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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| cd53dd1 | All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2088582 | Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know. They have counted every word he wrote, logged every dib and jot. They can tell us (and have done so) that Shakespeare's works contain 138,198 commas, 26,794 colons, and 15,785 question marks; that ears are spoken of 401 times in his plays; that dunghill is used 10 times and dullard twice; that his characters refer to love 2,259 tim.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| f4a3e40 | Returning to my book, I learned that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country. It was a wonderful evening. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e59fa7b | His real gift was as a phrasemaker. "Shakespeare's language," says Stanley Wells, "has a quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language." Among them: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all de.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7be534d | The inhabitants of England in the age of Chaucer commonly used an expression, to be in hide and hair, meaning to be lost or beyond discovery. But then it disappears from the written record for four hundred years before resurfacing, suddenly and unexpectedly, in America in 1857 as neither hide nor hair. It is dearly unlikely that the phrase went into a linguistic coma for four centuries. So who was quietly preserving it for four hundred year.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| f27532d | Facts are surprisingly delible things, and in four hundred years a lot of them simply fade away. One of the most popular plays of the age was Arden of Faversham, but no one now knows who wrote it. When an author's identity is known, that knowledge is often marvelously fortuitous. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e9c50ef | There breaks a crutch Scotland never knew it possessed. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 07c5b28 | It's good for a man to get drunk once in a while. It releases all the evil spirits. | James Clavell | ||
| 0d8b863 | Five minutes," I said, and walked away, but my heart was still going just as fast as before. This was only half over. Was it five minutes until I pulled this off? Or five minutes to live?" | James Patterson | ||
| 6ee935d | I hugged everyone, sat down beside Cindy Thomas and Yuki Castellano, Claire's best girlfriends and mine, the four of us making up the entire membership of what we half jokingly call the "Women's Murder Club." | James Patterson | ||
| aac007b | Durante mucho tiempo te desprendes del pasado con facilidad y de una forma que parece automatica y adecuada. Las escenas del pasado, mas que desvanecerse, dejan de tener importancia. Y entonces se produce una brusca vuelta atras, lo que esta acabado y bien acabado resurge de repente, requiere tu atencion, incluso que hagas algo al respecto, aunque salte a la vista que no se puede hacer nada. | Alice Munro | ||
| 68d7de7 | The alphabet Miss Poobner taught was represented on the wall above her head by a series of personified cartoonlike letters--Mr. A, Eating an Apple; Mrs. B, Buying a Broom; and so on--and something insipid about the parade of grinning letters defeated Dylan's will utterly. | page-23 | Jonathan Lethem | |
| 1d48a7a | Once I had it free, I gobbled the sandwich like a nature-film otter cracking an oyster on its stomach: knees up in the wiring under the dashboard, my elbows jammed against the steering wheel, my chest serving as a table, my shirt as a tablecloth. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| c3415dc | Astrology fell into the class of a ...and not worth the efforts of the debunking engine Cicero had been born with in place of a brain. Cicero's capacities were reserved for lies that mattered. Ideology, though that word was yet unknown to him: the veil of sustaining fiction that drove the world, what people to believe. This, Cicero wished to unmask and unmake, decry and destroy. (p. 65) | ideology unmask | Jonathan Lethem | |
| c8954cd | Mrs. Neverbody's Recipe for Making Crocodile Tears To a slice of hanky-panky Add some artificial cranky. Moisten well with canned boo-hoo. Flavor with a spoof or two. Drip this slowly--as it falls Roll it into little bawls. If you're careful, while they're cooling You can spread on only-fooling. (This recipe is not worthwhile Unless you are a crocodile.) | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| bc23d7e | I)t was by Cicero's attainments that that he'd gained special witness to the liberals' adjustment to a brush with equality. | attainments equality witness | Jonathan Lethem | |
| 76f421b | Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| a340515 | Vierte amor en las heridas. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 70cc8d9 | Paranoid art, unlike paranoid persons, also distrusts itself. And so, paranoid art is the ultimate opposite, the urgent opposite, of complacent art. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 96a369b | You can't reclaim a thing that changes as you touch it. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 074dcb5 | I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| e713f4a | Develop your pawns or Hulk will smash. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 21fd14a | I'd never pondered the bourgeois implications of an earplug. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| cda5db5 | Mai infrangere le illusioni degli altri se non si e certi di poter offrir loro un'alternativa migliore di quella a cui li si vuole strappare. