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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 39adc42 | He saw the role of the serious writer as both lofty and practical in the same instant. He used to say that literature was one of the first indications of civilization. He used to say that a fine piece of prose could not only cure a depression, it could clear up a sinus headache. Like many great healers, he meant to heal himself. | John Cheever | ||
| db16dad | This is being written abord the S.S. Augustus, three days at sea. My suitcase is full of peanut butter, and I am a fugitive from the suburbs of all large cities. | John Cheever | ||
| 9d43f63 | Adultery and cruelty have well-marked courses of action but what can a man do when his wife wants to appear naked on the stage? | John Cheever | ||
| 0e9877b | He might have been compared to a summer's day, particularly the last hours of one. | John Cheever | ||
| 2b11602 | Burying ourselves in the cultivation of a single talent is now ill advised. What we need are lots of little projects, sent out into different parts of the world, by means of many media. Thus do we carry on that irreplaceably useful conversation between now and next. | Grant McCracken | ||
| 4d01cab | We need [retail] shelf space to serve as our deep space. We are going to put things there and invite the consumer to give it a try....Most consumers engage in variety seeking, in any case. Why not invite them to pursue it within a purchase instead of across purchases? | Grant McCracken | ||
| f05b660 | The city is full of accidental revelation, half-heard cries for help, and strangers who will tell you everything at the first suspicion of sympathy, | John Cheever | ||
| 8c4aef0 | Like most incurable fibbers, she had an extravagant regard for the truth, which she expressed by sending up signals meant to indicate that she was lying. | John Cheever | ||
| 45aa7fc | years of resolute self-denial, instead of rewarding him with reserves of fortitude, had left him more than ordinarily susceptible to temptation. | John Cheever | ||
| 86f8566 | You might have said that his look was thoughtful until you realized that he was not a thoughtful man. It was the earnest and contained look of those who are a little hard of hearing or a little stupid. | John Cheever | ||
| b27590c | Damoclean, but these were people without pretense or affectation, | John Cheever | ||
| 45f8efd | Seated at the table, high in her firmament of gin, she looked critically at her brother and his wife, remembering some real or imagined injustice of her youth, for with any proximity the constellations of some families generate among themselves an asperity that nothing can sweeten. | John Cheever | ||
| d656d1a | There is something universal about being stood up in a city restaurant between one and two--a spiritual no-man's-land, whose blasted trees, entrenchments, and ratholes we all share, disarmed by the gullibility of our hearts. | John Cheever | ||
| f6eb099 | Mixed with the love we hold for our native country is the fact that it is the place where we were raised, and, should anything have gone a little wrong in this process, we will be reminded of this fault, by the scene of the crime, until the day we die. | John Cheever | ||
| aad74e2 | Each year, we rent a house at the edge of the sea and drive there in the first of the summer--with the dog and cat, the children, and the cook--arriving at a strange place a little before dark. The journey to the sea has its ceremonious excitements, it has gone on for so many years now, and there is the sense that we are, as in our dreams we have always known ourselves to be, migrants and wanderers--travelers, at least, with a traveler's ac.. | summer-house summertime | John Cheever | |
| 342b442 | The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable, even to a purblind waiter, | John Cheever | ||
| 3aa1bd6 | And walking back from the river I remember the galling loneliness of my adolescence, from which I do not seem to have completely escaped. It is the sense of the voyeur, the lonely, lonely boy with no role in life but to peer in at the lighted windows of other people's contentment and vitality. It seems comical -- farcical -- that, having been treated so generously, I should be struck with this image of a kid in the rain walking along the ro.. | John Cheever | ||
| a470478 | Oh, God, you bore me this morning," my wife said. "I've been bored for the last six years," I said. I took a cab to the airport and an afternoon plane back to the city. We had been married twelve years and had been lovers for two years before our marriage, making a total of fourteen years in all that we had been together, and I never saw her again." | John Cheever | ||
| 18b1910 | zogjer sazogadoebriv azrs up`ro meti gavlena ak`vs, vidre shen ggonia. xalxs samart`lianobis zeimis danaxva scquria da magis ardanaxva ar sheiz'leba. hoda, mec` geubnebi: miec`i xalxs is, rac` scquria da rasac` moelis. - mere, me ro mart`la arap`eri ar damishvebia? - nc, eg jerjerobit` aravin ar ic`is. adamianebi daskvnebs xan p`ak`tebis sap`uz'velze aket`ben, xanac` - p`ak`tebis ararsebobis miuxedavad. shen t`u sheni sorodan ar gamoz'veri .. | D.B.C. Pierre | ||
| 971682e | Where TV lets you down, I'm discovering, is by not convincing you how things really work in the world. Like, do buses stop anywhere along the road, to pick up any kind of asshole, or do you have to be at a regular bus stop? | D.B.C. Pierre | ||
| 06c4c13 | This would never happen to Van Damme. Heroes never shit. They only fuck and kill. | D.B.C. Pierre | ||
| 3de546e | She gets that fabulous edge that girls get to their voices, the edge that spells oncoming Tantrum From the Bowels of Hell, that says, 'I'll scratch the heavens down around you and suck the fucken air from your lungs and spit you to fucken hell and you know it. | D.B.C. Pierre | ||
| 1de9c55 | Ash liked his characters at or over the edge of madness, constructing systems of belief and survival from the fragments of experience available to them. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| b85b790 | The thin child knew enough fairy stories to know that a prohibition in a story is only there to be broken. The first humans were fated to eat the apple. The dice were loaded against them. The grandfather was pleased with himself. The thin child found no one in this story with whom to sympathise. Except maybe the snake, which had no asked to be made use of as a temper. The snake wanted simply to coil about in the branches. | A. S. Byatt | ||
