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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 32d8b54 | Li i libri erano ammassati dappertutto. Non erano solo sugli scaffali come nelle altre case, no: da loro erano accatastati sotto i tavoli, sulle sedie, negli angoli piu remoti. Ce n'erano in cucina e in bagno, sul televisore e nell'armadio; pile basse e pile alte. Grossi, piccoli, vecchi, nuovi... libri e ancora libri. Accoglievano Meggie sulla tavola apparecchiata per la colazione, invitanti; l'aiutavano a scacciare la noia... e qualche vo.. | writing | Cornelia Funke | |
| 2f965f9 | E Mo comincio a riempire la quiete notturna di parole. Le attirava fuori dalle pagine come se non stessero aspettando altro che la sua voce: lunghe e corte, aspre e dolci, sibilanti e gutturali. Danzavano per la stanza, solleticavano la pelle, dipingevano figure di vetro colorato nel vuoto. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 872c1ff | Mai prima di allora, pero, aveva incontrato qualcuno che scriveva le frasi che ne riempivano le pagine. Persino di alcuni dei suoi libri preferiti non sapeva nemmeno il nome dell'autore, ne tanto meno aveva idea di che aspetto avesse. Sempre e solo i personaggi scaturiti da quelle magiche parole aveva visto con gli occhi della fantasia, mai chi stava dietro, chi li aveva inventati. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| b4744be | Voglio dire che io fiuto le belle storie a chilometri di distanza. Quindi non tenti di nascondermene una. Sputi fuori, forza, e in cambio si guadagna una fetta di questo fantastico dolce con i buchi - soggiunse in tono scherzoso. | writing | Cornelia Funke | |
| bf04dbc | Da dove devo cominciare? Intanto, va chiarita subito una cosa fondamentale: un romanziere non scrive mai tutto quello che sa sui suoi personaggi. I lettori non devono venire a sapere tutto. Alcuni aspetti e meglio che restino un segreto fra lo scrittore e le sue creature. | writing | Cornelia Funke | |
| 9e95d30 | I libri amavano tutti coloro che li aprivano, offrivano protezione e amicizia senza pretendere nulla in cambio. Non ti abbandonavano mai, nemmeno quando li maltrattavi. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 4620af5 | Come Mo aveva detto un giorno, scrivere storie, in fin dei conti, ha un po' a che fare con la magia. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 4e73241 | Men liked to claim how different they were, yet they were all so alike. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| bfaa45e | No son historias, Lengua de Brujo, es la pura verdad! ?Es que ya no la reconoces cuando la ves? Cierto: es una chica fea y no es agradable mirarla a la cara. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 9f5bbee | Historier har aldrig nogen slutning, Meggie" havde han engang sagt til hende, "selvom bogerne gerne vil bilde os det ind. Historierne gar altid videre, de slutte lige sa lidt pa den sidste side, som de begynder pa den forste." | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 9a28665 | Molotov explained how that book, should one be foolish enough to open it, gave the power to read things and creatures out of any book in the world. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| f689819 | Jacob had seen too many horses whipped half to death to find anything romantic about horse-drawn carriages, | Cornelia Funke | ||
| f495bc6 | He sought her lips as if he needed to breathe through her, as if only she could keep him from choking on his rage. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| d29e4ed | She] did not reply. She didn't want to talk to anyone. She just wanted to listen to what her bewildered heart was telling her. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 662af0b | The road went ever more steeply downhill. Overhead, the branches of the trees intertwined. It was a still, windless morning, cloudy and damp. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 087ddfb | Guilt is a strong motivator, sometimes even stronger than love. | brothers family fantasy guilt portal-fantasy young-adult young-adult-fantasy | Cornelia Funke | |
| ca6ffed | I'm only a kind of book doctor. I can give books new bindings, rejuvenate them a little, stop the bookworms from eating them, and prevent them from losing their pages over the years like a man loses his hair. But inventing the stories in them, filling new, empty pages with right words-- I can't do that. That's a very different trade. A famous writer once wrote, 'An author can be seen as three things: a storyteller, a teacher, or magician-- .. | magic writing | Cornelia Funke | |
| 27e20a4 | Perhaps the story now goes on beyond the book. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 13469e8 | Nothing is more frightening then a fear you cannot name. | life-truths | Cornelia Funke | |
| e135781 | You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 889a78f | Nothing chased nightmares away faster than the rustle of printed paper. But | Cornelia Funke | ||
| a538172 | Vielleicht gehoren wir alle nicht nur in eine Geschichte. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 8d257a1 | In fairy tales, the heroes are punished when they run away from a task. The heroes, not their younger brothers... | fairytales family hero heroes punishment siblings ya | Cornelia Funke | |
| 0378142 | They all believed that ideas are not "out there" waiting to be discovered, but are tools--like forks and knives and microchips--that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves." | Louis Menand | ||
| 1909891 | Restating Kierkegaard, the cultural historian Louis Menand noted, "Anxiety is the price tag on human freedom."2 Kierkegaard believed that we are free to choose our future actions, and this defines who we are.3 But modern science has concluded that our freedom is often more illusory than we think.4 Regardless of how free our will really is, though, the fact that we believe it is free makes us anxious when we perceive that we do not actually .. | Joseph LeDoux | ||
| 46bbb2a | Of course civilizations are aggressive, Holmes says, but when they take up arms in order to impose their conception of civility on others, they sacrifice their moral advantage. Organized violence, at bottom, is just another form of oppression. | Louis Menand | ||
