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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 15c9005 | What he taught was very simple. He taught that we are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the means to freedom. He taught that it is not essential to salvation to retire from the world, but only to renounce the self. He taught that work done with no selfish interest purifies the mind and that duties are opportunities afforded to man to sink his separate self and become one with the universal self. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 385282f | Charm is essential. In the last two years I've got to know a good many prominent politicians and they've all got it. Some more and some less. But they can't all have it by nature. That shows it can be acquired. It means nothing, but it arouses the devotion of their followers so that they'll do blindly all they're bidden and be satisfied with the reward of a kind word. I've examined them at work. They can turn it on like water from a tap. Th.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 8a33410 | we are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the means to freedom. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| ad238cd | I think I can tell you. I've always felt that there was something pathetic in the founders of religion who made it a condition of salvation that you should believe in them. It's as though they needed your faith to have faith in themselves. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 51b8daa | endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 50c6a47 | They stood in silence, looking at floorboards and corners of cornices and other such insignificances, their curiosity and compassion at the ready. They were waiting so hard that when the door cracked and Bellman appeared, they jumped. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 6b53864 | Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 3e6286b | The rook is a skilled survivor. He is ancient and has inhabited the planet longer than humans. This you can tell from his singing voice: his cry is harsh and grating, made for a more ancient world that existed before the innovation of the pipe, the lute, and the viol. Before music was invented he was taught to sing by the planet itself. He mimicked the great rumble of the sea, the fearsome eruption of volcanoes, the creaking of glaciers, an.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 5075d18 | Rose waited for the night to bring her the same comfort. It didn't. Her mother was dead...she was now too exhausted to sleep -- and too heartbroken to weep. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 702d5d4 | For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 06c85bb | In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| df7b2a7 | If you dazzle a man with green eyes, he'll be so hypnotized that he won't notice there is something inside the eyes spying on him. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8899e8f | There can be no secrets in a house where there are children. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| d4e7950 | They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 71830df | La gente desaparece cuando muere. La voz, la risa, el calor de su aliento, la carne y finalmente los huesos. Todo recuerdo vivo de ella termina. Es algo terrible y natural al mismo tiempo. Sin embargo, hay individuos que se salvan de esa aniquilacion, pues siguen existiendo en los libros que escribieron. Podemos volver a descubrirlos. Su humor,el tono de su voz, su estado de animo. A traves de la palabra escrita pueden enojarte o alegrar.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| fc37c43 | Tu estas viva; pero estar viva no es lo mismo que vivir. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| db85603 | L'appetit vient en mangeant. Appetite comes by eating. Your appetite will come back, but it must be met halfway. You must want it to come. | profound | Diane Setterfield | |
| 27ed6d0 | My father never put a book into my hands and never forbade a book. Instead, he let me roam and graze, making my own more or less appropriate selections. I read gory tales of historic heroism that nine-teenth century parents were suitable for children, and gothic ghost stories that were surely not; I read accounts of arduous travel through treacherous lands undertaken by spinsters in crinolines, and I read handbooks on decorum and etiquette .. | censorship-of-books reading | Diane Setterfield | |
| 585cb2d | Nos acostumbramos tanto a nuestros propios horrores que olvidamos el efecto que pueden tener en otras personas. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8b863e5 | I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers at the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events. How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only m.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 5bdd14b | Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes--characters even--caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 5b8b613 | I made a resolution to telephone my mother the next day, but it was a safe resolution; no one can hold you to a decision made in middle of the night.And then my spine sent me an alarm. A presence. Here. Now. At my side. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 3d85b76 | An unrested mind is prone to wander into unfruitful avenues; it is nothing that a good night's sleep cannot cure. | rest sleep thinking | Diane Setterfield | |
| 6ec9f25 | They are more real than the books on the shelves, books that are sketched with the barest hint of a line here and there, fading in places to a ghostly nothingness. Why recall the picture now, you must be wondering. The reason I remember it so well is that it seems to be an image of the way I have lived my own life. I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| f80d3df | ten years of marriage is usually enough to cure marital affection, but Angelfield was an odd fellow, and there it was. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 4bf7716 | Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in private, some unknown person--some stranger--had gone to the trouble of marking my name onto this envelope. Who was it who had had his mind's eye on me while I hadn't suspected a thing? | Diane Setterfield | ||
