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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a6d6464 | UCL made provision for women to study science. Skinner told Humphry that a good Fabian should consider his daughters' education as seriously as his sons'. Humphry said that Dorothy--and Griselda--were still only little girls. Hardly, said Skinner, smiling at the two serious young faces. Hardly. They would be young women any moment, he could see. His look made Dorothy feel unexpectedly heated, on her skin, and also inside her. She wriggled a.. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 4cff8f7 | You asked, why are the poor poor. I was struck by that." "What I can't see--what I really can't see--is why everyone doesn't ask themselves that, all the time . How can these people bear to go to church and then go about in the streets and see what is there for everyone to see--and get told what the Bible says about the poor--and go on riding in carriages, and choosing neckties and hats--and eating huge beefsteaks--I can't see it." "I have .. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 48e1de8 | It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air acts. | books dust librarians library library-books london pollution victorian | A.S. Byatt | |
| 9b225e0 | In the morning the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction, and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 7cc986e | There were all sorts of small canals and cuts and runnels to be crossed. There were trees that had been shaped by steady blasts of wind, stunted and reaching sideways. Philip wanted to draw them. They were a stationary form of violent movement. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| d61bc3c | God," said Benedict Fludd, "your God, that is, strides in and out of my life with no warning. One day he seems impossible--laughable, laughable--and the next, he is imperious." He stopped. He said "It is like the phases of the moon, maybe. Or the seasons of the sphere we live on, rolling in and out of the light, skeleton trees one day, and then snow, and afterwards the bright green veil and after that the full heat and shining. Only it is n.. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 173ddba | Imagining the end of things, when you are a child, is perhaps impossible. The thin child, despite the war that was raging, was more afraid of eternal boredom, of doing nothing that mattered, of day after day going nowhere, than she was of death or the end of things. When she thought of death she thought of the little boy across the road who had died of diabetes. No one at school, told of this, knew how to respond. Some giggled. They shifted.. | 2011 children-s-fears death | A.S. Byatt | |
| af93bd2 | For Ann, aged two in 1903, a year was half a lifetime. She did not expect the second winter, and then, when it came, vaguely assumed it was eternal, until spring came, and summer came, and she understood that they had come "again" and began to learn to expect." | A.S. Byatt | ||
| d7dc37c | know how much difference a night's sleep can make, that what seems ungovernable and world-breaking at one A.M. can be made to feel like someone else's dream if you put seven hours of unconsciousness between it and you. Tomorrow's not just another day, another person lives it--and every time you go to sleep, you say good-bye. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| aef7b85 | He couldn't make the thought go anywhere, and soon zoned out into watching the television screen. It showed a crazy-haired old gent tramping around an undistinguished patch of countryside. He couldn't remember selecting the channel, and with the sound off it really wasn't very interesting. Was it worth turning the sound up? Probably not. It increasingly seemed to him that television was being created for someone else. He was welcome to watc.. | tv | Michael Marshall Smith | |
| 73a0a4c | Being me is not a fate everyone would enjoy. There are risks, and frequent disappointments. I'm not all that keen on the arrangement myself, to be honest. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| fa0a8bb | I shut my eyes, turned away for a moment, and it came: a shiver of finality like the one when you decide, in your own mind, that you're going to have to tell someone who loves you that you don't want to be with them anymore. Terror, and relief; relief and terror, so intermingled that they feel like the same thought. | pain relationships | Michael Marshall Smith | |
| 5c40006 | My father used to claim that inanimate objects hate us and plot our downfall behind our backs. He was probably right. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| 97a57f3 | All non-smokers seem to live in the belief that smokers have wandered naively through life, bereft of the knowledge that their habit is extremely bad for them. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| b547d40 | I was sixteen back then, and I was going to a party with my girlfriend and Earl. Earl was driving, and his new squeeze was in the passenger seat. I was in the back, holding hands with mine. That was such a big thing at that age, clasping the hand of someone you loved. A heady declaration, the closing of a circuit, the joining of two souls. When you get older you don't seem to do it so much. Your hands are generally busy with other things, a.. | love | Michael Marshall Smith | |
