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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d51d0f8 | love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal, | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| 23a0055 | This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me. How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful? | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| 5034b9f | There is only one spot in me that is as warm and placid as those cattle, and that is the part that knows quite surely that I will always be cold, that there will always be a wind hunting through me, and that I will always be hurrying before the coming darkness in search of a place that is not there. | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| 6b67673 | I fall in love with one special hat, but it happens to be on the head of the old Indian who is waiting on us. It is an old black hat, broken with white lines where it must have been crumpled and stepped on and kicked, and its brim droops like a hound's ear all along one side, but it is a wonderful hat, a magic hat. D'Artagnan wore a hat like that when he came up from Gascony, and Don Quixote wore a hat like that when he went home at last. A.. | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| fc6c0d6 | She is a rarer creature than you dare to dream. She is a myth, a memory, a will-o'-the-wish. | memory myth she | Peter S. Beagle | |
| 657cd6b | I am a king's daughter, And if I cared to care, The moon that has no mistress Would flutter in my hair. | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| 0b246d7 | Where you are going now,' Schmendrick answered, 'few will mean you anything but evil, and a friendly heart-- however foolish -- may be as welcome as water one day. Take me with you, for laughs, for luck, for the unknown. Take me with you. | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| 8aa327e | I'll stuff you with misery till it comes out of your eyes. I'll change your heart into green grass, and all you love into a sheep. I'll turn you into a bad poet with dreams. | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| 7380967 | to the magician's eyes the unicorn was the moon, cold and white and very old, lighting his way to safety, or to madness. | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| 20f7977 | she is a story with no ending, happy or sad. She can never belong to anything mortal enough to want her." Most" | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| 3e3feed | Outside, the night lay coiled in the street, cobra-cold and scaled with stars. There | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| 5564cb9 | The universe and Claudio Bianchi had agreed long ago to leave one another alone, and he was grateful, knowing very well how rare such a bargain is, and how rarely kept. And if he had any complaints, he made sure that neither the universe nor he himself ever knew of them. | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| c1fd1f0 | With the vague hope that it might somehow explain his dream, he took one of his old textbooks from the shelves and tried to read the chapter on lycanthropy. The book cataloged the queerly universal primitive beliefs that human beings could change into dangerous carnivorous animals. He skimmed the list of human wolves and bears and jaguars, human tigers and alligators and sharks, human cats and human leopards and human hyenas. The were-tiger.. | Jack Williamson | ||
| f1f127d | I fancy that the spirit of old Tom Hossie, wise with age and vastly weary of the labor and troublous delights of life, hungered and thirsted for death. | Jack Williamson | ||
| 8602ecb | We're never quite so powerful as we feel, in this free state," she whispered in the rushing wind. "Because our usual bodies are left behind, and our moving mind complexes can draw only upon the chance energies that they happen to grasp from the atoms of the air or other substances we possess, by the linkage of probability. All our power lies in that control of probability, and we must strike where it will serve." | Jack Williamson | ||
| 92793dd | Barbee had always wondered about mental institutions. He thought of taking notes for a feature story on this adventure at Glennhaven, as the evening wore on, began to seem remarkable for utter lack of anything noteworthy. It began to appear as a fragile never-never land, populated with timid souls in continual retreat from the real world outside and even from one another within. | insanity | Jack Williamson | |
| de9385c | Perhaps that was just a hunch." Barbee shivered again. He knew that he himself possessed what he called the "nose for news" - an intuitive perception of human motivations and the impending events that would spring from them. It wasn't a faculty he could analyze or account for, but he knew that it wasn't unusual. Most successful reporters possessed it, he believed - even though, in an age of skepticism for everything except mechanistic mater.. | alcoholism intuition sensitivity | Jack Williamson | |
| 460606b | The trouble began when the first witch was hounded and stoned to death, by the first savage man. It will go on till the last witch is dead. Always, everywhere, men must follow that old Biblical law: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. | Jack Williamson | ||
| eed78a2 | I wonder-?" whispered April Bell, her long eyes narrowed and dark. "I wonder what they really found?" "Whatever it is," breathed Barbee, "the find doesn't seem to have made them very happy. A fundamentalist might think they had stumbled into hell." "No," the girl said, "men aren't that much afraid of hell." | Jack Williamson | ||
| 52c0df3 | I'm afraid Dr. Mondrick chose an unfortunate publicity device. After all, the theory of human evolution is no longer front page news. Every known detail of the origin of mankind is extremely important to such a specialist as Dr. Mondrick, but it doesn't interest the man in the street - not unless it's dramatized. | knowledge public-opinion | Jack Williamson | |
| 9825cd9 | was still afraid--not of the dark-lipped girl who seemed to be waiting for his kiss, not even of the twentieth-century sorceress she pretended to be, but rather of that vague and strangely terrifying feeling she aroused, of awakening senses and powers and old half memories in himself. | Jack Williamson | ||
| 1d05812 | Wendre had appealed to Horn as no woman ever had. She had a man's mind and a woman's heart. She was self-reliant, proud, courageous. She grasped the situation quickly, accepted the odds, and did what had to be done without complaining. This was no spoiled child of empire, no sheltered darling of an all-powerful father; this was a woman fit to stand and fight beside any barbarian from the restless marches, made for love and ready to battle f.. | Jack Williamson | ||