| 2cd849d | James believed that scientific inquiry, like any other form of inquiry, is an activity inspired and informed by our tastes, values, and hopes. But this does not, in his view, confer any special authority on the conclusions it reaches. On the contrary: it obligates us to regard those conclusions as provisional and partial, since it was for provisional and partial reasons that we undertook to find them. | Louis Menand | ||
| 4cf8bc2 | Scientific and religious beliefs are important to people; but they are (usually) neither foundational premises, backing one outcome in advance against all others, nor ex post facto rationalizations, disguising personal preferences in the language of impersonal authority. They are only tools for decision making, one of the pieces people try to bundle together with other pieces, like moral teachings and selfish interests and specific informat.. | Louis Menand | ||
| f2ac8f8 | It was not a matter of choosing sides, it was a matter of rising above the whole concept of sideness. | Louis Menand | ||
| 4834967 | The broader appeal of statistics lay in the idea of an order beneath apparent randomness. Individuals--molecules or humans--might act unpredictably, but statistics seemed to show that in the aggregate their behavior conformed to stable laws. | Louis Menand | ||
| e7007a0 | in a universe in which events are uncertain and perception is fallible, knowing cannot be a matter of an individual mind 'mirroring' reality. Each mind reflects differently--even the same mind reflects differently at different moments--and in any case reality doesn't stand still long enough to be accurately mirrored ... knowledge must therefore be social. | Louis Menand | ||
| 2276a04 | Addams's] idea was that the conflict between Pullman and his workers was analogous to the conflict between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia in Shakespeare's play: an old set of values, predicated on individualism and paternalism, had run up against a new set of values, predicated on mutuality and self-determination. | Louis Menand | ||
| 81cfe30 | Dewey's 'Reflex Arc' paper] is the strategy he followed in approaching every problem: expose a tacit hierarchy in the terms in which people conventionally think about it. We think that a response follows a stimulus; Dewey taught that there is a stimulus only because there is already a response. We think that first there are individuals and then there is society; Dewey taught that there is no such thing as an individual without society. We t.. | Louis Menand | ||
| 8d5bda3 | gradualism in theory, is perpetuity in practice. | Louis Menand | ||
| b92c798 | What are the liberal arts and sciences? They are simply fields in which knowledge is pursued disinterestedly--that is, without regard to political, economic, or practical benefit. Disinterestedness doesn't mean that the professor is equally open to any view. Professors are hired because they have views about their subjects, views that exclude opposing or alternative views. Disinterestedness just means that whatever views a professor does ho.. | Louis Menand | ||
| 45f83ca | When Holmes emerged as a consistent judicial defender of economic reform and of free speech, he became a hero to progressives and civil libertarians--to people like Louis Brandeis, Learned Hand, Walter Lippmann, and Herbert Croly. Holmes did not share the politics of these people, but he did not think it was his business as a judge to have a politics, and he did nothing to discourage their admiration. It suited his conception of heroic disi.. | Louis Menand | ||
| eec8210 | A] right," he said there, "is only the hypostasis of a prophecy--the imagination of a substance supporting the fact that the public force will be brought to bear upon those who do things to contravene it--just as we talk of the force of gravitation accounting for the conduct of bodies in space."17" | Louis Menand | ||
| 847dc40 | I ate a vendor's hot dog with sauerkraut (a combination whose tastiness still makes me tremble), walking fast in order to save as much of the twenty minutes of my lunch hour I had left for reading. | Nicholson Baker | ||
| 7d2a241 | The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction. | Nicholson Baker | ||
| d8e9589 | Why are things beautiful? I don't know. That's a good question. Isn't it pleasing when you ask a question of a person, a teacher, or a speaker, and he or she says, That's a good question? Don't you feel good when that happens? | questions | Nicholson Baker | |
| f267596 | in repairing the object you really ended up loving it more, because you now knew its eagerness to be reassembled, and in running a fingertip over its surface you alone could feel its many cracks - a bond stronger than mere possession. | wabi-sabi | Nicholson Baker | |
| 9ed98d1 | One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokenness of it will perish and go black and crumbly -- maybe -- and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. And scholars will write studies of and and and and and , and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form. American poetry will perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are new to human evolution and ther.. | language poetry sitcom television | Nicholson Baker | |
| 7ba3bcb | So the first thing about the history of rhyme . . . is that it's all happened before. It's all part of these huge rhymeorhythmic circles of exuberance and innovation and surfeit and decay and resurrectional primitivism and waxing sophistication and infill and overgrowth and too much and we can't stand it and let's stop and do something else. | Nicholson Baker | ||
| 3688ed4 | As it happened, the first three major advances in my life--and I will list all the advances here-- 1. shoe-tying 2. pulling up on Xs 3. steadying hand against sneaker when tying 4. brushing tongue as well as teeth 5. putting on deodorant after I was fully dressed 6. discovering that sweeping was fun 7. ordering a rubber stamp with my address on it to make billpaying more efficient 8. deciding that brain cells ought to die --have to do with .. | Nicholson Baker |