1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5048
5049
5050
5051
5052
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 |
| 3234dc1 | First they came for the hackers. But I never did anything illegal with my computer, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the pornographers. But I thought there was too much smut on the Internet anyway, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the anonymous remailers. But a lot of nasty stuff gets sent from anon.penet.fi, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the encryption users. But I could never figure out how to work PGP anyway, s.. | David Brin | ||
| a486cc6 | Such moments are too often lost, the private interludes between the tribal gatherings, the transit between destinations, when the city becomes an intimate landscape, a secret shared by two. This was once their neighborhood and she wants to reclaim it for a little while, to walk past the apartment where they spent so much of their lives, even if it makes her sad thinking of all that transpired there, and all that's lost. It makes her melanch.. | Jay McInerney | ||
| e550766 | Last night Vicky was talking about the ineffability of inner experience. She told you to imagine what it was like to be a bat. Even if you knew what sonar was and how it worked, you could never know what it feels like to have it, or what it feels like to be a small, furry creature hanging upside down from the roof of a cave. She said that certain facts are accessible only from one point of view - the point of view of the creature who experi.. | point-of-view | Jay McInerney | |
| b3f93aa | From the window, Luke looked out over the water towers of Fifth Avenue to the park, studying the senescence of the daylight, which seemed almost viscous, ready to coagulate--trying to register that perfect moment of transition from day to evening, that instant when the light, in dying, was most nearly itself. | Jay McInerney | ||
| cfae3ae | Love is recreational, it needs not be aspirational | Jay McInerney | ||
| 5372633 | Your head is pounding with voices of confession and revelation. You followed the rails of white powder across the mirror in pursuit of a point of convergence where everything was cross-referenced according to a master code. For a second, you felt terrific. You were coming to grips. Then the coke ran out; as you hoovered the last line, you saw yourself hideously close-up with a rolled twenty sticking out of your nose. The goal is receding. W.. | Jay McInerney | ||
| 2abc8e4 | The sound of the tumblers in the locks of your apartment door puts you in mind of dungeons. The place is haunted. Just this morning you found a makeup brush beside the toilet. Memories lurk like dustballs at the backs of drawers. The stereo is a special model that plays only music fraught with poignant associations. | melancholy | Jay McInerney | |
| db316a7 | Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. The need the Bolivian Marching Powder. | drugs | Jay McInerney | |
| a23790e | Goliama chast ot vremeto si prekarva taka: predstavia si kakvo bi kazala, bez vs'shchnost da go kazva. | Colum McCann | ||
| 0822610 | Prekrasen den. Potapiakha kraka v shchastieto i ne biakha gotovi da gi izvadiat. Khv'rliakha klechki v'v vodnite v'rtopcheta i gi nabliudavakha kak se izgubvat. Postelikha si odeialo i iadokha sandvichi. Po-k'sno sestra i se razplaka vnezapno, kato promiana v'v vremeto, niamashe druga prichina osven izpukvaneto na tapata ot vinoto. Dzheizlin i podade salfetka. Gloriia se razsmia i im kaza, che mnogo otdavna e otv'd skr'bta i i e omr'znalo v.. | Colum McCann | ||
| ebc93f6 | She likes the word mother and all the complications it brings. She isn't interested in true or birth or adoptive or whatever other series of mothers there are in the world. Gloria was her mother. Jazzlyn was too. They were like strangers on a porch, Gloria and Jazzlyn, with the evening sun going down: they just sat there together and neither could say what the other one knew, so they just kept quiet, and watched the day descend. One of them.. | Colum McCann | ||
| 81e1fe4 | Oh, the mind itself is a deep, deep well. Lower me down and let me touch water. | Colum McCann | ||
| 63acf21 | His theme was happiness--what it is and what it might not have been, where he might find it and where it might have disappeared. | Colum McCann | ||
| 2c2a8be | It was Vietnam that brought me to my knees. In she came and took all three of my boys from right under my nose. She picked them up out of their beds, shook the sheets, and said, These ones are mine. | Colum McCann | ||
| c733a7c | Everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried. | Colum McCann | ||
