a door closing, a boy dropping a coin in the street, a woman turning her head, a man calling. For a moment he wondered why such things were occurring now: could it be that the world sprang up around him only as he invented it second by second and that, like a dream, it faded into the darkness from which it had come as soon as he moved forwar.. | Peter Ackroyd | ||
| 30b6212 | It has often been said that the more unusual the murder the easier it is to solve, but this is a theory I don't believe. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple, and you should think of your investigations as a complicated experiment: look at what remains constant and look at what changes, ask the right questions and don't be afraid of wrong answers, and above all rely on observation and rely on experience. | detective investigation murder | Peter Ackroyd | |
| bec78ff | He was clearly not the murderer whom Hawksmoor was seeking, but it was generally the innocent who confessed: in the course of many enquiries, Hawksmoor had come across those who accused themselves of crimes which they had not committed and who demanded to be taken away before they could do more harm. He was acquainted with such people and recognised them at once - although they were noticeable, perhaps, only for a slight twitch in the eye o.. | confessions guilt madness mentall-illness | Peter Ackroyd | |
| a235179 | None of these apparent sightings interested Hawksmoor, since it was quite usual for members of the public to come forward with such accounts and to describe unreal figures who took on the adventitious shape already suggested by newspaper accounts. There were even occasions when a number of people would report sightings of the same person, as if a group of hallucinations might create their own object which then seemed to hover for a while in.. | murder witness witnesses | Peter Ackroyd | |
| 3c6bd5c | And I was a Child again, watching the bright World. But the Spell broke when at this Juncture some Gallants jumped from the Pitt onto the Stage and behaved as so many Merry-Andrews among the Actors, which reduced all to Confusion. I laugh'd with them also, for I like to make Merry among the Fallen and there is pleasure to be had in the Observation of the Deformity of Things. Thus when the Play resumed after the Disturbance, it was only to e.. | audiences crowds entertainment play plays | Peter Ackroyd | |
| 8a066ac | I asked him what he said, for there was such a mish-mash of Conversation around us that I could scarcely understand him - the frequenters of Taverns have Hearts of Curd and Souls of Milk Sop, but they have Mouths like Cannons which stink of Tobacco and their own foul Breath as they cry What News? What's a Clock? Methinks it's Cold to Day! Thus is it a Hospital For Fools | drunken-behaviour drunkeness tavern | Peter Ackroyd | |
| b174e19 | DYER. (Sits down) There was nothing that I recall save that the Sunne was a Round flat shining Disc and the Thunder was a Noise from a Drum or a Pan. VANNBRUGGHE. (Aside) What a Child is this! (To Dyer) These are only our Devices, and are like the Paint of our Painted Age. DYER. But in Meditation the Sunne is a vast and glorious Body, and Thunder is the most forcible and terrible Phaenomenon: it is not to be mocked, for the highest Passio.. | plays sun symbolism thunder | Peter Ackroyd | |
| 92c0e3e | DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application. Labour and Time are the Instruments in the perfection of all Work. | words writing | Peter Ackroyd | |
| ceea00f | Then he took the pages, smoothed them with the palm of his hand, and fixed them with pins to the walls. So that now, if he sat looking down upon Grape Street, the letters and images encircled him. And it was while he sat here, scarcely moving, that he was in hell and no one knew it. At such times the future became so clear that it was as if he were remembering it, remembering it in place of the past which he could no longer describe. But th.. | time | Peter Ackroyd | |
| 6f21d00 | Suffering is intrinsic to human existence. There is no joy without its attendant pain. | Peter Ackroyd | ||
| e7421b3 | It might be compared to some organism which sloughs off its old skin, or texture, in order to live again. It is a city which has the ability to dance upon its own ashes. | Peter Ackroyd | ||
| 9d2195e | Yet, of course, and more especially, the executioners themselves became notorious. The first known public hangman was one Bull, who was followed by the more celebrated Derrick. "And Derrick must be his host," Dekker wrote of a horse-thief in his Bellman of London (1608), "and Tiburne the land at which he will light." There was a proverb--"If Derrick's cables do but hold"--which referred to an ingenious structure, like a crane, upon which tw.. | Peter Ackroyd | ||
| cd3627d | A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit," quips the clown Feste in Twelfth Night," | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| 9a37ce7 | without prizing either learning or debate, monks nonetheless became the principal readers, librarians, book preservers, and book producers of the Western world. | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| d7a10f3 | On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius offered a feeling of liberation and the power to stare down what had once seemed so menacing. What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| 86c5826 | Eve is a figure for the soul that each human should love. The commandment to be fruitful and multiply did not originally refer to the flesh but to "a spiritual brood of intellectual and immortal joys filling the earth." | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| f69afba | I am his Highness' dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you? | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| 4ea6c7c | Venus and Adonis is a spectacular display of Shakespeare's signature characteristic, his astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and to slip free of all constraints. The capacity depends upon a simultaneous, deeply paradoxical achievement of proximity and distance, intimacy and detachment. | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| 39834a1 | Flaubert: "Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone." | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| e6b5583 | book by the Spanish friar Luis de Granada, Of Prayer and Meditation. Printed in Paris in 1582, the book opened with a letter by the translator, Richard Harris, lamenting the rise of Schism, Heresy, Infidelity, and Atheism in England. These evils were dark signs that the world was nearing its end, Harris argued, and that Satan was frantically struggling to make a last demonic triumph. | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| 5a70e3d | place of the philosopher the singer is called in, and in place of the orator the teacher of stagecraft, and while the libraries are shut up forever like tombs, water-organs are manufactured and lyres as large as carriages. | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| 34c02e4 | In the enraptured audiences that have flocked to the play for more than four hundred years, Juliet in effect gets her wish that after death, night should take Romeo and cut him out in little stars And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night. (III.ii.22-24) | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| 0659849 | Most teachers of the humanities lived itinerant lives, traveling from city to city, giving lectures on a few favorite authors, and then restlessly moving on, in the hope of finding new patrons. | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| 96e83d0 | To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death, he wrote, is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed. He gave voice as well to a thought I had not yet quite allowed myself, even inwardly, to articulate: to inflict this anxiety on others is manipulative and cruel. | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| be9a5ee | The key point, as Epicurus' disciple Lucretius wrote in verses of unrivalled beauty, was to abandon the anxious and doomed attempt to build higher and higher walls and to turn instead toward the cultivation of pleasure. | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| 9ef3902 | The bookworm--"one of the teeth of time," as Hooke put it--is no longer familiar to ordinary readers, but the ancients knew it very well." | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| fcbdb75 | I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read. Much of the pleasure and interest of poetry depends on such attention. | Stephen Greenblatt | ||
| 39b7ce9 | Maybe she'd get a Siamese fighting fish. Or better yet, a ficus tree. God knows a plant would probably be a lot less offended that she ate take-out sushi almost every other night. It was a thought. | Lisa Gardner |