| c7c529a | Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes - characters even - caught in the fibres of your clothes, and when you open the new book they are still with you. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| a58207c | Was it a miracle? It was as if they had dreamt of a pot of gold and woken to find it on their pillow. As if they had told a tale of a fairy princess and finished it only to find her sitting in a corner of the room, listening. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| fc139bb | For one thing, the river that flows ever onwards is also seeping sideways, irrigating the fields and land to one side and the other. It finds its way into wells and is drawn up to launder petticoats and be boiled for tea. It is sucked into root membranes, travels up cell by cell to the surface, is held in the leaves of watercress | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 939ecb5 | Well, then," the cressman concluded sagely, "just 'cause a thing's impossible don't mean it can't happen." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 4912765 | What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump com.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| e6f9380 | pasaule ir parak daudz gramatu, lai tas izlasitu vienas dzives laika; kaut kur ir janovelk svitra. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 9ebcffc | in time-wasting loops and diversions. Its changes of direction are frequently teasing: on its journey it heads at different times north, south, and west, as though it has forgotten its easterly destination--or put it aside for the while. At Ashton Keynes it splits into so many rivulets that every house in the village must have a bridge to its own front door; later, around Oxford, it takes a great unhurried detour around the city. It has oth.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 5a16ab4 | There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 2df2fd9 | Religion is funny stuff, and it has unpredictable effects on those who use it. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 36d683a | Every previous revolutionary movement in human history has made the same basic mistake. They've all seen power as a static apparatus, as a structure. And it's not. It's a dynamic, a flow system with two possible tendencies. Power either accumulates, or it diffuses through the system. In most societies, it's in accumulative mode, and most revolutionary movements are only really interested in reconstituting the accumulation in a new location... | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 4a5db77 | Take up citizenship and the conversion it entailed, send a couple of your sons to the levy when they were of age, pay taxes calculated not to drive you and your family into penury or the mountains and the life of a bandit. Oh, and while you're at it, steer clear of debt and disease. Chances were -- -- if you did all that, you'd never starve, never have your home burned down and your children raped before your eyes, never have to wear a sl.. | conversion | Richard K. Morgan | |
| e95cb20 | Well than try giving it some thought, why don't you? Apply that finely tutored mind of yours to all those bullshit hero-with-a-high-destiny legends you people are so fucking fond of telling one another. You really think, in a mudball slaughterhouse of a world like this, where war and privation harden whole populations to inhuman brutality and ignorance, where the ruling classes dedicate their sons to learning the science of killing men the .. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 636a9c9 | I'll tell you what I see, and at no charge. You know much of war, you carry its spirit stabbed deep inside you, just as he up there has the steel within him. Just as deeply buried, just as hard and unyielding to all the softer things you are and want and own to. And just as bitter in its wounding. You think you'll be free of it one day; you carry it as if the wound will someday heal. But for you, just as for him, there will be no healing." .. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| ddaba34 | Freed hands both rising for the pommel now, so natural, so smooth, it was like Kiriath machinery, as if he machinery, a cunningly crafted clockwork Kiriath mannequin, built to complement the steel. He felt the accustomed kiss of the grip on his palms, felt the grin on his face turn into a snarl. Cold chime as the scabbard gave up its embrace. And the Ravensfriend came out. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 2f080e9 | His lack of condemnatory zeal gave him a reputation in the religious hierarchy that ensured he would always remain a humble teacher in a backwater town. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 89a57e5 | In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensify the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be established as a simplistic equation of class conflict. Marxists and their ideological inheritors described this as sharpening the contradictions of society. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 8e3528d | I'm Kristin Ortega, Organic Damage Division. Bancroft was my case. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 2c006b6 | And now he couldn't cloak it any longer, the leaking sense of loss, more fucking loss, soaking through into the same old general, swirling sense of betrayal, years upon pissed-away years of it, made bitter and particular on his tongue now, as if Grace-of-Heaven had come wormwood into his mouth in those final clenched, pulsing seconds. | Richard K. Morgan |