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 80be8da | Il guaritore mi aveva detto che ero stato saggio a rivolgermi a lui per tempo, spiegandomi che troppa gente afflitta da singhiozzi cronici ricorre all'agopuntura quando e all'ultima spiaggia. Avrebbe impiantato gli aghi nei punti E-37, E-1 ed E-33, e a quel punto avremmo capito per quale via Perkus fosse giunto a quella situazione, sottintendendo come al suo solito che avrebbe fatto scomparire i sintomi per poter passare a questioni piu pro.. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 28c052a | Carlotta hovered over us as we devoured her meatballs, running her floury fingers over the backs of our chairs, then gently touching our heads, the napes of our necks. We pretended not to notice, ashamed in front of one another and ourselves to show that we drank in her nurturance as eagerly as her meat sauce. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 8f76e63 | The whole state of Maine is unlocked. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 151bc70 | Sleepwalkers, leave other sleepwalkers alone! | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 8cdac6c | A superhero spliced criminals from victims. In Gowanus things tended to be more mixed up. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 3a42e8f | La calidad de una cena la determinan las conversaciones secundarias que la mayoria de la mesa no oye. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 8ba7bc1 | Notes? Kromer was a hinge between worlds, a glimpser. All he had to offer them was his own notes, not the world itself. This situation he couldn't make understood. | passive perversion pervert sex-toys | Jonathan Lethem | |
| 9cfe870 | A wizard salesman, Kromer switched on and demonstrated the range of speeds on any number of devices with a shame-dissolving forthrightness. At those moments, he thought of himself as a Conceptual Lesbian, a term he'd invented and never spoken aloud, nor advanced into any coherent definition. Kromer was fairly certain he'd never experienced an erection within the bounds of the shop. | passive perversion pervert sex-shop sex-toys | Jonathan Lethem | |
| de1c153 | The writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something "original," nine out of ten times they just don't know the references or the original sources involved." | Austin Kleon | ||
| 6e724ef | Go buy milk,' Robert said at last. Dylan moved for Buggy's door. But if ou come around here with that old lady's money next time I might have to take it off you.' Dylan recognized this as a sort of philosophical using. He was grateful for the implied sense of pooled information. He and Robert could move forward together from this point into whatever was required. | kid-talking-adults | Jonathan Lethem | |
| 43906e9 | His recording career spans just a decade: Rude was silenced by drug abuse and domestic tragedy at the end of the '70s. | liner-notes | Jonathan Lethem | |
| bb4f207 | Zelmo was nearly bellowing by the time he raised his glass to the tables center. 'To the human heart!' Diners at other tables glanced to see what was the matter. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 2dab91a | But we were chumps and we knew it. As makers of sentences we were practically fetal, beneath notice, unlaunched, fooling around in our spare time or on somebody else's dime. Nobody loved our sentences as we loved them, and so they congealed or grew sour on our tongues. We barely glanced at our wall-scribblings for fear of what a few weeks or even hours might expose in our infatuations. Our photocopied fortune slips we'd find in muddy clogs .. | writing | Jonathan Lethem | |
| e278209 | I turned myself into a vinyl hawk, scouring record shops for out-of-print LPs, studying them with Talmudic intensity. The music I loved would all be dug out of studio archives and put onto CD within a few years, but then it was still scratchy and moldy and entirely my own. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 1775be6 | So it wasn't Peggy I was interested in, not her tears, her crumpled looks. She reminded me too much of myself. It was her comforters I marvelled at. How they seemed to bow down and declare themselves in front of her. What had they been saying? Nothing in particular. All right, they said. It's all right, Peggy, they said. Now, Peggy. All right. All right. Such kindness. That anybody could be so kind. It is true that these young men, brought .. | Alice Munro | ||
| f7be45f | for since Munro's chosen form is the short story, her overriding theme is brevity--look now, act now, contemplate now, because soon, very soon, this thing that involves you will be over. | Alice Munro | ||
| f4676d4 | Captain Tervitt had been a real captain, for many years, on the lake boats. Now he had a job as a special constable. He stopped the cars to let the children cross the street in front of the school and kept them from sledding down the side street in winter. He blew his whistle and held up one big hand, which looked like a clown's hand, in a white glove. He was still tall and straight and broad-shouldered, though old and white-haired. Cars wo.. | clown lake proud-professional | Alice Munro | |
| 00ba14f | How can you get your finger on it, feel that life beating? It was more a torment than a comfort to think about this, because I couldn't get hold of it at all. I | Alice Munro | ||
| 83f1b28 | Her father was outraged. "Now you sell your stories, how soon before you will sell yourself?" | Alice Munro | ||
| 0527a7f | A hero worn out by his struggle, one who had sacrificed his youth--that was how he might present himself, not without effect. And it was true, in a way. He was physically brave, he had ideals, he was born a peasant and knew what it was to be despised. And she too, just now, had been despising him. | Alice Munro |