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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7714888 | It seems so easy now to destroy libraries--mainly by taking away all the books--and to say that books and libraries are not relevant to people's lives. There's a lot of talk about social breakdown and alienation, but how can it be otherwise when our ideas of progress remove the centres that did so much to keep people together? In the North people met in the church, in the pub, in the marketplace, and in those philanthropic buildings where .. | community libraries meeting-places social-centers | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 9954a8e | Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually? I dare not ask if you are happy? Are you happy? | jeanette-winterson literature | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 477bbf3 | But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory? | jeanette-winterson literature | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 4c7fccb | Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| ae65eb6 | He loves books,' said Perdita. 'Yeah. He does. When you've finished a book you can put it away and it doesn't ask to see you again. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 76903f0 | What's the big deal? Snow's just rain that's been left out in the cold. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| f927859 | I'm not against anyone fastening their life to an event of some significance and that way making themselves significant. God knows, we need what footholds we can find on the glass mountain of our existence. Trouble is, you climb and climb, and around middle age, you discover you have spent all the time in the same spot. You thought you were going to be somebody until you slip down into the nobody that you are. I'm telling you because I know.. | existence insignificance life middle-age significance | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 40d91b6 | Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us wave.. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 84c8602 | Why is it the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise then should I call it love? It is so terrifying.. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 730d108 | People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 79bdba9 | She found that the whole world could be contained in one place because that place was herself. Nothing had prepared her for this. | self-containment world | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 917b683 | Snow is covering us. Close your eyes and sleep. Close your eyes and dream. This is one story. There will be another. | snow | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 0ae6dc2 | It's better if I think of my life like that - part miracle, part madness. It's better if I accept that I can't control any of the things that matter. My life is a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations; there are only sandbanks and shipwreck; then another boat, another tide. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 0f6c6f8 | To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 5e8e422 | I like passion, I like to be among the desperate. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 249f6db | I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they're supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are .. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 86fa0ca | To do something large and to do it well demands such observances, personal and peculiar, laughable as they often are, because they stave off that dinginess of soul that says that everything is small and grubby and nothing is really worth the effort. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| a71087c | It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change. Of course people mutilate and modify, but these are fallen powers, and to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil. | evil | Jeanette Winterson | |
| e0acc41 | Miss Pinch came visiting, and asked me what I intended to do with my Future. She spoke about it as though it were an incurable disease. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 8883856 | If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 3a6dc0a | It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| cbab2b7 | Humankind cannot bear very much reality. That is why we invent stories, I said. And what if we are the story we invent? He said. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 943a4ef | Everyone has a demon as you so rightly observed [...] but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it. [...] We're [the demons] here to keep you in one piece, if you ignore us, you're quite likely to end up in two pieces, or lots of pieces, it's all part of the paradox. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 2150450 | I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the corners of the world. | Barry Hughart | ||
| 77b3d59 | I dunno...maybe everyone has to feel guilty. Everyone! Forever! | Art Spiegelman | ||
| 0b907b3 | The book was so clean and white, and the letters were so perfectly black and defenseless; it would have been like tearing the ears off a kitten. | Haven Kimmel | ||
| 0647421 | I could no longer look at him. I wished, in fact, for blindness. | Haven Kimmel | ||
| e2cddb6 | It was an Indian summer afternoon in Indiana, a rare gift. We walked home slowly. I thought Mom might be wrong about me having all I needed, but just at that moment, I had no need to complain. | Haven Kimmel | ||
| 3cbe33a | laura had hoped, she'd written in her journal, that whatever befell her daughters, they would not be damaged at the level of instinct, that exact phrase. | Haven Kimmel | ||
| d98b0dc | Since we were only going to the best place on the Earth, where every single minute of every day was different and filled with promise, what the heck difference did it make what we were gonna do | Haven Kimmel | ||
| f3ff341 | in the 1970s people still referred to my mother as a Communist because she had a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly, | Haven Kimmel | ||
| d728c66 | He's no John Walton. | Haven Kimmel | ||
| 7df880f | once there was a great king who gazed down from a tall tower upon a gardener who sang as he worked, and the king cried, 'Ah, to have a life of no cares! If only I could be that gardener.' And the voice of the August Personage of Jade reached out from Heaven and said, 'It shall be so,' and lo, the king was a gardener singing in the sun. In time the sun grew hot and the gardener stopped singing, and a fine dark cloud brought coolness and then.. | Barry Hughart | ||
| bec10f4 | Nothing on the face of this earth - and I do mean nothing - is half so dangerous as a children's story that happens to be real, and you and I are wandering blindfolded through a myth devised by a maniac. | Barry Hughart | ||
| a79832f | Immortality is a meaningless word unless invulnerability goes with it. | Barry Hughart | ||
| 424940c | O great and mighty Master Li, pray impart to me the Secret of Wisdom!' he bawled. A silly smile was sliding down the side of his face like a dripping watercolor, and his eyeballs resembled a pair of pink pigeon eggs that were gently bouncing in saucers of yellow won-ton soup. To my great credit I never batted an eyelash. 'Take a large bowl,' I said. 'Fill it with equal measures of fact, fantasy, history, mythology, science, superstition, lo.. | Barry Hughart | ||
| 5b7ebc9 | I used to love history class. I can still quote whole passages by heart: "When the emperor entered the Hall of Balming Virtue, a violent wind came from a dark corner, and out of it slithered a giant serpent that coiled around the throne. The emperor fainted, and that night earthquakes struck Loyang, and waves swept the shores, and cranes shrieked in the marshes. On the fifth day of the sixth moon a long trail of black mist floated into the .. | Barry Hughart | ||
| f41f531 | Miser Shen is preparing to spend the night with a goat. | Barry Hughart | ||
| 3aa8954 | One of the previous possessors of the stone was Chuang Tzu. He had a disciple who spent seven years studying universal energy and then demonstrated his wisdom by walking across the surface of a river and back again, and Chuang Tzu broke into tears. 'Oh, my boy!' he sobbed. 'My poor, poor, boy! You spent seven years of your life learning to do that, and all the while old Meng has been running a ferry not two miles from here, and he only char.. | Barry Hughart | ||
| f9f7e96 | Sometimes it's beautiful and we fall in love with all that story. Even after a thousand pages we don't want to leave the world the writer has made for us, or the make-believe people who live there. You wouldn't leave after two thousand pages, if there were two thousand. The Rings trilogy of J.R.R.Tolkien is a perfect example of this. A thousand pages of hobbits hasn't been enough for three generations of post-World War II fantasy fans; even.. | hobbits lotr tolkien writing | Stephen King | |
| 1812e40 | All true art stems from the depths of the unconscious mind. | Piers Anthony | ||
| bd03321 | Good intentions were not enough; they had to be rationally implemented. | Piers Anthony | ||
| b7844d8 | God created the earth but the Devil evolved it. | Piers Anthony | ||
| 19ae3e0 | But I have so much to learn!" Zane cried plaintively. "Then get to it, Death," she said, closing the door behind her." | Piers Anthony |