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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2358808 | The sun dances in her and she has an immense joy of life | dance happiness joy sun women | James Clavell | |
| 9ee13af | Yabu his sword." "I think Lord Toranaga only wants Izu strong and a vassal state. Not as an ally. He doesn't want allies any more than the Taiko did. Yabu thinks he's an ally. I think Toranaga detests allies. Our clan will prosper as Toranaga vassals. Or as Ishido" | James Clavell | ||
| 00d9336 | Why do you weep, child? We of the Floating World live only for the moment, giving all our time to the pleasures of cherry blossoms and snow and maple leaves, the calling of a cricket, the beauty of the moon, waning and growing and being reborn, singing our songs and drinking cha and sake, knowing perfumes and the touch of silks, caressing for pleasure, and drifting, always drifting. Listen, child: never sad, always drifting as a lily on the.. | floating lily pleasures stream ukiyo | James Clavell | |
| 528c0df | Always remember, child,' her first teacher had impressed on her, 'that to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline--training--is about. | James Clavell | ||
| 0743756 | Bez zhenata m'zh't e prosto edna nelepa shega. | James Clavell | ||
| 7c91d23 | If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline--training--is about. So train your mind to dwell on sweet perfumes, the touch of this silk, tender raindrops against the shoji, the curve of this flower arrangement, the tranquillity of dawn. Then, at length, you won't have to make such a great effort and you w.. | James Clavell | ||
| 8c000bc | They put me with a blind monk who taught me how to massage and to see again with my fingers. Now my fingers tell me more than my eyes used to, I think. | James Clavell | ||
| b7e7032 | I can't use hope against swords. | James Clavell | ||
| aa92905 | Yes. My ship'll be like her, he promised himself. She'll be trim and miniature and perfect like a Yoshitomo blade, and that's the best in the world, and just as dangerous. Next year she'll take a prize twenty times her own weight, like Mariko did at Osaka, ans she'll rip the enemy out of Asia. | James Clavell | ||
| 5c020d5 | The Scots knew that the burning of a cross was a summons to the clan, and to all the kinsmen of all kindred clans: a summons to rally to the cross for battle. And the burning cross was raised only by the chief of the clan. By ancient law, once raised, the burning cross committed the clan to defend the land unto the end of the clan. | James Clavell | ||
| 10b397d | If the Truth is already clear, what is the use of meditation?' " " 'And if the Truth is hidden?' " Toranaga said. " 'It's already clear,' " Hiro-matsu answered correctly. The quotation was from the ancient Tantric Buddhist teacher, Saraha." | James Clavell | ||
| 5a6f859 | You don't know for certain about God until you're dead. | James Clavell | ||
| 08a255e | I send you my laughter. May Buddha bless thee and thine. | James Clavell | ||
| 6d40284 | only the emperor among three hundred millions is allowed to use vermilion ink. Imagine that. If Queen Victoria said, 'From now on, only I am allowed to use vermilion,' as much as we love her, forty thousand Britons would instantly forswear all ink but vermilion. I would mysel'. | James Clavell | ||
| 1261cdb | all the people have a right to vote, and no single man ever controls the destiny of any nation, either by divine right or by right of stupid votes of a stupid electorate. | James Clavell | ||
| 3abe22b | But they're as Communist as Russia. They went to war against us when we were only trying to protect freedom in South Korea. We weren't going to attack them. | James Clavell | ||
| 9568a5e | Why is it there is always such violence between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law? Doesn't daughter-in-law, in time, become mother-in-law? Why does she then always treat her own daughter-in-law to a lashing tongue and make her life a misery, and why does that girl do the same in her turn? Doesn't anyone learn? | James Clavell | ||
| b943913 | love is like the sea, sometimes calm and sometimes stormy; it's dangerous, beautiful, death-dealing, life-giving. But never permanent, everchanging. | James Clavell | ||
| 78a33ba | Oh, yes. Every year in this Land of the Gods we have earth tremors. And fires and flood and Great Waves, and the monster storms - the tai-funs. Nature is very strong with us.' Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. 'Perhaps that is why we love life so much, Anjin-San. You see, we have to. Death is a part of our air and sea and earth. You should know, Anjin-San, in this Land of Tears, death is our heritage. | James Clavell | ||
| d2983de | After forty years of selling wholesale industrial deodorizing supplies, one establishment is forced to open its doors to the public. In the lingo of the trade, a salesman explains why their large institution buyers have gone elsewhere. Who wants to stand downwind of the League o' Nations every time some freshman with a bladder infection pulls a Nebuchadnezzar? | nebuchadnezzar | Ben Katchor | |
| 8d69cbf | You see these unsold goods taking up space in busy stores and ask yourself, 'Who would ever buy such a thing? To whose antiquated and misguided sense of taste would such a thing appeal?' To the dead, I answer! The dead are the eternally out of fashion! ... These piles of unsold goods are conclusive proof of the existence of an eternal and insatiable appetite. | Ben Katchor | ||
| 6b913bb | I was born Moishe Ketzelbourd but the Indians call me Maurice Cougar. | jews | Ben Katchor | |
| d0b120c | What sort of attractions do you think lured our coreligionists out of the ghetto and into the mainstream of European culture? Was it the wit of Moliere, or the ingenious stage mechanisms of Pixerecourt? Or was it simply the opportunity to cast an eye, without shame, upon the living, unclad human form? | jews | Ben Katchor | |
