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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e07ecde | It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 4a3a3c6 | I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change. | history people society society-problem violence world | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 50de8a3 | The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 2b9374d | People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 17c890a | The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 07074b7 | I've been at some pains to tell you about myself because among other reasons I think we should know who our enemies are. I've known people to spend their lives nursing a hatred of phantoms and they were not happy people. | enemies enemy hatred | Cormac McCarthy | |
| ec29984 | I dont know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful it will make little difference whether she lives at all. | living marriage truth values-and-beliefs | Cormac McCarthy | |
| f3ca3b2 | In their images they had thought to find some small immortality but oblivion cannot be appeased. | oblivion | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 265e3c2 | he was gibbering hysterically and when he saw the kid standing there looking down at him he held out to him his bloodied hands as if in accusation and then clapped them to his ears and cried out what it seemed he himself would not hear, a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| a65efef | This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job. Then he wrapped him in the blanket and carried him to the fire. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| e1017cb | The names of entities that have the power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity. | authority change constraints convention infirmity power time | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 3358b67 | The harp player had just fallen off the stage and cracked his head on an Italian tourist's pint. There was a big cheer, and Con the barman rang a bell on the counter. St Patrick's Day, and McCarthy's Bar was heaving. | Pete McCarthy | ||
| 2e5c1fb | Never pass a bar with your name on it | Pete McCarthy | ||
| 68cd220 | I use the pay phone to call my friend Noel. The last time I was here he took me up a mountainside in Connemara with a seventy-eight-year-old poteen-maker who'd learned his craft as a teenager from his father. We spent the day watching him double-distill brown bog water in two oil drums over a turf fire into something that tasted like the finest malt. Noel acted as interpreter, as the old man spoke no English. Perhaps he'll have another adve.. | Pete McCarthy | ||
| 2f33c78 | Mind you, he looks a bit out of it, gazing around in confusion, as if his sax player's brain has been removed and replaced with a drummer's. | Pete McCarthy | ||
| e82607c | I find myself thinking, and not for the first time, just how useful wilderness must be when it comes to burying a troublesome relative, or a complete stranger. | Pete McCarthy | ||
| d0eaa7c | You can't have love in your life if you aren't willing to suffer for it, | Mike Greenberg | ||
| dd2f283 | There is nothing more debilitating than regret, and no anger worse than that which is directed at yourself. | Mike Greenberg | ||
| 4ec478b | The audience can endorse the triviality of modern art, but they can't like it. | audience modern-art storytelling | David Mamet | |
| 639ccc0 | All that work and then, finally, something levitates. When the minute stresses of practice fade, the specialness emerges. There is a quotation from "On Directing Film" by David Mamet that I underlined in 1993 and have never forgotten: "Stanislavsky wrote that the difficult will become easy and the easy habitual, so that the habitual may become beautiful." | Leanne Shapton | ||
| 0fd3301 | JOHN: I'll tell you a story about myself. Do you mind? I was raised to think myself stupid. That's what I want to tell you. CAROL: What do you mean? JOHN: Just what I said. I was brought up, and my earliest, and most persistent memories are of being told that I was stupid. "You have such intelligence. Why must you behave so stupidly?" Or, "Can't you understand? Can't you understand?" And I could not understand. I could not understand. CAROL.. | David Mamet | ||
| c57977e | As a youth I enjoyed -- indeed, like most of my contemporaries, revered -- the agitprop plays of Brecht, and his indictments of Capitalism. It later occurred to me that his plays were copyrighted, and that he, like I, was living through the operations of that same free market. His protestations were not borne out by his actions, neither could they be. Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. The public's endorsement of his play.. | communism humour irony playwriting | David Mamet | |
| 8212106 | Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. | Annie Dillard | ||
| cc17690 | The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience. | Annie Dillard | ||
| c3ac358 | That it's rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks "the heaven and the earth, and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, .. | nature religion wonder | Annie Dillard | |
| fcc6e2c | In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss. They're out there showering down, committing hari-kiri in a flame of fatal attraction, and hissing perhaps into the ocean. But at dawn what looks like a blue dome clamps down over me like a lid on a pot. The stars and planets could smash and I'd never know. Only a piece of ashen moon occasionally climbs up or down the inside of the dome, and our.. | faith meteors nature science sky spirit taboo wonder | Annie Dillard | |
