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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d453059 | He is able to put aside personal feelings and see the broad strokes. Experience counts in these things. | maturation seasoning self-discipline statecraft | Geraldine Brooks | |
| d3d6599 | When the madness came, he would be like a man staggering along the rim of the abyss - which was his rage - and when the edge gave way or he missed his step, he might clutch at anyone within reach and drag that person with him over the precipice. | emotions mental-illness relationships | Geraldine Brooks | |
| cecb2a9 | As wars dwindled to skirmishes and our strength grew, so David was able to spend less time with military commanders and more with the engineers and overseers who were fanning out throughout the land, digging cisterns, making roads, fortifying, connecting, and generally making a nation out of our scattered people. | defensiveness fragmentation leadership | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 9b6fbc0 | One did not need to penetrate David's secret counsels or insinuate a man in his bodyguard. All one needed was a pair of years and access to the royal precincts. Just to eavesdrop upon his singing was to develop an accurate idea of his state of mind. | music | Geraldine Brooks | |
| a709164 | He gave himself fully to the penitent life, fasting, praying, confessing his wickedness and execrating himself in public. He became a better man in the small matters of his days, an even better, wiser king in the great matters of state. | regeneration renewal | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 3fe5123 | In the heir's world, where everything was available, the unattainable had a wild allure. | materialism self-discipline spiritual-warfare thought-wife | Geraldine Brooks | |
| e692c14 | It is one thing to know what is to come. It is another thing to confront it. | preaching prophecy | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 7a30ec3 | I knew that the Name was still with him, animating his soul, even as his body failed. | regeneration renewal | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 8a89b07 | The laws of the Islamic state would be derived first from the Koran. But since only about six hundred of its six thousand verses are concerned with law, and only about eighty of these deal directly with crime, punishments, contracts and family law, other sources also have to be consulted. The | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 2783766 | But perhaps one day I will be entrusted with daughters of my own, and if so, I swear I will not see their minds molded into society's simpering ideal of womanhood. Oh how I would like to raise writers and artists who would make the world acknowledge what women can do! | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| a180b75 | The drill sergeants learned that lavishly praising recruits who got it right worked better than abusing those who got it wrong. The women had been raised to please, Tracy Borum discovered, | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| ab6a2e8 | It is this notion of women's barely controllable lust that often lies behind justifications for clito-ridectomy, seclusion and veiling. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| a19d119 | You did not kill Silas Stone, or Zannah's child. The war killed both of them. You must accept that." "But I might have saved them. There was a man, Jesse, he handed me a gun, and I handed it back to him. I valued my principles more than I valued their lives. And the outcome is, they are slaves again, or dead." "You are not God. You do not determine the outcome. The outcome is not the point." "Then what, pray, is the point?" His voice was a .. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 4774459 | Many men believe in the saying that educating women is like allowing the nose of the camel into the tent: eventually the beast will edge in and take up all the room inside. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 4248c2a | the women began traveling to remote villages, distributing articles that argued not just against "honor" killings but also against forced marriages and the pernicious way gossip is used in small communities to control the behavior of women and girls." | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| df75be4 | What the extremists were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, which excoriates anyone who impugns a woman's reputation and sentences them to eighty lashes. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 682e18a | I had come in stages to a different belief about how one should be in this life. I now felt convinced that the greater part of a man's duty consists in abstaining from much that he is in the habit of consuming. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| cb08be9 | This is called My Youth in Vienna. It's a very nice edition--an association copy, Schnitzler to his Latin master, one Johann Auer, 'with thanks for the Auerisms.' [...] Here he apologizes for writing so much on 'the so-called Jewish question.' But he says that no Jew, no matter how assimilated, was allowed to forget the fact of his birth. [...] 'Even if you managed to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain comp.. | judaism racism | Geraldine Brooks | |
| 711b785 | Somehow, the telling of all this rinsed my mind clean and left me able to think clearly once more. By gathering and sorting my own feelings so, I was finally able to fashion a scale on which I could weigh my father's nature and find a balance between my disgust for him and an understanding of him; my guilt in the matter of his death against the debt he owed me for the manner of my life. At the finish of it, I felt free of him, and I was abl.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| f6a518c | First nights in strange places can determine how one sees them forever after. | James Hamilton-Paterson | ||
| 71df9f2 | Children," Mrs. Oakenfeld sighed. "I do not want you to be good to avoid being punished. I do not want you to be good so that you can receive rewards. I want you to be good," she stressed, "because it is the right thing to do. You are very formidable adversaries, but don't you see that when you work against eachother, you just cancel eachother out?" | Dale Peck | ||
| 0d2dbde | Life's cheap out here, Daniel. With a little budgeting I can get by till you go off to college." "And then?" My dad reached for whatever he was drinking that day. "There don't always have to be a then." He poured, drank, swallowed, grimaced. Left his hand on the bottleneck. "Hell, there ain't really a now, so why should there be a then?" | Dale Peck | ||
| 6c2a031 | You are -" she stopped fanning long enough to push the glasses up her nose - "Sprout Bradford?" I thought it was a little pretentious to say "You are Sprout Bradford?" instead of "Are you Sprout Bradford?" so I said, "I Sprout Bradford!" in my best half-hick, half-retard voice." | Dale Peck | ||
