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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e84d540 | I hated his religion and its cold disapproving gaze, its malevolence that cloaked itself in pretended kindness, and its allegiance to a god who would drain the joy from the world by naming it sin, | Bernard Cornwell | ||
| afb2d54 | It'll be an honour to serve you, sir," he added. "In a French battalion?" Gudin teased him. "If you don't flog, sir, and you don't carve up pricks, then it'll be more than an honour." | Bernard Cornwell | ||
| 8b69e91 | It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.' Napoleon | Bernard Cornwell | ||
| 89e0712 | Pyrlig laughed. "Being alive is bad in a Christian! We say people are saints if they're good, but how few of us become saints? We're all bad! Some of us just try to be good." | Bernard Cornwell | ||
| 7a394b6 | Thou shalt not kill, they preached, then screamed at us warriors to slaughter the pagans. Thou shalt not steal, they preached, and forged charters to take men's lands. Thou shalt not commit adultery, they preached, and rutted other men's wives like besotted hares in springtime. | Bernard Cornwell | ||
| 2604a29 | We make oaths, we make choices, but fate makes our decisions. | Bernard Cornwell | ||
| e5c8a86 | I suspect most copies were used to wipe arses or light fires. | Bernard Cornwell | ||
| 9abfa0a | I just gazed at the smoke haze above Lundene, the darkness darkening a summer sky, and wished I were a bird, high in that nothingness, vanishing. Haesten | Bernard Cornwell | ||
| 169d94c | Guinefort had been a dog and, so far as Thomas's father knew, the only animal ever to be canonized. The beast had saved a baby from a wolf, then been martyred by his owner, who thought the dog had eaten the baby when in truth he had hidden it beneath the cot. | Bernard Cornwell | ||
| 6fae1fb | I am not sure,' Mordecai told Thomas, 'whether omens can be trusted.' 'Of course they can.' 'I should like to hear your reasons. But show me your urine first.' 'You said I was cured,' Thomas protested. 'Eternal vigilance, dear Thomas, is the price of health. Piss for me. | medicine | Bernard Cornwell | |
| ba5584e | It was while he was on the tower that Robbie came to the rampart beneath. 'I want you to look at this,' Robbie called up to him, and flourished a newly painted shield. 'You like it?' Thomas peered down and, in the moonlight, saw something red. 'What is it?' he asked. 'A blood smear?' 'You blind English bastard,' Robbie said, 'it's the red heart of Douglas!' 'Ah. From up here it looks like something died on the shield. | warriors | Bernard Cornwell | |
| c361110 | Men do not relish the shield wall. They do not rush to death's embrace. You look ahead and see the overlapping shields, the helmets, the glint of axes and spears and swords, and you know you must go into the reach of those blades, into the place of death, and it takes time to summon the courage, to heat the blood, to let the madness overtake caution. | shield-wall uhtred war | Bernard Cornwell | |
| 8748152 | I have kept the faith, Planchard." -"Then you are the only man who has" Planchard said, "and it is an heretical faith." -"They crucified Christ for heresy" Vexille said, "so to be named a heretic is to be one with Him." | church faith grail heretic | Bernard Cornwell | |
| e6a7250 | I was born a Saxon, but raised by Danes, my daughter had married a Norseman, my dearest friend was Irish, my woman was a Saxon, the mother of my children had been Danish, my gods were pagan, and my oath was sworn to AEthelflaed, a Christian. Whose side was I on? | Bernard Cornwell | ||
| 58d49df | Meanwhile the whole of the Realm worries that I may already have seen my last winter, yet have appointed no heir to succeed me--while High Lords like Aquitaine seem ready to swim to the throne through a river of blood, if necessary." Miles considered the enormity of it for a moment in silence. "Balls." | Jim Butcher | ||
| a36b38d | Time is measured in meaning | time | Rene Denfeld | |
| 64587e8 | I'm afraid," she confessed, her voice quiet. "Of what?" "That if the box is opened I might want and want and never be filled." She took a breath. "That you will get tired of filling it." She paused and spoke her deepest fear, turning to his ear. "That you will use me and throw me away." | Rene Denfeld | ||
| 762dc1e | She stopped by an empty field, the soil abandoned, gone to mustard weed and grass. Lush bundles of crimson clover lined the fence. At the far end was a cluster of trees. As always, her eyes sought movement at the edge of the woods. | Rene Denfeld | ||
| af819b4 | The truth is not in the touch of a stone, but in what the stone tells you. | touch | Rene Denfeld | |
| 38733c1 | My soul left me when I was six. It flew away past a flapping curtain over a window. I ran after it, but it never came back. It left me alone on wet stinking mattresses. It left me alone in the choking dark. It took my tongue, my heart, and my mind. | darkness soul spirit | Rene Denfeld | |
| 6ba2d5a | You can tell me everything, her eyes say, because I will see beauty in everything you say. | confiding everything sharing | Rene Denfeld | |
| 6c45d5e | After the economy collapsed following the mill closure, the townspeople apparently tried to find other ways to make money. The two-block main street has boarded-up signs for the Bead Store Emporium and Nature's Gifts. She has come to recognize bead stores as indicators of economic doom. | Rene Denfeld | ||
| 468fa76 | It is meaning that drives most people forward into time, and it is meaning that reminds them of the past, so they know where they are in the universe. | Rene Denfeld | ||
| f77a1de | He was sweet as a baby, you know? Sweet as sugar. And then he hardened. I can't 'splain it another way. He was like sugar in a jar that hardens. And after a while you take it out, and it is one rock-solid lump. | Rene Denfeld | ||
| 9f301c1 | But he saw Naomi as the wind traveling over the field, always searching, never stopping, and never knowing that true peace is when you curl around one little piece of something. One little fern. One little frond. One person to love. | Rene Denfeld | ||