| e0fdb81 | witch. A being born a little different, he preferred to phrase it. He remembered reading something about the Rhine experiments, at Duke University. Some people, those sober scientists had proved, perceived the world with something beyond the ordinary physical senses. Some people, they had demonstrated, displayed a direct control over probability, without the use of any physical agency. | Jack Williamson | ||
| 3491113 | Sleep pressed upon him with an urgency that became resistless. And April Bell was calling to him. Her voice came clearly to him, above all the subdued murmur of traffic noises. It was a ringing golden chime, more penetrating than the occasional beep of a driver's horn or the far clamor of a streetcar. It shimmered out of the dark, in waves of pure light as green as her malachite eyes. Then he thought he could see her, somehow, far across .. | Jack Williamson | ||
| eb38182 | Hurrying on, Barbee nodded to the workman as casually as he could. His skin felt goose-pimpled under the thin red robe, and he couldn't help shivering to a colder chill than he felt in the frosty air. For the quiet city, it seemed to him, was only a veil of painted illusion. Its air of sleepy peace concealed brooding horror, too frightful for sane minds to dwell upon. Even the cheery bricklayer with the lunch pail might - just might - be th.. | suburbia | Jack Williamson | |
| e5df209 | You tell yourself it is a bad dream. You tell yourself you have died--you, not the others--and have waked up in hell. But you know better. You know better. There is an end to dreams, and there is no end to this. And when people die they are dead--as who should know better than you?" --Jim Thompson The Getaway" | Greg F. Gifune | ||
| 1c790f6 | shoddily constructed sexual fantasies" The Guardian... a newspaper in England." | jim-thompson steele-s-pots-and-pans the-leather-room the-pentra | Rocky Flintstone | |
| fd35c89 | Vos vaisseaux se croient intelligents et conscients ! gloussa Hamin. C'est aussi une erreur assez communement repandue parmi certains de nos compatriotes humains. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| b4779f9 | What difference does it make whether a mind's made up of enormous, squidgy, animal cells working at the speed of sound (in air!), or from a glittering nanofoam of reflectors and patterns of holographic coherence, at lightspeed? (Let's not even think about a Mind mind.) Each is a machine, each is an organism, each fulfills the same task. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 0fc097c | In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 52d3114 | A new collection of matter and information to present to the universe and to which it in turn will be presented; different, arguably equal parts of that great ever-repetitive, ever-changing jurisdiction of being. | changing ever-changing ever-repetitive jurisdiction-of-being pregnancy procreation repetitive the-universe | Iain M. Banks | |
| d033be6 | It's luck. All is luck when skill's played out. It was luck left me with a face that didn't fit in Contact, it's luck that's made you a great game-player, it's luck that's put you here tonight. Neither of us were fully planned, Jernau Gurgeh; your genes determined you and your mother's genofixing made certain you would not be a cripple or mentally subnormal. The rest is chance. I was brought into being with the freedom to be myself; if what.. | luck | Iain M. Banks | |
| ec66519 | Where do you keep your memories of love, past lovers?" QiRia looked at her. "In my head, of course." He looked away. "There are not so many of those, anyway," he said, voice a little quieter. "Loving becomes harder, the longer you live, and I have lived a very long time indeed." He fixed his gaze on her again. "I'm sure it varies across species - some seem to do quite well with no idea of love at all - but you soon enough come to realise th.. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 253dcad | Thing about emergencies," he said, sounding weary. "Rarely occur when they'd be convenient." "May" | Iain M. Banks | ||
| def225c | now he realized... now he knew why the Empire had survived because of the game; Azad itself simply produced an insatiable desire for more victories, more power, more territory, more dominance... | Iain M. Banks | ||
| e5261d3 | I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away. | self-pity wallowing | Iain M. Banks | |
| a56a5ff | the Fate had moved, or had been moved, thirty light years in less than a picosecond. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| a50f8cb | The majority of species, too, could scrape together some sort of metaphysical framework, a form of earlier speculation - semi-deranged or otherwise - regarding the way things worked at a fundamental level which could later be held up as a philosophy, life-rule system or genuine religion, especially if one used the excuse that it was really only a metaphor, no matter how literally true it had declared itself to be originally. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 07d18de | Division was the only order. | state-of-nature | Iain M. Banks | |
| 23b50af | Just as one might do useful work without fully understanding the job one was engaged in, or even what the point of it was, so the behaviour of devotion still mattered to the all-forgiving God, and just as the habitual performance of a task gradually raised one's skills to something close to perfection, bringing a deeper understanding of the work, so the actions of faith would lead to the state of faith. Finally, she was shown the filthy, s.. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| c28593a | Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess. | privilege western-civilization | Iain M. Banks | |
| c0ca6f7 | T]here is an osmosis from fiction to reality, a constant contamination which distorts the truth behind both and fuzzes the telling distinctions in life itself, categorizing real situations and feelings by a set of rules largely culled from the most hoary fictional cliches, the most familiar and received nonsense. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| cf79dfa | Money is a sign of poverty. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 8783dc1 | The right place; that was what he was looking for. The right place. Place was all important, place meant everything. Take this rock... "Take you, rock," he said. He squinted at it. Ah yes, here we have the nasty big flat rock, sitting doing nothing, just amoral and dull, and it sits like an island in the polluted pool. The pool is a tiny lake on the little island, and the island is in a drowned crater. The crater is a volcanic crater, the v.. | science science-fiction | Iain M. Banks |