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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7df70b6 | He looks up at her, and behind her, at the sky, which holds more stars than he ever has seen at one time, crowded together, a mess of dust and gems. | literature | Jhumpa Lahiri | |
| 6f192ad | Do I remind you of that night?" "Not at all," his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now. "You remind me of everything that followed." | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| c849a97 | Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end. "Gogol," | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 85a5b59 | Assured by his grades and his apparent indifference to girls, his parents don't suspect Gogol of being, in his own fumbling way, an American teenager. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 0ef5c7d | Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 24f9047 | That's what books are for, to travel without moving an inch. | reading travel | Jhumpa Lahiri | |
| b02dfc3 | She calculates the Indian time on her hands. The tip of her thumb strikes each rung of the brown ladders etched onto the backs of her fingers, then stops at the middle of the third: it is nine and a half hours ahead in Calcutta, already evening, half past eight. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| c89c09e | T]hey are trying to find the right word, to choose, finally, the one that is most exact, most incisive. It's a process of sifting, which is exhausting and, at times, exasperating. Writers can't avoid it. The heart of the craft lies there. | writing | Jhumpa Lahiri | |
| 1f2ea00 | She speaks reverently of her summers here. This is her favorite place in the world, she tells him, and he understands that this landscape, the water of this particular lake in which she first learned to swim, is an essential part of her, even more so than the house in Chelsea. This was where she lost her virginity, she confesses, when she was fourteen years old, in a boathouse, with a boy whose family once summered here. He thinks of himsel.. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 621adb1 | They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera. I | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 0a2c14c | Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people. They | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 613611c | No parent ever called a child by his good name. Good names had no place within a family. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 3093693 | And so the eight months are put behind them, quickly shed, quickly forgotten, like clothes worn for a special occasion, or for a season that has passed, suddenly cumbersome, irrelevant to their lives. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 7874d7e | Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband's name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying Ashoke's name, she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates roughly as "Are you listening to me?" | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 1d1bde7 | The right cover is like a beautiful coat, elegant and warm, wrapping my words as they travel through the world, on their way to keep an appointment with my readers. Books come to stand for various episodes in our lives, for certain idealisms, follies of belief, moments of love. Along the way they accumulate our marks, our stains, our innocent abuses, they come to wear our experience of them on their covers and bindings like wrinkles on our .. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 4b152dd | If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me--everything that makes me react, in short--I have to put it into words. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| d0aeabd | The moments of transition, in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments that we tend to remember. | transformation | Jhumpa Lahiri | |
| 75f7713 | Here are more lines from The Great Gatsby. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. I like to remember when I was one of them, or to pretend that I am one of them still, sensing that restless man at my back and half turning, no, turning all the way, open-armed, saying, . | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| 492d386 | There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. (quoting Doris Lessing) | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| 16c4d78 | It is one of the great bafflements of student fiction. I have read that college students can spend up to ten hours a day on social media. But for the people they write about - also mostly college students - the internet barely exists. | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| 80dd81f | It would undo me, I think, to glimpse some familiar piece of clothing, or a certain book or photograph, or to catch a hint of your smell. And I don't want to be undone like that, oh my God, not with your widow standing by. | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| 54ed425 | They don't commit suicide. They don't weep. But they can and do fall to pieces. They can and do have their hearts broken. They can and do lose their minds. | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| 79819b6 | I once heard a stranger in agitated conversation with her pug: And I suppose it's all my fault again, isn't it? At which, I swear, the dog rolled its eyes. | dogs-and-humans | Sigrid Nunez | |
| 924beae | The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you. The extraordinary sense that you are reading these words, that you know what they'll say even before I write them. | grief loss omniscience unreality | Sigrid Nunez | |