| 440f25a | Ideas are powerful things; we should take more care with them. I know there are some who would disagree-- those who think ideas are like food they can taste and then spit out if they don't like it. But ideas are stronger than that. You can get a taste of an idea inside you, and the next thing you know, it won't leave. Until you do something about it. | Rene Denfeld | ||
| 5c8b8cf | there is no game in her smile. There is warmth and kindness and something that looks like steel. You can tell me anything, her eyes say, because I will see the beauty in everything you say. | smile | Rene Denfeld | |
| c4151c8 | Now when those dark times happen, I curl into a ball on my cot and make a cape with my blanket. I remind myself I am not dust, but I should be. I tell myself I am made of the same cells as life itself even if I am a mistake. | Rene Denfeld | ||
| b8efc95 | To keep the peace you must plan for war. | J.J. Connolly | ||
| b779266 | Mais quelle famille solitaire avais-je donc ! J'etais meme ebahi que deux de ses membres avaient pu s'assembler pour engendrer les deux suivants. Seulement, des solitaires qui feignent de ne pas l'etre... voila sans doute comment les familles se construisent, et comment la race des gens seuls est devenue si nombreuse. | Benjamin Kunkel | ||
| af2fbfd | What solitary people my family were! It amazed me that two of its members had ever gotten together to produce the others. But then solitary people pretending not to be - that must be how families start up, and how the race of the lonely has grown so numerous. | Benjamin Kunkel | ||
| d184328 | Currently the party line I give myself, and do in part believe, is that what's the happiest is just to be alive and sensitive when it comes to feeling the world, and if what your senses, honed beyond usefulness, end up registering is so much suffering out there that you become light-headed with it at times - well, those senses can still be used for extracting pleasures from fruits, nuts, beverages of all kinds, words on a page, a loved mamm.. | Benjamin Kunkel | ||
| b043d8a | Dating women was the hardest thing I had to to as Ned, even when the women liked me and I liked them. I have never felt more vulnerable to total strangers, never more socially defenseless than in my clanking suit of borrowed armor. But then, I guess maybe that's one of the secrets of manhood that no man tells if he can help it. Every man's armor is borrowed and ten sizes too big, and beneath it, he's naked and insecure and hoping you won't.. | Norah Vincent | ||
| 8a53dfc | It was like when I'd taken a trip to some foreign land and everyone asked about it when I got back: my accounts would grow similar, focusing on this impression, that cool place, a certain funny anecdote, until there was just the one account which then substituted for my memory. Remembering this tendency, I felt an honest fear. It was the familiar fear, made honest through sudden intensity, that once all the sensation had evaporated from my .. | Benjamin Kunkel | ||
| 5273c32 | Adeline, who is the girl that she once was, the bright Victorian girl shut behind dark paneled doors with her thirteen, fifteen, eighteen years of life and a Greek lexicon. She is the girl stopped in time who could not speak or feel at the side of her dead mother's bed. She keeps the cold, clear information of those days, unclouded by revision or the lies of age. | Norah Vincent | ||
| 191fd7d | We tend to think of happiness (and by happiness I also mean health or overall well-being)as a gift, and sometimes it is, a pure gratuity. But most of the time it comes about because you've done the work, prepared the ground to allow it in or tended it carefully once it has arrived. You have to practice happiness the way you practice the piano, commit to it the way you commit to going to the gym. | Norah Vincent | ||
| 6f80889 | He could put up a gruff front and he was no angel, but he was really just trying to hide his sensitivities so that he could hang on to them. | Norah Vincent | ||
| bd807ce | It was the woman's job to be on the defensive, because past experience had taught her to be. It was the guy's job to be on the offensive, because he had no choice. It was that or never meet at all. | Norah Vincent | ||
| 53e9bb6 | Maxwell's greatest work shows two unique characteristics which stem from his philosophical insight. The first is the way he could return to a subject, often after a gap of several years and take it to new heights using an entirely fresh approach. He did this twice with electromagnetism. The second is even more remarkable. His electromagnetic theory embodied the notion that things we can measure directly, like mechanical force, are mery the .. | Basil Mahon | ||
| d66e5e7 | He wrote up the mathematics and everything fitted together. James had shown how the electrical and magnetic forces which we experience could have their seat not in physical objects like magnets and wires but in energy stored in the space between and around the bodies. Electrostatic energy was potential energy, like that of a spring; magnetic energy was rotational, like that in a flywheel, and both could exist in empty space. And these two f.. | Basil Mahon | ||
| cb98639 | David Hume, the great eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, had put the cat among the pigeons with his notion of scepticism: that nothing can be proved, except in mathematics, and that much of what we take to be fact is merely conjecture. | Basil Mahon | ||
| 28854d6 | I couldn't help overhearing," he went on. "Grrr," said Emerson. (I assure you, there is really no other way of reproducing this sound.) "Honestly." | Elizabeth Peters | ||
| 0cf738c | Any man with a grain of sense knows that marriage is the only way, these days, to acquire a full-time maid who works twenty-five hours a day, with no time off and no pay except room and board. (p9) | men | Elizabeth Peters | |
| aab6916 | The soaring mountains rose around her, and the poets' waters glittered beneath her in the valleys of memory--hosts of golden daffodils, Swallows and Amazons, Peter Rabbit. She | Elizabeth Wein |