1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
4939
4940
4941
4942
4943
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c5acb28 | he was pouring vinegar onto the hot grill, where it sputtered and foamed and hissed. The air was full of it for a few seconds, enough to get everyone at the counter teared up, but just as quickly it was gone, with an implicit promise that anything so intensely horrible would be design pass swiftly. | Richard Russo | ||
| cb0b6c6 | Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection. | Richard Russo | ||
| 6cf8260 | She had always seemed to him to be deep-down wild, the wilder because she harnessed that wildness most of the time. | Richard Russo | ||
| 7bac8df | My afternoon comp class is not persuaded. In fact, they feel ill-treated...I've read three short essays aloud, anonymously, for the purpose of inspiring discussion or, failing discussion, private misgiving. It's my hope that if the majority of these intellectually addled young folk actually hear their words aloud, if they are forced to digest not only their advice to me but the logic that led to this advice, they will, if not change their m.. | Richard Russo | ||
| 0bc85e5 | Most Americans want it to be 1959, with the addition of cappuccino and cable TV. | Richard Russo | ||
| 8d3fe5f | If she wanted to go back to Boston so damn bad, she should just do it. He said this knowing full well she wouldn't, for it was the particular curse of the Whiting men that their wives remained loyal to them out of spite. By | Richard Russo | ||
| f098f20 | they were dreamers who felt no urgency about bringing their dreams to fruition. | Richard Russo | ||
| 4c9ec63 | Beneath every history, another history. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| c582636 | Of course I have had to rearrange the text a bit-- bugger about with it, as Hebert would say. | humour jurnalism | Hilary Mantel | |
| 4cb5b2f | Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent? | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 9288b44 | Men are a strange breed. | Richard Ford | ||
| 09d2860 | In the three boats story, a man is floating alone in an ocean without a life jacket when a boat passes by. "Get in. I'll save you," the boatman says. "Oh, no, it's fine," the floating man answers, "I'm putting my faith in the Lord." In time, two more boats come along, and to each rescuer the man - usually me, in Wade's telling - says, "No, no, I'm putting my faith in the Lord." Eventually, and it isn't very long in coming, the man drowns. Y.. | Richard Ford | ||
| 672aab3 | then nothing was ever again as it had been. You don't think things like that can happen. Then you find out they both can and will. So, | Richard Ford | ||
| d47539f | Porque no hay una forma adecuada de planificar la vida ni tampoco de vivirla: solo un monton de formas inadecuadas"." -- | Richard Ford | ||
| e38360f | and closed | Richard Ford | ||
| f4a3bb0 | When Johnson birthed the NEA and the NEH, the budgets were tiny. (The NEH began life in 1966 with an appropriation of $5.9 million, and the NEA $2.9 million.) Under Richard Nixon, both budgets increased exponentially, and two of the NEA's strongest leaders were Republican appointees: Nancy Hanks, who served under Nixon and Gerald Ford, and Gioia, who served under George W. Bush. | The Washington Post | ||
| 61dfc39 | This is the only badge of true friendship I'm sure of: not to be curious. | Richard Ford | ||
| a9a2e05 | I do not hold to the old belief that professors like writers because they can see us fail in a grander and sillier and therefore more unequivocal way than they have. On the contrary, they like to see someone trying, giving it all up to set a permanent mark. | Richard Ford | ||
| 630ecb9 | We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer. | potential potentialities truth | Richard Ford | |
| 4e12edd | to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen... | people | Richard Ford | |
| 51d2756 | Voyez-vous, d'apres mon experience, c'est quand on a l'impression de ne pas progresser qu'on avance sans doute le plus. >> | Richard Ford | ||
| d8edb8d | No one's permitted in except contractors, owners, and local officialdom (plus President Obama and our big candied yam of a governor). | Richard Ford | ||
| 86c19e7 | Love, Henry remembered thinking then, was a lengthy series of insignificant questions whose answers you couldn't live without. | Richard Ford | ||
| 3d52554 | The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as a present to myself but haven't made much progress there--though I need to. | Richard Ford | ||
| c1204a2 | don't see what this has to do with us." I say back, "Does everything have to be about you? Can you not project yourself outside yourself? Can you not take on another's life for your own benefit?" | Richard Ford | ||
| c241a41 | Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself. | Richard Ford | ||
| 34d6d55 | Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product. 4 Henry Ford | Richard Koch | ||
