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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 70bd0b4 | Look at those vines,' he said. 'Nature is wearing her prettiest clothes.' The effect of this unexpectedly poetic observation was slight spoiled when Massot cleared his throat nosily and spat, but he was right; | Peter Mayle | ||
| 3d8ee14 | Oh, that,' he said. 'Poncet is grooming his ass. | Peter Mayle | ||
| 1312b38 | Later he would tell her that their story began at the Royal Hungarian Opera House, the night before he left for Paris on the Western Europe Express. The year was 1937; the month was September, the evening unseasonably cold. His brother had insisted on taking him to the opera as a parting gift. The show was Tosca and their seats were at the top of the house. Not for them the three marble-arched doorways, the facade with its Corinthian column.. | Julie Orringer | ||
| 6681aec | Strange, Andras thought, that war could lead you to involuntarily forgive a person who didn't deserve forgiveness, just as it might make you kill a man you didn't hate. | Julie Orringer | ||
| fc24f87 | when he thought of the word mercy, it was the Yiddish word that came to his mind: rachmones, whose root was rechem, the Hebrew word for womb. Rachmones: a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what a mother felt for her child. | Julie Orringer | ||
| 1861da4 | Practice at hunger makes the fast easier. | Julie Orringer | ||
| 2cf6129 | He could see the inchworm in his mind even now, that snip of green elastic with it's tiny blunt legs, coiling and stretching its way toward the tabletop, on a mission whose nature was a mystery. Survival, he understood now - that was all. That contracting and straining, that frantic rearing-up to look around: It was nothing less than the urgent business of staying alive. | Julie Orringer | ||
| 78786a1 | ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her. | Michel Faber | ||
| 9bf3fad | Isserley walked along the path the generations of sheep-flocks had made, up the tiers of the hill. In her mind, she was already | Michel Faber | ||
| 55d4b3e | Some people go through heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They're in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country. It's one long list of setbacks and humiliations. But it doesn't touch them, not really. They're having an adventure. It's like: What's next? An then there's other people who are just trying to live quietly, they stay out of trouble, they're maybe ten years old.. | Michel Faber | ||
| 0b01f3f | A simple fuck is one thing, but let a man sleep with you just once and he thinks he can bring his dog and his pigeons. | Michel Faber | ||
| ef53989 | I wouldn't use the word 'man'. The Hebrew is , which I would argue encompasses both sexes. | hebrew man sexes | Michel Faber | |
| 2e94333 | Unreality was swirling all around her like the delirious miasmas | Michel Faber | ||
| 02b7213 | She sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board. | Michel Faber | ||
| be8a05f | The holy book he'd spent so much of his life preaching from had one cruel flaw: it was not very good at offering encouragement or hope to those who weren't religious. | Michel Faber | ||
| 5bc7d3d | What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax. | apathy existence existentialism futility habit hopeless hopelessness time | Michel Faber | |
| 837ebd2 | Belief was a place that people didn't leave until they absolutely must. | Michel Faber | ||
| 5967f8e | God, Agnes has decided, is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach. So, They tolerate each other, and take care of the world as best They can. Moving | Michel Faber | ||
| 9b6d0e4 | Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude. | Michel Faber | ||
| e071529 | William pouts irritably. Socialism is not the same thing as letting one's servants muddle towards anarchy. But never mind, never mind: on a day like today, it's not worth worrying over. Soon the servant question, at least in William Rackham's household, will be resolved beyond any ambiguity. | Michel Faber | ||
| c012057 | Reading, by its very nature, is an admission of defeat, a ritual of self-humiliation: it shows that you believe other lives are more interesting than yours | Michel Faber | ||
| b8094b4 | So much for yesterday. Today, Sophie's formal education must begin. Dressing the lamb before the kill, as Mrs Castaway once put it, when Sugar dared to ask what, exactly, education is. | Michel Faber | ||
| f41adcb | HIs great talent in life was to be a Good Bloke. He could walk into a room and sit down and everybody would be happy to have him, even if all he ever did was smile, for they imagined behind the mustache, behind the smile it hid, something sterner, more critical and yet, also, tolerant, so that when he smiled they felt themselves approved of and they vied with each other to like him best. | Peter Carey | ||
| 19a939b | His hair was a curling mess and he showed the proper desregard for sartorial elegance which Harry had always seen as a sign of reliability in a person. Neat men always struck him as desperate and ambitious. | Peter Carey | ||
| fb0762c | The cicadas, as if they were wired on the same circuit, suddenly filled the garden with a loud burst of celebration. | Peter Carey | ||
| 8580ab6 | It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat Bitter according to your mood. | Peter Carey | ||
| afb212b | And in it's magical pattern there was now a new element, a new glow, a cast of a golden colour which suffused everything, the source of which was a character in a book he had half read of and would never finish. He was not interested in what happened to Jay Gatsby. He was only interested that Jay Gatsby should exist. | Peter Carey | ||