| f027d20 | I wish," said Dr Perholt to the djinn, "I wish you would love me." "You honor me," said the djinn, "and maybe you have wasted your wish, for it may well be that love would have happened anyway, since we are together, and sharing our life stories, as lovers do." | life-stories love | A.S. Byatt | |
| 7555c65 | She tells her love while half asleep, In the dark hours, With half-words whispered low: As Earth stirs in her winter sleep And puts out grass and flowers Despite the snow, Despite the falling snow. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 6337f88 | Well, that explains the repeated commission of wanton acts of poetry. I was starting to feel like I was being punished for my earthly sins by being trapped in an A. S. Byatt novel. | Chris Moriarty | ||
| 98a98d9 | How could he ever sleep, in such a roar of silence, how could he forgo a conscious moment of the bliss of solitude? He stretched arms and legs to all points of the compass and fell asleep almost immediately. He woke and slept, woke and slept, time after time before dawn, each time taking possession again of the dark and the silence. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 52fbac6 | Pomona's Tom's age and lucky enough to be as pretty as her name--so dangerous, don't you think, giving romantic names to little scraps who may grow up as plain as doorposts. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| e13ec7f | I have always believed I cd diagnose this state of which they regard as as inspired by one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, one graceful attitude of body or mind, one female history of some twenty-two years from, shall we say, 1821-1844--I have always believed this to be something of the masking itself under the particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet, who assumes and informs both. I wd have told you--no, I.. | love | A.S. Byatt | |
| 11bfff7 | His mother was a good and fearful Lutheran, who gave away both time and money, visiting hospitals for the poor, organising bazaars and clothing collections. But she ate from Meissen porcelain with silver spoons. There were hideous inconsistencies. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| fbaddf2 | I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem, and now am neither, | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 23247a3 | No two faces are the same; this endless human diversity is one of the more hopeful things about the preponderant species on the planet. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 97dfdec | I do love you, my Florence. Will you always be so sensible?" "No. I quite expect to become very silly as I grow older. Everyone seems to." | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 9402ca4 | Dorothy looked at everything as though it might vanish. The bright daily pottery, the spice-jars, the sweep of the staircase, the pigeons in the stable yard. What had been real was now like a thick film, a coloured oilcloth, spread over a cauldron of vapours which shaped and reshaped themselves into shadowy forms, embracing, threatening, glaring. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 81e0f98 | Being as I am both a woman and working-class, choice don't come into it, much, for me. I do what I must." Charles/Karl wanted to say he was sorry, and couldn't. "I imagine you don't talk to many of us, as against studying us in bulk. The dangerous masses. To be put in camps, and set to work on projects." "You are being unfair," said Charles/Karl. "You are mocking me." "We can do that, at least, if we dare." "Miss Warren," said Charles/Karl,.. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 65d29d4 | Maud laughed, drily. Roland said, "And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's really powerlessness." Impotence," said Maud, leaning over, interested. I was avoiding that word, because that precisely We are so knowing. And all we've found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 113b42f | She was called Maria. She was a Maria Magdalena who washed away sins, and she was Venus Anadyomene to me, though she was ill-nourished I think since birth, my artist's eye saw she was puny, though my lover's eye saw her breasts as globes of milky marble, and the tuft between her legs as the bushes surrounding the gate to Paradise Lost--and Regained. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 58c748b | The truth is," said Florence, "that the women we are--have become--are not fit to do without men, or to live with them, in the world as it was. And if change, and don't, there will be no help for us." | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 30ce5ac | Ah," said Florence, grimly. "A woman has to be extraordinary, she can't just do things as though she had a right. You have to get better marks than the Senior Wrangler, and still you can't have a degree." | A.S. Byatt | ||
| e2581ea | Suppressing natural feelings, Methley said, in the end distorted both mind and body. And excluding them from the consideration of novelists distorted the novel, infantilised it, turned good fiction into bad lying. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| b06434b | Se amava quel viso non indulgente, era perche era netto, espressivo e risoluto. Vedeva, o gli sembrava di vedere, come tali qualita fossero state mascherate o soffocate da atteggiamenti piu convenzionali: una modestia simulata, un'appropriata pazienza, un disprezzo che si spacciava per calma. Al suo peggio - oh, lui la vedeva chiaramente, malgrado la possessione che esercitava su di lui - al suo peggio guardava in basso e di traverso e sorr.. | identity love possession women-s-nature | A.S. Byatt | |
| a7420bc | Julian occasionally thought that enjoying oneself was a very strenuous occupation. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 5986cc4 | Olive thought she had forgotten what pain could be. She was a railway tunnel in which a battering train had come to a fiery halt. She was a burrow in which a creature had wedged itself and could go neither forwards nor back. | A.S. Byatt |