| 346914d | What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the war, the poverty--was that life could be capable of small beauties. | Colum McCann | ||
| e772999 | It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime. | Colum McCann | ||
| fbd009e | We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's a chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable. | god sentiment serendipity | Colum McCann | |
| e8d7cba | We could not have found peace unless the desire for it was already here. | peace | Colum McCann | |
| 425b812 | There isn't a story in the world that isn't in part, at least, addressed to the past. | Colum McCann | ||
| fb40559 | That's what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence. | god | Colum McCann | |
| a8bf7b2 | A bottle of gin sat in the center of the table. More emptiness than gin in the bottle. | Colum McCann | ||
| 20bc611 | The disconnect between his mouth and his mind. That's where the camera came in. It was the unspoken thing between him and the others. | Colum McCann | ||
| 3543f79 | There was a quote about "standing in a river too long or long enough" that I can't find now. Anyone remember? If so, what page?" | Colum McCann | ||
| 585166b | A priest? I said. --A monk or some such. One of those worker guys. Liberation theowhateveritis. --Theologian, said the other. --One of those guys who thinks that Jesus was on welfare. | Colum McCann | ||
| b57de62 | she might not have been party to love, but it still took a lot of volume to fill a life. | Colum McCann | ||
| e26c0db | There were canvases in our backseat. We had tried to flog them at Max's Kansas City the night before, but we had failed. Paintings that nobody wanted. Still, we had carefully arranged them so they wouldn't get scratched. We had even placed bits of styrofoam between them to keep them from rubbing one another. if only we had been so careful with ourselves. | Colum McCann | ||
| 1251579 | Rain fell more steadily now. Grey and unrelenting. Nobody seemed to notice. Rain on the puddles. Rain on the high brickwork. Rain on the slate roofs. Rain on the rain itself. | Colum McCann | ||
| d61601d | When I was seventeen I had a body that Adam woulda dropped Eve for. Hot-potato time. It was prime, no lie. Nothing in the wrong place. I had legs a hundred miles long and a booty to die for. Adam woulda said to Eve, "Eve, I'm leaving you, honey," and Jesus himself woulda been in the background saying, "Adam, you're one lucky motherfucker." | Colum McCann | ||
| 0c82c8a | although i know that a wall to happiness is expecting too much happiness | Colum McCann | ||
| c84039f | Kracha prez sveta, vse edno mi e v dzhoba. | Colum McCann | ||
| a978c88 | There'll be lawyers in heaven before you see somethin' so good again. | Colum McCann | ||
| 2a92323 | Predlagakh im samo istini i nikakva chestnost. | Colum McCann | ||
| 0a44d84 | She had that emigrant's sadness--she would never go back to her old country--it was gone in more senses than one--but she was forever gazing homewards anyway. | Colum McCann | ||
| c27aa32 | If you think of the world without people it's about the most perfect thing there ever is. It's all balanced and shit. But then come the people, and they fuck it up. | Colum McCann | ||
| d46df55 | I was reminded of how years before, he had drifted away from one of our afternoon strolls and got surrounded by the tide - Corrigan, isolated on a sandbar, tangled in light, voices from the shores drifting over him, calling his name. | Colum McCann | ||
| fe37f11 | R'kata mu dokosna moiata. Tozi t'i star, t'i choveshki poriv na zhelanieto. | Colum McCann | ||
| a747f6e | V'rtiashchi se vrati izkhv'rliakha chetv'rtinki razgovor na ulitsata. | Colum McCann | ||
| 999371e | Nadnikna k'm p'lnata chasha i popita da ne bi neshcho da ne e nared. - Prosto ne s'm v nastroenie. Pogledna me, kato che li beshe mnogo veroiatno da s'm izv'nzemna. Ne pie kafe? Obadete se v Agentsiiata za antiamerikanski deinosti. | Colum McCann | ||
| aaca3a3 | Po diavolite, Park aveniu! St'pvala s'm tam samo pri igra na Monopoli! | Colum McCann | ||
| 4263498 | Women in long dresses, aloof and elegant, the mark of bonnet ribbons still on the soft of their necks. | Colum McCann | ||
| 687ec6e | It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once How they mangle it and revere it. How they color even their silences. | Colum McCann | ||
| 5d9793f | Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief. | Colum McCann | ||
| 61c1337 | Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was non ov those things, he said, and it had to be fought for. | Colum McCann |