| e880a45 | there is at least one book in you that cannot be written by anyone else but you. My advice is to dig deep and find | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| 598d450 | Wouldn't it be easier if we just named all the cats Password? | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| 09e928b | Why should not old men be mad? Some have known a likely lad That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist Turn to a drunken journalist; A girl that knew all Dante once Live to bear children to a dunce; A Helen of social welfare dream, Climb on a wagonette to scream. Some think it a matter of course that chance Should starve good men and bad advance, That if their neighbours figured plain, As though upon a lighted screen, No single story would they fi.. | William Butler Yeats | ||
| 2fcd3c9 | I am large, I contain multitudes. --WALT WHITMAN | Helen Fisher | ||
| 3d73d69 | El clima del amor es tan agradable. En efecto, cuando estamos enamorados, resplandecemos. Tambien sentimos la angustia de la agonia y de la espera. El amor romantico es un impetu, un deseo, una necesidad, un impulso primigenio del apareamiento que a veces puede ser mas poderoso que el hambre. | Helen Fisher | ||
| 08cea0b | The reverse can also happen: as a man becomes more and more attached to his family, levels of testosterone can decline. In fact, at the birth of a child, expectant fathers experience a significant decline in levels of testosterone.66 Even when a man holds a baby, levels of testosterone decrease. This | Helen Fisher | ||
| 57d82f6 | Anthropologists have long observed that women are "face-to-face" communicators, while men do so "side-by side." This means that women are much more comfortable with direct eye contact, which probably has a lot to do with the female history of nursing, cuddling, and generally fawning over their infants all the while staring lovingly into those big baby eyes. Men, on the other hand, find direct eye contact extremely confrontational. As Helen .. | Ian Kerner | ||
| aa21677 | Marse Compton hadn't aged but curdled like stagnant milk. His white arrogance had piled and thickened, casting its sour odor wherever he went. | Paul Beatty | ||
| cb151d9 | Devo molto a quelli che non amo. Il sollievo con cui accetto che siano piu vicini a un altro. La gioia di non essere io il lupo dei loro agnelli. Mi sento in pace con loro e in liberta con loro, e questo l'amore non puo darlo, ne riesce a toglierlo. Non li aspetto dalla porta alla finestra. Paziente quasi come una meridiana, capisco cio che l'amore non capisce, perdono cio che l'amore mai perdonerebbe. Da un incontro a una lettera passa non.. | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| f8d95ac | Me parece que solo sera a partir de la proxima generacion cuando caminar se convierta en algo vanguardista. | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| 3455c26 | Would we really be driven to darkest despair by the news that life doesn't exist beyond Earth? (...) But let's stop and think about such a revelation. Would that really be the worst of all possible news? Perhaps just the opposite--it would sober us, brace us, teach us mutual respect, point us toward a slightly more human way of life? Perhaps we wouldn't talk so much nonsense, tell so many lies, if we knew that they were echoing throughout t.. | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| f89d15d | Dimenticano che la vita non e qui. Altre leggi, nero su bianco, vigono qui. Un batter d'occhio durera quanto dico io, si lascera dividere in piccole eternita piene di pallottole fermate in volo. Non una cosa avverra qui se non voglio. Senza il mio assenso non cadra foglia, ne si pieghera stelo sotto il punto del piccolo zoccolo. C'e dunque un mondo di cui reggo le sorti indipendenti? Un tempo che lego con catene di segni? Un esistere a mio .. | writing | Wisława Szymborska | |
| 3608d1a | Buscar sinceridad en unas memorias carece de sentido. Mejor seria preguntarse que version de uno mismo y del mundo ha escogido el autor, dado que siempre hay posibilidad de elegir. | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| 198e8cc | DESPEDIDA DE UN PAISAJE No le reprocho a la primavera que llegue de nuevo. No me quejo de que cumpla como todos los anos con sus obligaciones. Comprendo que mi tristeza no frenara la hierba. Si los tallos vacilan sera solo por el viento. No me causa dolor que los sotos de alisos recuperen su murmullo. Me doy por enterada de que, como si vivieras, la orilla de cierto lago es tan bella como era. No le guardo rencor a la vista por la vista.. | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| 044d82c | No carece de encantos un mundo tan terrible, no carece de madrugadas que merecen un despertar. | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| 6767ab9 | How many, after a shorter or longer life (if they still see a difference), good, because it's beginning, bad, because it's over (if they don't prefer the reverse), | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| bc5b61c | Merciless song, you leave me with my lone, nonconvertible, unmetamorphic body: I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones. Four A.M. The hour between night and day. The hour between toss and turn. The hour of thirty-year-olds. The hour swept clean for roosters' crowing. The hour when the earth takes back its warm embrace. The hour of cool drafts from extinguished stars. The hour of do-we-vanish-too-without-a-trace. Empty hour. Hollow. Vain.. | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| db8dffa | Funny little thing. How could she know that even despair can work for you if you're lucky enough to outlive it. I'd | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| e8d7740 | Po kazdej wojnie ktos musi posprzatac. | poetry polish sprzątać war wojna | Wisława Szymborska | |
| f5bc217 | Eve from the rib, Venus from foam, Minerva from Jupiter's head - All three were more real than me. When he isn't looking at me, I try to catch my reflection on the wall. And I see the nail where a picture used to be. | Wisława Szymborska |