| 18b0841 | The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, a bottom and sides. But what it mostly has is volume: a hungry space I've somehow got to fill. | writing-process | Mike Carey & Peter Gross | |
| f90af40 | She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant | Peter Carey | ||
| 76503a2 | Zach looked at Carey in consternation, obviously wondering if we were using the rare good cop/loony cop interrogation technique. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| a517973 | She felt his personality to be round and smooth and free from nasty spikes. | Peter Carey | ||
| 1b4a8aa | after we ate we was silent on our blankets looking out across the mighty Great Divide I never seen this country before it were like a fairy story landscape the clear and windy skies was filled with diamonds the jagged black outlines of the ranges were a panorama. You're going to ride a horse across all that. I know. He laughed and he were right I knew nothing of what lay ahead. See that there he pointed. That is called the Crosscut Saw and .. | Peter Carey | ||
| f869715 | The self," Blackmore writes, "is just a fleeting impression that arises with each experience and fades away again. . . . There is no inner self," she argues, "only multiple parallel processes that give rise to a benign inner delusion--a useful fiction." She argues that consciousness itself is a fiction. The" | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 1a18d93 | There are some scientists who frown upon such practices, believing that nature should run its course," Jane wrote in an early chapter of The Chimpanzees of Gombe, a scholarly compilation of her first twenty-six years of work. "It seems to me, however, that humans have already interfered to such a major extent, usually in a very negative way . . . with so many animals in so many places that a certain amount of positive interference is desira.. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 69cfc9e | A voltmeter picks up the fish's electric pulse. A light, actually powered by the eel's electricity, flashes across a panel built on top of the tank to show when the eel is hunting or stunning prey, and this quickly attracts attention. On this morning, Scott and I had the eel tank to ourselves. Even though Scott had just fed some worms into the Deployer, the three-foot, reddish-brown eel was immobile. I wondered if he was just watchfully wai.. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 749bdcf | The sight of a slender young woman sitting in the anaconda exhibit with a 13-foot-long, predatory reptile snuggling in her lap, the tip of a tail coiled lovingly around one leg, provided dramatic evidence of what Scott and Wilson already knew: "Just about every animal," Scott says--not just mammals and birds--"can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy." | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 28ea239 | Octopuses and their relatives have what Woods Hole researcher Roger Hanlon calls electric skin. For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin's surface--all controlled in different ways. The deepest layer, containing the white leucophores, passively reflects background light. This process appears to involve no muscles or nerves. The middle layer contains the tiny iridophores, each 100 m.. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| b74b75a | the relationship that Jane Goodall has with the chimpanzees of Gombe--and that Dian Fossey had with the mountain gorillas she studied, and Birute Galdikas has with the wild orangutans of Tanjung Puting--is different. There is a trust between human and animal, a privileged trust unlike any other. The contract for that trust is not written by the human: the animals are the authors of the agreement. The relationship is on the animals' terms. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 509075d | In all religions, as in all legal systems. people find ways to skirt the rules. We obey the letter of the law without honoring its spirit, and then reassure ourselves of our righteousness. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 1ad8a22 | Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas modeled their approach on Jane Goodall's: they began their studies by relinquishing control. In the masculine world of Western science, where achievement is typically measured by mastery, theirs was an unusual approach. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 7cfafe6 | Laos is saddled with the distinction of one superlative: it is the most heavily bombed country on earth. During the nine-year secret war against the Communists, during the Vietnam War, the U. S. dropped 6,300,000 tons of bombs on Indochina, about 1/3 of which fell on Laos. It was the heaviest aerial bombardment in the history of warfare. During the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. rained more bombs on Laos than were dropped on Nazi Germany during .. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 162eb2e | Watching a pig eat is the ultimate vicarious thrill. Seldom can you take such pleasure in another's joy. Here is someone following his bliss. Pigs are quite literally made for eating--they were bred to eat and get fat fast. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 422d226 | Normally a prolonged stare from a gorilla is a threat. But Digit's gaze bore no aggression. He seemed to say: I know. Dian would later write that she believed Digit understood she was sick. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 3dd9614 | Assessing the mind of a creature this alien demands that we be extraordinary flexible in our own thinking. Marine biologist James Wood suggests our hubris gets in our way. | Sy Montgomery |