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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4052e17 | The long soft life is what I feel I'm settling into and the only question is how deadly it will turn out to be. But | Don DeLillo | ||
| bd7b866 | Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands. | Don DeLillo | ||
| b52ca9e | Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you're a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not. | Don DeLillo | ||
| dc263aa | I needed death in order to believe I was living, an atmosphere of death much more real and personal than anything the newspapers can offer. | Don DeLillo | ||
| ce3b7ba | Fear is intense self-awareness. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 5c3c9cc | To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition. --SAMUEL JOHNSON | Sarah Ban Breathnach | ||
| 1715617 | demonstrating the importance of being Ernst as the marketing department put it. | Charles Stross | ||
| 31f0d56 | When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history. | Don DeLillo | ||
| df5e273 | I know it's thankless to be sensible in the face of someone's primitive distrust. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 7afd743 | I can see one of them clearly now, walking along with a newspaper tucked under his arm. he has cut himself shaving and a bit of tissue with a circle of blood is stuck to his cheek, | details newspaper shaving | Billy Collins | |
| 586f42d | And when my heart is beating too rapidly in the dark, I will go downstairs in a robe, open it up to a blank page, | Billy Collins | ||
| 32f77a2 | It seems only yesterday I used to believe There was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I would shine. | Billy Collins | ||
| 2e74643 | Maybe it was the hip-sprung way she moved, high-assed and shiny, alert to surfaces, like a character in a B movie soaked in alimony and gin. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 08888f7 | Yet the one I think of most often_"" | Billy Collins | ||
| b36fe20 | I feel like the secretary to the morning whose only/ responsibility is to take down its bright, airy dictation/ | mundane poetry small-joys writing | Billy Collins | |
| eb7598c | Just pour the tea, just look into the eye of the flower, just sing the song-- one thing at a time and | Billy Collins | ||
| 0a00491 | The Lanyard The other day I was ricocheting slowly off the blue walls of this room, moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard. No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one into the past more suddenly-- a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake learning .. | Billy Collins | ||
| d71265e | Returning the Pencil to Its Tray Everything is fine-- the first bits of sun are on the yellow flowers behind the low wall, people in cars are on their way to work, and I will never have to write again. Just looking around will suffice from here on in. Who said I had to always play the secretary of the interior? And I am getting good at being blank, staring at all the zeroes in the air. It must have been all the time spent in the kayak this .. | Billy Collins | ||
| bf485c4 | Eastern Standard Time Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, but here I would like to address only those in my own time zone, this proper slice of longitude that runs from pole to snowy pole down the globe through Montreal to Bogota. Oh, fellow inhabitants of this singular band, sitting up in your many beds this morning-- the sun falling through the windows and casting a shadow on the sundial-- consider those in other zones who cannot hea.. | morning night poetry | Billy Collins | |
| 2ba8f12 | The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska Too bad you weren't here six months ago, was a lament I heard on my visit to Nebraska. You could have seen the astonishing spectacle of the sandhill cranes, thousands of them feeding and even dancing on the shores of the Platte River. There was no point in pointing out the impossibility of my being there then because I happened to be somewhere else, so I nodded and put on a look of mild disappointment if only.. | Billy Collins | ||
| 05177f1 | You are turning me like someone turning a globe in her hand, and yes, I have another side like a China no one, not even me, has ever seen. So describe to me what's there, say what you are looking at and I will close my eyes so I can see it too, the oxcarts and all the lively flags. I love the sound of your voice like a little saxophone telling me what I could never know unless I dug a hole all the way down through the core of myself. | poetry | Billy Collins | |
| 461f0f7 | tjws lryH lbyt kshbH fy hdhh llyl@ w bynm 'tlk' `l~ bb lnwm 'fkWr b'wl shkhS r'~ Hlman, wkm l bdW kn blG lhdw fy lSbH ltly bynm wqf lakhrwn Hwl lnr mtdthryn bjlwd lHywnt, mtklmyn l~ b`Dhm b`Dan blHrwf llyWn@ dh kn hdh qbl zmn Twyl mn khtr` lHrwf lskn@. *** rbm dhhb bmfrdh wjls `l~ Skhr@ wrH yt'ml lDbb `l~ SfH@ bHyr@ bynm yHwl 'n ykhbr nfsh bm jr~, kyf 'nh dhhb l~ mkn m mn dwn 'n ydhhb Hqan, kyf khnq bdhr`yh wHshan mftrsan l yqtrb mnh lakhrw.. | Billy Collins | ||
