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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6fe8ceb | La musica doveva avere il volto di una donna da seddure. Chiudevo gli occhi per immaginarla, per dare colore ai suoi capelli e ai suoi occhi, ma compresi che finche dal mio sax fossero usciti soltanto ragli d' asino, quella ragazza non sarebbe mai esistita. | Manuel Rivas | ||
| 9892865 | Sisters are like that; you can't spend too much time with them without fighting about something. | Sean Stewart | ||
| ec8b956 | For long after guilty memories fade, the urge for penance lingers: strong and blind as the will to drink rain and grope for sunlight. | Sean Stewart | ||
| 4d62057 | xxx each of us carries his or her own solitude. We are invisible and we cannot be touched. | Sean Stewart | ||
| 1ce5882 | To tell only the happy stories: that isn't life. It isn't true, and you deserve better. You deserve to know. | Sean Stewart | ||
| 967667a | We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way. --Irving Townshend, Separate Lives | Michael Korda | ||
| 4fe10b1 | Lee was a born pedagogue, never happier than when his children were learning to do something the right way. It is a testament to Lee's affection and patience that his children did not rebel. In fact, they appear to have thrived. | encouragement parenthood | Michael Korda | |
| 15b662c | Cats don't think they're owned by anybody. | free | Michael Korda | |
| 8135f02 | Ask a book publisher how many copies a book has sold, and he or she, presuming you're not the author, will probably try to remember the size of the first printing, then double it. If you're the author, the publisher will try to remember the number of copies that were shipped and cut that in half in order to avoid encouraging you to expect a big royalty check. | Michael Korda | ||
| 416fb72 | The small Greek city-states could not understand what the organisation of a great empire and the movement of many thousands of men entailed: they themselves thought in terms of hundreds or at the most a few thousands. It would be well over a century until a Greece, unified under Alexander the Great, would have to tackle the problems of Empire. | Ernle Bradford | ||
| 59741dd | Remembering the treatment that had been accorded the Knights and soldiers of St. Elmo, the Maltese inhabitants of Senglea took no prisoners. Hence there arose the expression (used in Malta to this day) 'St. Elmo's pay' for any action in which no mercy is given. | retribution revenge st-elmo war | Ernle Bradford | |
| e7dd694 | In Malta, the Wars of Religion reached their climax. If both sides believed that they saw Paradise in the bright sky above them, they had a close and very intimate knowledge of Hell. | jihad knights-of-st-john malta war | Ernle Bradford | |
| 9c3a75d | It was an excellent place to be if you wanted to hear crowds of wretched philosophers heaping abuse on one another--an endless number of historians reading out their imbecilic writings--innumerable poets reciting their drivel to the wild applause of other poets--gaggles of magicians showing their tricks--throngs of fortune-tellers telling fortunes--countless lawyers perverting justice--or armies of peddlers hawking whatever rubbish came to .. | Tony Perrottet | ||
| 88f108d | Tony is waiting outside, his eyes crinkled into a smile. 'Come inside the house,' he says. He knows what I am feeling. And in I go, where the dogs lie flat on the kitchen floor, tails wagging, and the kettle is whistling, and the house is very warm. | Helen Macdonald | ||
| 9bdedbf | Four bricks could be affixed under a skateboard and used as really inefficient wheels. Ha! Let's see Tony Hawk do tricks on that board. Actually, he probably could. | Jarod Kintz | ||
| 5dae503 | I've always found old bookstores exciting. Whenever I'm in a city that's new to me, I immedicately look through the telephone directory for BOOKS, USED AND RARE. Book dealers send me their catalogs, and I read them as carefully as I would a letter from an old friend, never knowing what treasure I might find. Sometimes the catalogs contain printed material other than books, such as old photographs, newspapers, pamphlets, postcards, and lette.. | bookstores letters newspapers pamphlets photographs postcards | Walter Dean Myers | |
| 7c8720b | the ideas I found in books helped me imagine a life I wanted to live. | Walter Dean Myers | ||
| ef0eda8 | It's hard to be brave when you can stumble across a world of hurt around any corner. | Walter Dean Myers | ||
| bfbc638 | In a sane world, we would be heroes. Teachers would applaud as we walked into the school. There is the smart one, the one who wants to be a writer. And there is the runner. | sane | Walter Dean Myers | |
| cf3c127 | Yeah, it's hard, baby It's hard right down to the bone I said Oh, it's hard baby It's hard right down to the very bone It's hard when you're a woman And you find yourself all alone I've been flapping and scrapping And running from door to door You know I've been flapping and scrapping, honey Running from door to door | women | Walter Dean Myers | |
