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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0db013a | Teddy was reminded of Paterson, but that polyglot population had appeared healthier, more hopeful, the American mood more fertile then in its promises, and the streets of Silk City with their little yards holding a fuchsia bush or a blue-robed plaster statue of the Virgin more livable than these stacked, stinking, ill-lit dens. He had been a part of the population then, a schoolboy immersed in its details of competition and expectation and .. | paterson-new-jersey wealth-disparity | John Updike | |
| 7f5e1c4 | Funny, the world just can't touch you once you follow your instincts. | John Updike | ||
| ce384cc | A company of believers is like a prison full of criminals; their intimacy and solidarity is based on what they can least justify about themselves. | cults | John Updike | |
| 97f6583 | No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go the lengths that may be necessary. --HORACE WALPOLE, | Susan Elia MacNeal | ||
| 3e098ea | I come," replied he, "to thee, Manfred, usurper of the principality of Otranto, from the renowned and invincible Knight, the Knight of the Gigantic Sabre: in the name of his Lord, Frederic, Marquis of Vicenza, he demands the Lady Isabella, daughter of that Prince, whom thou hast basely and traitorously got into thy power, by bribing her false guardians during his absence; and he requires thee to resign the principality of Otranto, which tho.. | duel giant heir knight otranto | Horace Walpole | |
| 49e7b53 | This life is but a pilgrimage. | Horace Walpole | ||
| 8004a04 | I hold visions to be wisdom, and would deny them only to ambition, which exists only by the destruction of visions of everybody else | egocentrism vision wisdom | Horace Walpole | |
| fee4518 | Repertitious has not had nearly the success in entering the language that serendipitous has had, most likely because its PR team isn't nearly as good. The noun form of the latter, serendipity, was made up in the 1750s by the novelist Horace Walpole, based on Serendip (a former name for Sri Lanka). Repertitious, on the other hand, has its first mention in Thomas Blount's dictionary of 1656. Writers--1, lexicographers--0. Resentient | Ammon Shea | ||
| 94674d4 | When you predicted an apocalypse, you needed sooner or later to produce one. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| aa5048c | We most often understand the value of time only when we are in a position of having to regret its loss, | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 20ecd27 | He had come a long way since his conviction, as a twenty-year-old, that honesty could not be counterfeited. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 678debd | In her adult life Cleopatra would have met few people she considered her equal. To the Romans she was a stubborn, supreme exception to every rule. She remains largely incomparable: She had plenty of predecessors, few successors. With her, the age of empresses essentially came to an end. In two thousand years only one or two other women could be said to have wielded unrestricted authority over so vast a realm. Cleopatra remains nearly alone .. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 42e72c7 | We have ample testimony to her sense of humor; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus's further assertion that Egypt was a country in which "the women urinate standing up, the men sitting down." | Stacy Schiff | ||
| e4203f3 | For all its erudition, Cleopatra's Egypt produced no fine historian. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| a34dd69 | She knew neither that she was living in the first century BC nor in the Hellenistic Age, both of them later constructs. (The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 9f47d44 | What was said of an earlier tribune was more true of Antony: "He was a spendthrift of money and chastity--his own and other people's." The brilliant cavalry officer had all of Caesar's charm and none of his self-control. In 44 the conspirators had deemed him too inconsistent to be dangerous. After the Ides Mark Antony was in his glory, entirely the man of the hour--at least until Octavian arrived. Cleopatra" | Stacy Schiff | ||
| cbe29dd | And from an early age she enjoyed the best education available in the Hellenistic world, at the hands of the most gifted scholars, in what was incontestably the greatest center of learning in existence: | Stacy Schiff | ||
| cd9e0bc | Learning was a serious business, involving endless drills, infinite rules, long hours. There was no such thing as a weekend; one studied on all save for festival days, which came with merciful regularity in Alexandria. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 9aae82e | The art of speaking," it was later said, "depends on much effort, continual study, varied kinds of exercise, long experience, profound wisdom, and unfailing strategic sense." | Stacy Schiff | ||
| b720d48 | No text more thoroughly penetrated Cleopatra's world. In an age infatuated with history and calibrated in glory, Homer's work was the Bible of the day. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 8c516f4 | While Egyptian speakers learned Greek, it was rare that anyone ventured in the opposite direction. To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| d310804 | When Cleopatra was nine or ten, a visiting official had accidentally killed a cat, an animal held sacred in Egypt.* A furious mob assembled, with whom Auletes' representative attempted to reason. While this was a crime for an Egyptian, surely a foreigner merited a special exemption? He could not save the visitor from the bloodthirsty crowd. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| af1dcc9 | It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of anatomy and physiology established, the definitive editions of Homer produced. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| f32d563 | The best that can be said of the Alexandrian War is that Caesar acquitted himself brilliantly in a situation in which he stupidly found himself. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| d1eb4be | So it was that when a fiery wisp of a girl presented herself before an adroit, much older man of the world, credit for the seduction fell to her. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| ce18eb7 | Caesar's civic reforms were promising, but how and when would he put the Republic back together again? Over years of war it had been turned upside down, the constitution trampled, appointments made on whim and against the law. Caesar took few steps toward restoring traditional rights and regulations. Meanwhile his powers expanded. He took charge of most elections and decided most court cases. He spent a great deal of time settling scores, r.. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 53d7bb0 | But the standouts in the generations immediately preceding Cleopatra's were--for vision, ambition, intellect--universally female. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| b6fb22c | everything that lifts people above their fellows arouses both emulation and jealousy. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| beac8f2 | It's easy. Pretend to know what you don't, and pretend not to know when you do. Hear what you don't understand and don't hear what you do. Promise what you cannot deliver, what you have no intention of delivering. Make a great secret of hiding what isn't there. Plead you're busy as you spend your time sharpening pencils. Speak profoundly to cover up your emptiness, encourage spies, reward traitors, tamper with seals, intercept letters, hide.. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| b0e7b0a | Who can adequately express his astonishment at the changes of fortune, and the mysterious vicissitudes in human affairs? | Stacy Schiff | ||
| c050c53 | Aikhenvald saw Vera as a fearless guide to Vladimir on "the poetic path." She was on every count his champion. The wife of another emigre writer phrased it differently: "Everyone in the Russian community knew who and what you meant when you said 'Verochka.' It meant a boxer who went into the fight and hit and hit." | wingman | Stacy Schiff | |
| 0819cf8 | What is optimism? Alas, it is the mania for pretending that all is right, when in fact everything is wrong. --Voltaire, Candide | Stacy Schiff | ||
| a6f2ae1 | A few months since the idea of witches riding through the air upon a broomstick, and that of philosophers upon a bag of smoke, would have appeared equally impossible and ridiculous, | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 0a65828 | Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 4f1cb18 | When many varied sensations have agitated the day, when various matters preoccupy the mind, one falls asleep once, but not a second time. | Victor Hugo | ||
| 2402bdf | He had enlightened Marius by chance and without being aware of the fact, as does a candle which some one brings; he had been the candle and not the some one. | Victor Hugo | ||
| 977cd86 | I am not enthusiastic over your Jesus, who preaches renunciation and sacrifice to the last extremity. 'Tis the counsel of an avaricious man to beggars. Renunciation; why? Sacrifice; to what end? I do not see one wolf immolating himself for the happiness of another wolf. Let us stick to nature, then. | Victor Hugo | ||
| 4ab9a3c | Ah! indeed he must not be mounted. It does not suit his ideas to be a saddle-horse. Every one has his ambition. 'Draw? Yes. Carry? No.' We must suppose that is what he said to himself. | Victor Hugo | ||
| 78b5474 | what is there left to desire beyond it? A little garden in which to walk, and immensity in which to dream. At one's feet that which can be cultivated and plucked; over head that which one can study and meditate upon: some flowers on earth, and all the stars in the sky. | Victor Hugo | ||
| 6c2ac24 | Lend your ear then to this tutti of steeples; diffuse over the whole the buzz of half a million of human beings, the eternal murmur of the river, the infinite piping of the wind, the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed like immense organs on the four hills of the horizon; soften down, as with a demi-tint, all that is too shrill and too harsh in the central mass of sound, and say if you know any thing in the world more rich,.. | music paris sound | Victor Hugo | |
| ee2a58f | Nevertheless, in certain respects and in certain places, despite philosophy, despite progress, the spirit of the cloister lingers on, in the middle of the nineteenth century, and a bizarre new outbreak of asceticism now astounds the civilized world. The persistence of antiquated institutions in perpetuating themselves is like the stubbornness of stale scent clinging to your hair, the urgency of spoiled fish clamouring to be eaten, the oppre.. | Victor Hugo | ||
| ae1c034 | Facing these men, who were ferocious, we admit, and terrifying, but ferocious and terrifying for good ends, there are other men, smiling, embroidered, gilded, beribboned, starred, in silk stockings, in white plumes, in yellow gloves, in varnished shoes, who, with their elbows on a velvet table, beside a marble chimney-piece, insist gently on demeanor and the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages, of divine right, of fanaticism, of in.. | Victor Hugo | ||
| d475fad | Solve these two problems- Encourage the rich and protect the poor, abolish pauperdom, put an end to the unjust exploitation of the weak by the strong, and a bridle on the innate jealousy of the man who is on his way for a man who has arrived, achieve a fair and brotherly relationship between work and wages, associate compulsory free education with the bringing up of the young, and make knowledge the criterion of manhood, develop minds while.. | Victor Hugo | ||
| 8604aba | If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness. | victimization | Victor Hugo |