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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4acdcca | The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time. This difference makes finding latitude child's play, and turns the determination of longitude, especially at sea, into an adult dilemma--one that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history. | Dava Sobel | ||
| 07e3c97 | To learn one's longitude at sea, one needs to know what time it is aboard ship and also the time at the home port or another place of known longitude--at that very same moment. The two clock times enable the navigator to convert the hour difference into a geographical separation. Since the Earth takes twenty-four hours to complete one full revolution of three hundred sixty degrees, one hour marks one twenty-fourth of a spin, or fifteen degr.. | Dava Sobel | ||
| 91e92bf | How sour sweet music is When time is broke and no proportion kept! | Dava Sobel | ||
| 9da6bdf | Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch. Even when the bulbs of the hourglass shatter, when darkness withholds the shadow from the sundial, when the mainspring winds down so far that the clock hands hold still as death, time its.. | Dava Sobel | ||
| ca6adb0 | There was only one trial of Galileo, and yet it seems there were a thousand--the suppression of science by religion, the defense of individualism against authority, the clash between revolutionary and establishment, the challenge of radical new discoveries to ancient beliefs, the struggle against intolerance for freedom of thought and freedom of speech. | Dava Sobel | ||
| 7800567 | Catherine Marshall writes, "Resignation is barren of faith in the love of God.... Resignation lies down quietly in the dust of a universe from which God seems to have fled, and the door of Hope swings shut."2" | Richard J. Foster | ||
| 0ff3d03 | He holds his hands up. 'OK, OK. I was only asking. I do still care about you, you know. I know things haven't worked out the way we planned.' I raise my eyebrows at this, the understatement of the year, but he ignores me and carries on: 'But I'll always care about you, whether you want me to or not.' I hear Polly's voice in my head, snorting: care about you? He had a funny way of showing it. How long would I have gone on pretending everythi.. | Laura Marshall | ||
| bb252e1 | Dear God,' I said inside myself, 'when I came here, maybe I was partly running off from home for fun and freedom and adventure. But I have a notion that You had something else in mind in letting me come. Anyway if You can use me here in this Cove, well, here I am. | Catherine Marshall | ||
| 56cea6b | Quietly, Miss Alice was demonstrating this God of love and beauty too -- in small ways and in large. For a few, the concept that life did not have to be all starkness and misery was slowly taking root. Tentatively, timidly - -constantly encouraged by Miss Alice -- some of the women were at last reaching out for light and beauty and joy. | christianity | Catherine Marshall | |
| 6614b94 | Often God shuts a door in our face, And then subsequently opens the door through which we need to go. CATHERINE MARSHALL | Julia Cameron | ||
| 51f18a1 | And you dare to wear the golden spurs of a knight? You dare to call yourself a Marshal of France and carry the fleur-de-lis on your coat of arms? The meanest lackey in this hall knows more of honour and loyalty than you! Hang and burn my servants and kill me - kill too, now that you have handed your companion-in-arms Arnaud de Montsalvy, to your cousin. With my last breath, I shall call on Heaven to witness that Gilles de Rais is a traitor .. | medieval | Juliette Benzoni | |
| d1206c4 | According to my Glendale high school days, the road along the ocean that stretched from San Diego to San Francisco was staked out in the 1780's or so by the Spanish. The Spanish were afraid the French or Russians would claim the land along the coast first. France had picked up a big chunk of land between the Mississipi and the Rocky Mountains. Russia was coming south across the Berring Sea and down the coast from what would eventually be Al.. | Stuart M. Kaminsky | ||
| 23c3e5c | The air was hot and wet, as if it had absorbed the sweat of countless bodies. It dripped also with scandal. | Monica Ali | ||
| af441f7 | A man cannot live without water. He cannot live without it, but he can bear the thought of no water. A man can live without sex. He can live without it, but he cannot bear the thought of no sex. | Monica Ali | ||
| 144a5b7 | We open a book, we turn a newspaper page, we allow the television and the radio to come into our homes. All the things we are told every day - are the true? | Monica Ali | ||
| 8d0fa78 | In the rainy season, back home, when the land had given way to water and the buffaloes grew webbed feet, when the hens took to the roofs, when marooned goats teetered on minuscule islands, when the women splashed across on the raised walkway to the cooking hut and found they could no longer kindle a dung-and-husk fire and looked to their reserves, when the rain rang louder than cow bells, | Monica Ali | ||
| a12d226 | And the city itself was just a glow on the dark earth... | Monica Ali | ||
| 9cd6295 | When you have fallen low, she told herself, what hurts is pretending you are high. | Monica Ali | ||
| 66aa9d0 | Nishi's sister, who was sixteen years old, had gone for a "holiday" in Sylhet and returned six months later with a husband and a swelling belly. Nishi, strong on forward-planning skills, was taking evasive action: she was going on a holiday of her own and she would return when she was twenty-five. At that ancient age the danger of marriage was over." | Monica Ali | ||
| 912fb8b | I don't look down on them, but what can you do? If a man has only ever driven a rickshaw and never in his life held a book in his hand, then what can you expect from him? | Monica Ali | ||
| 0839305 | Has my watch stopped?" she wrote. "No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don't look at them. Think of something else--anything else; think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting." | Ariel Levy | ||