| 241ffa8 | This is just how they want you, an animal, a bitch with swollen udder lying in the dirt, blank-faced, surrendered, reduced to this meat, these smells... | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 298ce34 | What's known as bleeding-edge technology," sez Lucas. "No proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with." | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| c16f13f | No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into -- | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| be61374 | But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket , the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled...'Meters per second ' will integrate to 'meters.' The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It never did fall. | physics symbolism time | Thomas Pynchon | |
| a446988 | But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled..."Meters per second" will integrate to "meters." The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It never did fall." | physics symbolism time | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 528a5e4 | She finds the door wide open and the place empty, another failed dotcom joining the officescape of the time--tarnished metallic surfaces, shaggy gray soundproofing, Steelcase screens and Herman Miller workpods--already beginning to decompose, littered, dust gathering . . . Well, almost empty. From some distant cubicle comes a tinny electronic melody Maxine recognizes as "Korobushka," the anthem of nineties workplace fecklessness, playing fa.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 248906d | If patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least--an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this bein.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 41f5878 | Paranoiata e ches'n't v kukhniata na zhivota, vinagi mozhesh da slozhish oshche malko, nali? | life pynchon | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 07ac1d2 | When you reach a point in your life where you understand who is fucking who --beg pardon, Lord-- who's taking it and who's not, that's when you're obliged to choose how much you'll go along with. If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? It must be negotiated with the day, from those abso.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 6d0256e | For about ten minutes the vengeful crew proceed to maim, strangle, poison, burn, stomp, blind and otherwise have at Pasquale, while he describes intimately his varied sensations for our enjoyment. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 3280e0f | Our Meat Facial today, Ms. Loeffler?" "Uhm, how's that." "You didn't get our offer in the mail? on special all this week, works miracles for the complexion--freshly killed, of course, before those enzymes've had a chance to break down, how about it?" "Well, I don't . . ." "Wonderful! Morris, kill . . . the chicken!" From the back room comes horrible panicked squawking, then silence. Maxine meantime is tilted back, eyelids aflutter, when-- ".. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 19c9b31 | They steered south. Gordita Beach emerged from the haze, gently flaking away in the salt breezes, the ramshackle town in a spill of weather-beaten colors, like paint chips at some out-of-the-way hardware store, and the hillside up to Dunecrest, which Doc had always thought of, especially after nights of excess, as steep, a grade everybody sooner or later wiped their clutch trying to get up and out of town on, looking from out here strangely.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 24e9279 | As a courtesy I'm taking you out to the impound garage to get your vehicle. We've been over it with the best tools available to forensic science, and except for enough cannabis debris to keep an average family of four stoned for a year, you're clean. No blood or impact evidence we can use. Congratulations. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| c97d31a | Tis useful nonetheless, now and then, to regard Politics here, as the greater American Question in Miniature,-- in the way that Chess represents war,-- with Governor Penn a game-piece in the form of the King. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 27cb9dc | But as we all know, rock 'n' roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever. | henry-adams introduction life rock-and-roll slow-learner slow-learner-early-stories thomas-pynchon | Thomas Pynchon | |
| da92eeb | They talked in the car always, he trying to find the key to her own ignition behind the hooded eyes, she sitting back of the right-hand steering wheel and talking, talking, nothing but MG-words, inanimate-words he couldn't really talk back at. Soon | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 20b503a | The eyes from Burma, from Tonkin, watch these women at their hundred perseverances--stare out of blued orbits, through headaches no Alasils can ease. Italian P/Ws curse underneath the mail sacks that are puffing, echo-clanking in now each hour, in seasonal swell, clogging the snowy trainloads like mushrooms, as if the trains have been all night underground, passing through the country of the dead. If these Eyeties sing now and then you can .. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| ff648be | It's nothing he can see or lay hands on - sudden gases, a violence upon the air and no trace afterward... a Word, spoken with no warning into your ear, and then silence forever. Beyond its invisibility, beyond hammerfall and doomcrack, here is its real horror, mocking, promising him death with German and precise confidence, laughing down all of Tantivy's quiet decencies... no, no bullet with fins, Ace... not the Word, the one Word that rips.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 5210b00 | I'm talking to God here, be with ye as soon as we're done,-- Is Mason going to get angry and into a fight? Will he stand and announce, "This is none of God's judgment,-- to be offended as gravely by Calendar Reform as by Mortal Sin, requires a meanness of spirit quite out of the reach of any known Deity,-- tho' well within the resources of Stroud, it seems." And walk out thro' their stunn'd ranks to the Embrace of the Night, and never enter.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 799835a | Doc went automotively groping in this weirdness east on Olympic, trying not to flinch at what came popping up out of the gloom in the way of city buses and pedestrians in altered states of consciousness. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 423f321 | Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word. | Thomas Pynchon |