| 39f8405 | Cross-legged on the floor, you drink, hoping each mouthful will hurt; occasional flurries of spastic movement as you try to work out what to do with your hands. When everyone else is gone, your world is just a tiny box with the walls pressing in. Messages on the phone you can't bear to play, much less listen to, and nothing in the apartment that you can recognize as meaningfully yours. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| a0caaa6 | What they are is a small tablet about six inches square, which has a screen in it. As you walk it shows a scrolling digital map of the area you're in, telling you what each store you pass sells, who lives in what block, the whole works, updated by small beacons on every street corner. If you tap in a destination the screen shows you a red line to follow, and the tablet whispers at you to tell you when to make a turn. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| 6b8a329 | I realised suddenly that I was thirty-four and not making a very good job of it. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| 1b9dca0 | I caught one last glimpse of her face, howling something at me. There were too many vowels in what she said, and they were in an unkind order. ("Substitutions")" | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| 6809d40 | She lost her fury. He'd had none. That's how you win, in the end. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| 8f4f313 | Humans and stories need each other. We tell them, but they tell us too - reaching with soft hands and wide arms to pull us into their embrace. They do this especially when we have become mired in lives of which we can make no sense. We all need a path, and stories can sometimes usher us back to it. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| cdbae4c | In the story, an old man tells his grandson that he has a fight going on inside him, and has done his whole life. Between two wolves. One is a bad wolf -a wolf consumed with anger, regret, resentment and sorrow. The other wolf is good, with a heart filled with kindness, compassion and hope. Even joy. The boy asks which wolf will win in the end. The old man looks at him very seriously and says: "The one you feed." | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| 833fa50 | Everyone's alone in their world, because everybody's life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live. Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| b19ea3a | Welcome to adulthood. Please leave your dreams at the door. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| c92adf0 | In the beginning was the word. So what do you do when the words won't come? When you don't know what happens next? You just keep typing. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| 46932ee | You can't have made-up things in made-up stories. But in real life, you can. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| 3a853c0 | Hannah's dad had a habit of never walking home the same way twice, with the intention of giving her a sense of how it all fitted together. What he'd actually achieved was to fail to provide a dependable route. As she stood confused on the corner, turning in a circle, it struck Hannah this happened all the time - grown-ups trying to teach you things in the wrong way, way, that only made sense if you already knew what you were trying to lea.. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| f04368e | She didn't know what made him happy, though ... and she couldn't remember him doing any of those things - laughing, smiling or being silly - for quite a while. From some time before Mom left, in fact. Was that why she'd gone? Because he hadn't laughed any more? Would you leave someone because of something like that? Did you have to keep laughing and smiling and seeming happy or else people would leave you? | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| ea13f55 | And so later Hannah was back at the kitchen table in her house. Sitting where she'd sat earlier. Her place. Hannah didn't know that humankind has a deep-set belief in the idea that we create and maintain reality through ritual, that repeated actions are what keep the spheres in alignment. She also didn't know that it doesn't work, and that there are far older, more complex, and much darker designs in motion, ones that override ours as effor.. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| f82acde | Hell is not a place. It's not a noun, child. It's a verb. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| f5750a2 | It is not in Victory that you learn how strong you truly are. - Stronghand | Kate Elliott | ||
| 428362a | It is a sad truth, but one acknowledged by any person who can bother to read the law, that the inferior legal status of a woman in Europa means she is best protected by having a powerful family or, lacking that, by finding the strongest protector and marrying him. | Kate Elliott | ||
| 81f8aad | There's little enough joy, and far too much pain, in a world like this not to appreciate the beauty that comes your way. He | Kate Elliott | ||
| e0a7a0c | Are these soldiers really our enemy, or only the worst reflection of our own selves?... We made them. We have to unmake them, not just defeat or kill them. | war | Kate Elliott | |
| f98c08f | I believe that there is truth to be found inside every person, but that very few people find it because it is dark inside, and deeply hidden, and the trees grow thickly. | Kate Elliott | ||
| 3d86a3b | We are bound to our ancestors and to those who made us, whether we want to be or not. What matters is what we make of what we are. | Kate Elliott | ||
| 20f67cf | I had not realized how much anger I held against my heart for all the people who use others as nothing more than tools to build a house for themselves, who wrap chains around others and then claim they have the right and even the obligation to do so. | Kate Elliott | ||
| 05d4036 | All people are bound by ties and obligations, and the most binding ties of all are those between kin. | Kate Elliott | ||
| fe1bb91 | The history of the world begins with a seed. The seed is the kernel of what you are, but it is also the promise of what you can become. | empowerment promise seeds world | Kate Elliott | |
| 6778193 | Never let it be said that I could not talk my way out of any trouble that I could not punch. | punching-a-shark talking trouble | Kate Elliott | |
| d672f26 | No one can fall in love at first sight. Love is built over years, not snapped into existence like a flame that can be as easily extinguished. | Kate Elliott | ||
| c185b9a | Naturalists claim that however much the female may be said to love the accoutrements of fashion and furnishings, it is the male who is driven to display himself. | Kate Elliott | ||
| 32e25b8 | We don't have to accept the things we might change. | empowerment | Kate Elliott | |
| cf8b5f2 | The skin of frozen snow crunched satisfyingly beneath my boots as I smashed each step into the ground just as I planned to smash my foes. | power smash snow | Kate Elliott |