| 6786466 | The whole idea of it makes me feel Like I'm coming down with something, Something worse than any stomach ache Or the headaches I get from reading in bad light - A kind of measles of the spirit A mumps of the psyche, A disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, But that is because you have forgotten The perfect simplicity of being one And the beautiful complexity introduced by two But I can lie on .. | ageing growing-old growing-up passage-of-time | Billy Collins | |
| 38c1496 | I thanked everyone whose job it ever was to lay hands on the skin of strangers, and I gave general thanks that I was lying facedown in a warm puddle of soap and not a warm puddle of blood in some corner of this incomprehensible city. | Billy Collins | ||
| a8f8211 | would pass in the street, mostly people whose existence I did not believe in, | Billy Collins | ||
| 0fbcba7 | The fly lands on the swatter. The movie runs backwards and catches fire in the projector. This species apes us well by talking only about itself | poetry words | Billy Collins | |
| 3d480ec | There are easier ways of making sense, the connoisseurship of gesture, for example. You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase. You lift a gun from the glove compartment and toss it out the window into the desert heat. | gun guy heat surrealism | Billy Collins | |
| 48d5fdb | though they know in their adult hearts, even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed for his appalling behavior, that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids, their wives are Dopey Dopeheads and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants. | children fun silly youth youthful youthfulness | Billy Collins | |
| 0321710 | When i believe in everything, I could not see the actors semicircled around a studio microphone flipping the pages of scripts in unison. I only heard the voices, resonant, electric, adult, accusing each other of murder. | murder radio voices | Billy Collins | |
| 5e32d11 | I had to send away for the beacuse they are not available in any store. They look the same as any sunglasses with a light tint and silvery frames, but instead of filtering out the harmful rays of the sun. they filter out the harmful sight of you -- | poetry | Billy Collins | |
| 1d525d4 | Shouldn't death , I thought, be a swandive, graceful, white-winged and smooth, leaving the surface undisturbed? Blue jeans tumbled in the dryer. | Don DeLillo | ||
| dca33ee | What about the Americans?" "Eerie people. Genetically engineered to play squash and work weekends." | Don DeLillo | ||
| ed1f12d | Catastrophe is our bedtime story. | Don DeLillo | ||
| ea170d2 | Even at a distance, her mouth showed the small pursed conceit of a remark in the making. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 3493e34 | Tourism is the march of stupidity. | Don DeLillo | ||
| d4e54e0 | A Greek will never say anything he hasn't already said a thousand times." Her husband Charles reprimanded me for not knowing the word. To Charles it was a mark of one's respect for other cultures to know the local terms of abuse and the words for sex acts and natural wastes." | Don DeLillo | ||
| d19a4ea | I want to die and be finished forever. Don't you want to die?" he said. "I don't know." "What's the point of living if we don't die at the end of it?" In" | Don DeLillo | ||
| bde43ff | What ambiguity there is in exalted things. We despise them a little. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 940b17e | To Charles it was a mark of one's respect for other cultures to know the terms of local abuse and the words for sex acts and natural wastes. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 7a00d76 | Everything that has happened drives me in that direction, theoretically. But I don't feel reduced by my abstinence, as I did in the past. The craving is gone and maybe this is what reduces me. * | Don DeLillo | ||
| 4c6c8aa | You don't think of the tape as boring or interesting. It is crude, it is blunt, it is relentless. It is the jostled part of your mind, the film that runs through your hotel brain under all the thoughts you know you're thinking. | Don DeLillo | ||
| dd82524 | She watched him surrender his crisp gaze to a softening, a bright-eyed fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. It had the starkness of a last prayer. She worked to get at it. His face was drained and slack, coming into flatness, into black and white, cracked lips and flaring brows, age lines that hinge the chin, old bafflements and regrets. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 0633fa9 | Weede si alzo in piedi per un secondo e piego leggermente le ginocchia - come faceva sempre mio padre quando le mutande gli si incagliavano in qualche anfratto delle regioni inguinali, spiegando a me bambino che quel gesto era l'unica alternativa civile al disincagliamento manuale, sport preferito di emarginati e pazzi. | Don DeLillo | ||
| aaa9202 | Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we're in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we're leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night. This is time totally lost to us. We don't remember it. We take no sense impressions with us, no voices, none of the windy blast of the airc.. | Don DeLillo |