| fd90fcb | I hate it when people repeat the last thing that's been said to them because they're too afraid to ask what the other person meant by it. "You want to remember this moment," I said finally, because when it comes right down to it, I'm a coward." | Dale Peck | ||
| 140617e | Morgon, I told you what I am; you could see what dark power I was waking in me--you knew its origins. You knew I am kin to those shape-changers who tried to kill you, you thought I was helping the man who had betrayed you--why in Hel's name did you trust me?" His hands, circling the gold crown on the skull, closed on the worn metal with sudden strength. "I don't know. Because I chose to. Then, and forever." | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| b40666c | Research the imagination. It was as obsolete as the appendix in most adults, except for those in whom, like the appendix, it became inflamed for no reason. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 804c371 | he felt the snow, downward groping of tree roots. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 0fa971b | I made it when I was young, by my standards, after years of playing on various harps. I shaped its pieces out of Ymris oak beside night fires in far, lonely places where I heard no man's voice but my own. I carved on each piece the shapes of leaves, flowers, birds I saw in my wanderings. In An, I searched three months for strings for it. I found them finally; sold my horse for them. They were strung to the broken harp of Ustin of Aum, who d.. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 815891b | his hands moved busily among the puppets, choosing, discarding, until they pounced finally on the moon with her crystal eyes and her hands shaped like stars. 'I will be the moon,' Kyel said. 'You must make a wish to me.' Lydea slid her fingers into the fox's head, with its sly smile and fiery velvet pelt. 'I wish,' she said, 'that you would take your nap.' 'No,' the prince said patiently, 'you must make a true wish. And I will grant it beca.. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 5dedd66 | Tell me the story of the locket.' 'Once upon a time, my lord, in the best and the worst of all possible words, a princess fell in love with a young man who loved to draw pictures.' 'Like Ducon.' 'Very like your cousin. Every day for a year, she gave him a rose. She would pick it at dawn from her father's gardens and then take it to the highest place in the castle, a place so high that everyone had forgotten about it except for the doves tha.. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| c40ba90 | Her eyes met his. Garner started, feeling the implosion like a silent lightning bolt all through him. Those eyes, as green as river moss, watched him just above the surface of the water. Her pale hair floated all around her like the petals of some extravagant flower. In the next moment he caught his breath. It was not, could not possibly be Damaris, silent as a wild thing, her nose under water, and from what he could see, naked as an eel. A.. | spirit water wild | Patricia A. McKillip | |
| 6d57e74 | Easier to understand the wind . . . Easier to walk on the surface of the frothing sea, than to remember the hunger to do it. Easier to remember knowledge than ignorance, experience than innocence. Easier to know what you are than remember what you were. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| cefeea1 | I trust the depths don't leak." "No." "Then I'll sleep happily buried in stone." | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 535902f | But you had a right to be angry." "Yes. But not to hurt those I love, or myself." | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 4f3fe84 | Lydea was a blown flame; Lydea was yesterday; Lydea, alone on the streets of Ombria, was already changing into something neither of them would recognize, if she survived to see them again. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 4afe386 | Lavender,' he commented, looking at the ribbons in her sleeve. 'The prince was tired, he said, of looking at so much black.' 'So am I,' he breathed. ... Sorrow caught her, as it did sometimes unexpectedly: a thumbprint of fire in the hollow of her throat. She swallowed it, said only, 'Because you have been working so hard, my lord.' 'I'm not used to it yet.' He measured a trailing end of the ribbon at her wrist between his fingers, obliviou.. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 0af6b5e | Experience teaches us restrictions," the mage reminded him. "They are not dreamed up in some peaceful tower on a mountaintop." | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 79f73fc | This palace,' he had said, 'is a small city, past lying close to present like one shoe next to another. If you look at them in a mirror, left becomes right, present becomes past... | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 90d3137 | Lydea found Mag's knowledge astonishing, and had gotten into the habit of taking lessons with the prince. They helped each other study, sometimes with the aid of puppets. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 68ace4a | And then he left the palace to roam the streets of Ombria, where he painted shadows as he searched for light within them, painted thick, barred doors, as he searched in their hewn, scarred grains for what it was they hid, painted high windowless walls as if, rebuilding them stone by stone on paper, he could dismantle them and finally see the secret life behind the real. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 79b07e4 | He finally took his harp out of the cobwebs, walked out the door, and admitted who he was: the Unforgiven. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 359ace4 | There are pieces to the puzzle missing,' Camas said. He was tugging his hair; his eyes glowed eerily in the red light from a stained-glass lamp. 'And pieces that don't yet fit. What, for instance, precipitates the shift from city to shadow city? Is it sorcery? Has it to do with the precarious state of affairs in the House of Greve? The powerless heir, the bastard who cannot act? What secrets are hidden within the secret palace? What is ther.. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 4b25d07 | The tutor's eyelids drooped; his thoughts drained out of his face like water seeping into earth. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| fc27678 | That man would betray his own shadow. And for what? A child's tale.' 'Is it?' Mag looked at her. 'Is it only a tale?' For a moment, the purple eyes grew dark, black as the little rags of shadows that Mag saw on empty streets or patches of barren ground, attached to nothing, seemingly blown at random from some place adrift in light. | Patricia A. McKillip |