| e0926a4 | But in a strange way, I am comforted by the truth. Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive. Accepting this rule gives me a funny flicker of peace. | Ariel Levy | ||
| 885b27c | I asked if she'd ever wanted children. She told me, "Everybody doesn't get everything." It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn't get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality." | Ariel Levy | ||
| 9e26d2e | Grief is another world. Like the carnal world, it is one where reason doesn't work. | Ariel Levy | ||
| ac9eb45 | There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda. | Ariel Levy | ||
| 1212407 | But I understood, now, her dilemma. I wanted what she had wanted, what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can't have it all. | Ariel Levy | ||
| f2eb9b1 | It can be fun to feel exceptional--to be the loophole woman, to have a whole power thing, to be an honorary man. But if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven't made any progress. | gender-equality gender-roles misogyny raunch-culture | Ariel Levy | |
| 88d0bc7 | That trip was like all my life, distilled: a compulsion to thrust myself toward adventure, offset by a longing to crawl into the pouch of some benevolent kangaroo who would take me bounding, protected, through life. | Ariel Levy | ||
| d2eb129 | Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It's also a symptom of narcissism. | Ariel Levy | ||
| 44e4f1e | Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful can turn to God. | Ariel Levy | ||
| 505b8e3 | For a while, it was as poisonous and wrenching as it had been since the day it happened, as intolerable: a crime against nature. Then the grief went back to sleep in my body. | Ariel Levy | ||
| 4ad30ee | Bowman, too, had been born in a great city, in the French Hospital in Manhattan, in the burning heat of August and very early in the morning when all geniuses are born, as Pearson once told him. There had been an unbreathing stillness, and near dawn faint, distant thunder. It grew slowly louder, then gusts of cooler air before a tremendous storm broke with lightning and sheets of rain, and when it was over, | James Salter | ||
| 4436853 | Gertrude Stein, when asked why she wrote, replied "For praise." Lorca said he wrote to be loved. Faulkner said a writer wrote for glory. I may at times have written for those reasons, it's hard to know. Overall I write because I see the world in a certain way that no dialogue or series of them can begin to describe, that no book can fully render, though the greatest books thrill in their attempt. A great book may be an accident, but a goo.. | James Salter | ||
| 0d6d4f7 | England? The worst of all. You know, I do some business there, I have friends in England. Their flats are broken into constantly. The police come, they look around, they dust for fingerprints. Well, we know who it is, they say. Wonderful, who? The same ones who did it last time, they say. | James Salter | ||
| 4ac63ab | Greatness is something which can be regarded in a number of ways," he said. "It is, of course, the apotheosis, man raised to his highest powers, but it also can be, in a way, like insanity, a certain kind of imbalance, a flaw, in most cases a beneficial flaw, an anomaly, an accident." "Well, many great men are eccentric," Viri said, "even narrow." "Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense." -- | James Salter | ||
| 1bf683c | No hay felicidad como esta dicha: mananas apacibles, la luz del rio, el fin de semana por delante. Vivian una vida rusa, una vida fecunda, entrelazada, en la que un infortunio de uno de los miembros, un fracaso, una enfermedad, romperia el equilibrio de todos. Aquella vida era como una prenda de vestir. Su belleza estaba fuera, su calor dentro>> | James Salter | ||
| 8a17596 | The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was not a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone. | James Salter | ||
| 95e911d | When Vivian began to recover they brought her a fluted glass vase with an arrangement of lilies and yellow roses from the flower shop on Eighteenth Street owned by an elegant man Arthur had once been involved with, Christos, who was friends with both of them. He, too, loved the theater and everything about it. Later he opened a restaurant. | James Salter | ||
| cb2949e | He had never been particularly young, or to put it another way, he had been young for a long time and now was at his true age, old enough for civilized comfrots and not too old for the primal ones. | James Salter | ||
| 0679c23 | One feels pan of a vast servitude, anonymous and unending, all of it vanishing unexpectedly with the passing image of Madame Picquet behind the glass of her office, that faintly vulgar, thrilling profile. As I think of it, there's an ache in my chest. I cannot control these dreams in which she seems to lie in my future like a whole season of extravagant meals if only I knew how to arrange it. | James Salter | ||
| ec1194c | It was among the knowledgeable others that one hoped to be talked about and admired. It was not impossible--the world of squadrons is small. The years would bow to you; you would be remembered, your name like a thoroughbred's, a horse that ran and won. | James Salter | ||
| 614b236 | He wanted one thing, the possibility of one thing: to be famous. He wanted to be central to the human family, why else is there to long for, to hope? ...He had nothing. He had only the carefully laid out luggage of bourgeois life, his scalp beginning to show beneath the hair, his immaculate hands. And the knowledge; yes, he had knowledge...But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the ante.. | James Salter | ||
| a33c194 | The fast was ended. Like the story he had read to them so many times, of the poor couple who were given three wishes and wasted them, he had not wanted enough. He saw that clearly. When all was said, he had wanted one thing, it was far too small: he had wanted them to grow up in the happiest of homes. One of the last great realizations is that life will not be what you dreamed. | James Salter | ||
| c1366ed | He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, he cannot recognize it. It is more precious, he knows, than anything else they might own, but he does not have it. | James Salter |