| 3c1ca3a | In the Hitler years we still believed in books enough to burn them. Imagine, | William T. Vollmann | ||
| ddb816a | Lecktrickery?" grinned the fool boys, rubbing their rabbits' feet against the spell of these longest syllables in all Tarnation." | William T. Vollmann | ||
| da0de0c | It sure if terrific to be in the back seat of a car full of all the people in your affinity group, and as you zip down the center of the road the radio is going boodeley-boodeley-boo in some bluegrass heart song to open space, and, whoopee, you're hugging all the committed girls who love you just as the boys love you but even more so, maybe, because Bug never forgot that a Swiss army knife, for instance, does everything well and nothing exc.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| c212fa7 | At the time that he had seriously begun to consolidate his organization, Parker was working in a custom photo lab. The reader who is not much taken by audiovisual pastimes may have a deficient picture of that place where Parker was employed; or perhaps not so much a deficient picture--the dyes faded, shoddily spotted, brutishly burned in and doltishly dodged by subhuman technicians under the glare of the enlargers--as an image which had bee.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 7b01c9d | Bug, meanwhile, had learned at Marshtown that might made right, and he got older and paler, his head downcast like a nodding flower that expects itself to be cut at any moment. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 0f99ea0 | But on Thursday only the committed regulars are there, and they do what they do on Thursday, delving into pagan rituals of worship to the amber gods that let you see to the lurching anger that spins you round and round at the center of things beyond lines and angles and the very floorboards become crazy under your feet so that the floor goes YAAAWW up again down again and suddenly tunk! it hits you on the forehead and your nose bleeds and y.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 10d2d9e | Frank thought. Each time he became someone else's spy it got easier. The ideological virgin usually finds his first time an excruciating experience, just as an amateur hiker, used to the straight-and-narrow freeway of nine-to-five reliability, looks askance at the boulder-strewn path of mercenary betrayal, winding on up into the clouds and down into terrible moraines. But after the first time, the pain and intimacy and guilt becomes a habit.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| a37eeaf | The blood kept welling up and getting over things so that she couldn't see what she was doing, which annoyed her; but she knew that theoretical clarity was unattainable in times of action. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 777baf1 | The smoke detectors began to ring; for they were battery-powered and thus still functioned, just as a record can still be played after the death of every member of the orchestra. | music time | William T. Vollmann | |
| 3caa95f | 23 He dreamed that a bomb was singing to him. From far away, the bomb was coming to marry him. The bomb was his destiny, falling on him, screaming. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 48a339d | Plato says that as one learns to love, the image of any specific beloved can be left behind for knowledge of the Good. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 1ed1fa2 | Before [Hitler] slammed the door behind him, he needed there to be nothing left, not even the door itself. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 5a6e1d0 | I've never shot a civilian except when under orders. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| cf8fd19 | But I don't think a river wants anything, except to be itself. Just like anybody and anything. I don't think it claimed a soul. I don't think it's at all vindictive or vicious, just itself. It just seemed very honest. If you hear a river moan, you know it has life. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 24d0e4e | Forty minutes later, I leaned back in my chair, and looked at the thousand or so pages of manuscript towering on my desk. It hit me. Holy cow. This author had total control over this book. Total. And it was one of seven. One. Of. Seven. | book-design seven-dreams | Carla Bolte | |
| 560fa76 | Well let the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie remember Berlin any way they please. As Comrade Khruschev promised us, we will bury them. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 7d61e39 | So even that doesn't make you happy? What about your Seventh Symphony? At least it rallied people. Once you told me how alive you felt then; you said you gave it your all-- Didn't you learn in school, he demanded in a hateful voice, that Ivan the Terrible, having coaxed his architect into, so to speak, putting the very best of himself into building Polrovsky Cathedral, afterwards put out his eyes? Anyway, things are so much easier in our c.. | William T. Vollmann |