| 2c7e81e | Each thing in the world is translucent. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 342bbcd | Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you: Ah yes, then this; and yes, praise be, then this. | writing-process | Annie Dillard | |
| 77cb3b7 | Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper. | writing-process | Annie Dillard | |
| 1daf254 | There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. "The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity." Anne Truitt, the sculptor, said this... | Annie Dillard | ||
| d221448 | The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but what we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock. | impermanence love mortality | Annie Dillard | |
| e8657a9 | Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep blank space high up above many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of.. | beauty belief consciousness creation curiosity disbelief energy enoughness epiphany exploration exultant faith fate fearless fire free freedom gaps god grace growth hallelujah humility illumination intricacy joy joyful joyfulness life-force light living-in-the-present-moment mindfulness multiplicity mystery nature philosopher-s-stone philosophy poem poet poetry power praise prayer prayers praying religion religious-diversity ring-the-bells science seeing seeking soul spirit stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it tolerance walking watching wonder | Annie Dillard | |
| 6744dc1 | Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings...They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, wh.. | beauty belief consciousness creation curiosity disbelief energy enoughness epiphany exploration exultant faith fate fearless fire free freedom gaps god grace growth hallelujah humility illumination intricacy joy joyful joyfulness life-force light living-in-the-present-moment mindfulness multiplicity mystery nature philosopher-s-stone philosophy poem poet poetry power praise prayer prayers praying religion religious-diversity ring-the-bells science seeing seeking soul spirit stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it tolerance walking watching wonder | Annie Dillard | |
| 3b41102 | Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, "an infinite storm of beauty." The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth's face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains b.. | beauty belief consciousness creation curiosity disbelief energy enoughness epiphany exploration exultant faith fate fearless fire free freedom gaps god grace growth hallelujah humility illumination intricacy joy joyful joyfulness life-force light living-in-the-present-moment mindfulness multiplicity mystery nature philosopher-s-stone philosophy poem poet poetry power praise prayer prayers praying religion religious-diversity ring-the-bells science seeing seeking soul spirit stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it tolerance walking watching wonder | Annie Dillard | |
| e6e5fb2 | It could be that God has absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. | believe god life understanding universe | Annie Dillard | |
| 84d9788 | When, over the following months, Minta Randall found that Eustace apparently reciprocated her profoundest and most secret feelings, she thought she had never lived before, or knew what life could hold, or what absolute power one heart could exert upon another. She perceived no trace, fossil, or echo of this wild sensation anywhere around her, and concluded that she and Eustace had invented it together, which would be, she thought, just like.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 5d4edbc | I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 7874250 | How we spend our days is,how we spend our lives. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 3a99c07 | What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration. One needn't be, shouldn't be, reduced to a puppy. If you wish to tell me that the city offers galleries, I'll pour you a drink and enjoy your company while it lasts; but I'll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mout.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 5088d36 | If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs," then clearly I had better be scrying the signs." -- | philosophy religion universe world | Annie Dillard | |
| 9dc54c4 | He had been a boy who liked to draw, according to my friend, so he became an architect. Children who drew,I learned, became architects; I had thought they became painters. My friend explained that it was not proper to become a painter; it couldn't be done. I resigned myself to architecture school and a long life of drawing buildings. It was a pity, for I disliked buildings, considering them only a stiffer and more ample form of clothing, an.. | drawing painting vocation | Annie Dillard | |
| 304c057 | One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 0e96165 | Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe...No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe. | Annie Dillard | ||
| be8d339 | The higher Christian churches--where, if anywhere, I belong--come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they s.. | Annie Dillard |