| f460972 | To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 585b922 | What was this curious, syntactically repetitive emotion? It expressed a certain reflexivity about the amorous state, it meant deriving more pleasure from one's own emotional enthusiasm than from the object of affection which had elicited it. | Alain de Botton | ||
| aa33451 | Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and our weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place? Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone to believe in--but how can we believe in the beloved .. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 992eb2a | Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang .. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 2a3dfc6 | Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social group--and it is these specifics that tend to bore us whenever they lie outside of our own experience. But then, a layer beneath the particulars, the are hidden: the psychological, social and political themes that transcend the stories' temporal and geographic.. | specifics stories storytelling universalism | Alain de Botton | |
| 1b6c86e | It was not by mere coincidence that sex so disturbed us for thousands of years: repressive religious dictates and social taboos grew out of aspects of our nature that cannot now just be wished away. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 058e669 | Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union wit.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 09fc0a5 | Epicurus observed that: Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 8f9cd22 | The notion of buildings that speak helps us to place at the very centre of our architectural conundrums the question of the values we want to live by -- rather than merely of how we want things to look. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 136130e | Precedent forces us to suppose that later generations will one day walk around our houses with the same attitude of horror and amusement with which we now consider many of the possessions of the dead. They will marvel at our wallpapers and our sofas and laugh at aesthetic crimes to which we are impervious. This awareness can lend to our affections a fragile, nervous quality. Knowing that what we now love may in the future, for reasons beyon.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 1a20f60 | Analogising architecture with ethics helps us to discern that there is unlikely ever to be a single source of beauty in a building, just as no one quality can ever underpin excellence in a person. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 8e7e053 | Journeys are the midwives of thought | Alain de Botton | ||
| b557b20 | a lack of love: between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself. | philosophy schopenhauer | Alain de Botton | |
| 95c1968 | It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly. | philosophy schopenhauer | Alain de Botton | |
| 1f1de3d | The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of years. We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends | philosophy schopenhauer | Alain de Botton | |
| 4517b0e | When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 4030eb8 | A fundamental truth, is that there is simply no such thing as an inherently boring person or thing. People are only in danger of coming across as such when they either fail to understand their deeper selves or don't dare or know how to communicate them to others. | confidence insightful inspirational self-esteem self-help | Alain de Botton | |
| f8d259c | At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. We should add: it is a privilege.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 1a06a18 | You ask whether the Orient is all I imagined it to be. Yes, it is--and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind.' 8. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 0244f82 | There is only one person to whom we can expose our catalogue of grievances, one person who can be the recipient of all our accumulated rage at the injustices and imperfections of our lives. It is of course the height of absurdity to blame them. But this is to misunderstand the rules under which love operates. It is because we cannot scream at the forces who are really responsible that we get angry with those we are sure will best tolerate u.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 6045d4d | The accusations we make of our lovers make no particular sense. We would utter such unfair things to no one else on earth. But our wild charges are a peculiar proof of intimacy and trust, a symptom of love itself--and in their own way a perverted manifestation of commitment. Whereas we can say something sensible and polite to any stranger, it is only in the presence of the lover we wholeheartedly believe in that can we dare to be extravagan.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 97b5fc3 | considered earthquakes and decided they were the result of air trapped inside the earth that had sought a way out, a form of geological flatulence: | Alain de Botton | ||
| aa4239b | No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work. | life living-forever time work | James S.A. Corey | |
| ff3242d | Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would neve.. | arrivals travel | Alain de Botton |