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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a3d6b8b | They had killed themselves over the failure to find a love that none of us could ever be. | impossible jeffrey-eugenides love suicide the-virgin-suicides unattainable | Jeffrey Eugenides | |
| f9e7f6b | The experience of watching Leonard get better was like reading certain difficult books. It was like plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina, until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept on getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 61f8c46 | Though some of us saw Lux as a force of nature, impervious to chill, an ice goddess generated by the season itself, the majority knew she was only a girl in danger, or in pursuit, of catching her death of cold. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 939d4b3 | It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 4c3ed2e | The magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| b8bf3a3 | I was young, and, despite dread, full of animal spirits; it was impossible for me to take a dark view too long. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 1e7cb8b | If you used your head, if you became aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognized that being "in love" was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from its tyranny" | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 0d78ab8 | Don't you think it would have been easier just to stay the way you were?" I lifted my face and looked into my mother's eyes. And I told her: "This is the way I was." You" | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| c456f83 | From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I'm dipping into principal, spending it all. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 840cc36 | It is said: San Francisco is where young people go to retire. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 16a69c3 | Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? | young-love | Jeffrey Eugenides | |
| f9e84a8 | Elles nous avaient fait participer a leur folie, parce que nous ne pouvions faire autrement. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 8e7d466 | You alone, hold all my heart, whole in your hands. And you know that. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| d12c22e | Och, I want them frightened of me, Sassenach. It's the only way I'll have a chance of bringing them out of it alive. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| d67eb17 | what I was born does not matter, only what I will make of myself, only what I will become. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 27eb061 | There are so many there, beyond your reach. So many you can never touch, so many whose essence you can't find, so many who slip through your fingers. But you can't think about them. The only thing you can do--the only thing--is to try for the one who's in front of you. Act as though this one patient is the only person in the world--because to do otherwise is to lose that one, too. One at a time, that's all you can do. And you learn not to d.. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 081ea64 | Wait, let me get that down. Primum: save...men. Secundo: do not...drop...weapon. Tertio--what's the third thing on this list?" "Suck my prick," Grey said rudely. "Ass." Percy promptly flipped the sketchbook shut and came toward him, eyes brighter still. "Wait! I didn't mean it!" "Just following orders," Percy murmured, pinning him to the bed with a deft knee on his thigh, and getting a hand on his flies. "Sir." | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 5dc987d | You know Mountgerald, the big house at the end of the High Street? There's a ghost there, a workman on the house who was killed as a sacrifice for the foundation. In the eighteenth century sometime; that's really fairly recent," he added thoughtfully." | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 3f67340 | My father told me never to take advantage of a woman who was the worse for drink," he said. He had stopped squirming, but now started again, slower, as though he couldn't help himself. "I'm not worse, I'm better," I assured him. "Besides--" I executed a slow, sinuous squirm of my own. "I thought he said you weren't drunk if you could find your arse with both hands." He eyed me appraisingly. "I hate to tell ye, Sassenach, but it's not your a.. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 7176b97 | He had enough experience in the business of prayer to recognize an answer when it showed up, though, however unwelcome. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| aca27d1 | it does not escape me that one can wield Sword or Musket only upon one Enemy at a time, while Words may be employed upon any Number. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| c2fb631 | There are things that I canna tell you, at least not yet. And I'll ask nothing of ye that ye canna give me. But what I would ask of ye--when you do tell me something, let it be the truth. And I'll promise ye the same. We have nothing now between us, save--respect, perhaps. And I think that respect has maybe room for secrets, but not for lies. Do ye agree? | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 4be120f | It had occurred to me briefly to wonder why he had worn his kilt this morning, instead of changing to breeks; the crimson tartan might be quite literally a red flag to a bull, flaunted thus before an English soldier. Now I knew. They'd taken it from him once before, thinking to take with it pride and manhood. They had failed in that attempt, and he meant to underscore that failure, whether it was sense to do so or not. Sense had little to d.. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 8509ea9 | One never stops to think what underlies romance. Tragedy and terror, transmuted by time. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 91a5937 | Pero ?no te das cuenta de que la nocion de la muerte entre nosotros es muy poca cosa, Claire? --susurro. Mis manos se cerraron contra su pecho. No, no pensaba que fuera poca cosa. --Todo el tiempo, cuando me dejaste despues de Culloden, estuve muerto, ?no es asi? --Crei que estabas muerto. Por eso... --Dentro de doscientos anos seguro que estare muerto, Sassenach --dijo sonriendo--. A causa de los indios, los animales salvajes, una plaga.. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| e1376d8 | It was a blur," people say. What they really mean is the impossibility of anyone truly entering such an experience from outside, the futility of explanation." | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 89670a8 | It's always better if they see. Then they don't imagine things. So I didn't imagine, I remembered. | remembering | Diana Gabaldon | |
| 8126feb | As Grey put his hand on the pommel, he heard a low Scots voice murmur in his ear: "Queen's rook to king eight. Check." Grey laughed out loud, a burst of exhilaration pushing aside his disquiet. "Ha," he said, though without raising his voice. "Queen's bishop to knight four. Check. And mate, Mr ... MacKenzie." | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 1274ea4 | He choked, laughed in a shocked way, wept a little more, | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 45c2668 | Well, I say it is the place of science only to observe," he said. "To seek cause where it may be found, but to realize that there are many things in the world for which no cause shall be found; not because it does not exist, but because we know too little to find it. It is not the place of science to insist on explanation---but only to observe, in hopes that explanation will manifest itself." | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 207d343 | Good sex scene is about the exchange of emotions, not bodily fluids | sex writing | Diana Gabaldon | |
| 6857729 | There's a little trick called the Rule of Three: if you use any three of the five senses, it will make the scene immediately three-dimensional. | sex writing | Diana Gabaldon | |
| c15d62b | There aren't many people like that--who will tell you the truth about themselves and anything else right out. I've only met three people like that, I think--four now," she said, her smile widening to warm him. "There was" | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 0ea05f9 | I've yet to see the auld woman believes in witches, nor the young one, neither. It's men think there must be ill-wishes and magic in women, when it's only the natural way of the creatures. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 30d1f50 | Roger lay in the dust of the road, bruised, filthy, and starving, with a woman trembling and weeping against his chest, now and then giving him a small thump with her fist. He had never felt happier in his life. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 2db1faa | Then I laid my head upon his chest and gave my dreams up to his keeping. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| dbc5a34 | Infatuation. It was common, among the nurses and the doctors, the nurses and the patients, among any gathering of people thrown for long periods into one another's company. Some acted on it, and brief, intense affairs were frequent. If they were lucky, the affair flamed out within a few months and nothing resulted from it. If they were not ... well. Pregnancy, divorce, here and there the odd case of venereal disease. Dangerous thing, infatu.. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 5d39fed | All the sounds of the house, from the creak of the back stair under an early-rising maid's foot, to the drumming rain on the roofslates, were sounds he had heard a thousand times before; heard so often, he didn't hear them anymore. I did. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 5313ab8 | There was a sudden whoosh from above, followed immediately by a blur before my eyes and a dull thud. Captain Randall was on the ground at my feet, under a heaving mass that looked like a bundle of old plaid rags. A brown, rocklike fist rose out of the mass and descended with considerable force, meeting decisively with some bony protuberance, by the sound of the resultant crack. The Captain's struggling legs, shiny in tall brown boots, relax.. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| eb5c4bf | Well, legends are many-legged beasties, aye? But they generally have at least one foot on the truth. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 66c43df | a redheaded person with an empty stomach was a walking time bomb. I | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| e0476e1 | Do women hold back the evolution of such things as freedom and other social ideals, out of fear for themselves or their children? Or do they in fact inspire such things--and the risks required to reach them--by providing the things worth fighting for? | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 9a5b9b1 | could murder a plateful of eggs. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 072b45b | Looking down on the assembly, standing patiently in the drizzle awaiting a verdict, I suddenly had a vivid understanding of something. Like so many, I had heard, appalled, the reports that trickled out of postwar Germany; the stories of deportations and mass murder, of concentration camps and burnings. And like so many others had done, and would do, for years to come, I had asked myself, "How could the people have let it happen? They must h.. | Diana Gabaldon |