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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0750163 | Compliance with the mile-high stack of social expectations you grow up with as a girl turns out to be mandatory if you want to get ahead in business. Be blonde, be skinny, and don't forget to smile, bitch. | Charles Stross | ||
| 85a87d6 | One does not simply walk into Mordor these days; one drives a rented Cadillac Escalade the size of a county, shiny black and chrome, with a fake walnut dash, and enough black leather to clothe a battalion of Hell's Angels. | Charles Stross | ||
| 57226c5 | You have imposter syndrome," He says, "but paradoxically, that's often a sign of competence. Only people who understand their work well enough to be intimidated by it can be terrified by their own ignorance. It's the opposite of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, where the miserably incompetent think they're on top of the job because they don't understand it." | Charles Stross | ||
| 7c7dd22 | If an ancient horror invites you into its limousine at gunpoint-- | Charles Stross | ||
| 78be383 | you can't learn from a fatal mistake. | Charles Stross | ||
| c1cf679 | there's a point at which sufficient incompetence is malice. | Charles Stross | ||
| 3031a18 | These directly measurable costs, however, were the easy part of his decision. It was instead the "opportunity costs" that required more attention. As he elaborated: "If I make hay all summer, I can't be doing something else." | Cal Newport | ||
| 6de93ad | A deep life is a good life. | Cal Newport | ||
| 118abe7 | Mysle, ze madrosc to tylko spryt wypatroszony z odwagi. Wolalabym byc sprytna niz madra. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| ebe14e1 | Helpmate, n. A wife, or bitter half. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| b73c198 | In'ards, n. pl. The stomach, heart, soul, and other bowels. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| 457020c | Labor, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property of B. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| cb26e45 | Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| cd0c86c | Liberty, n. One of imagination's most precious possessions. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| 2ade91e | Monday, n. In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| c52079f | a cold, miserable little hamlet on the eastern coast of America called Piper's Grave. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 0ddb8bc | room was crowded with officers bringing reports or collecting orders, or simply gathering gossip. At one end of the room was a very venerable, ornate and crumbling | Susanna Clarke | ||
| e388b3e | But the sound that came out of his mouth was no sound at all; it was the emptied skin of sound without flesh or bones. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 720be37 | The little man was all smiling acquiescence. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 6c189a4 | Non-combatant, n. A dead Quaker. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| 6dd4954 | Country gentlemen who read in their newspapers the speeches of this or that Minister would mutter to themselves that he was certainly a clever fellow. But the country gentlemen were not made comfortable by this thought. The country gentlemen had a strong suspicion that cleverness was somehow unBritish. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 055d96a | Byron!" exclaimed the little man. "Really? Dear me! Mad, and a friend of Lord Byron!" He sounded as if he did not know which was worse." | Susanna Clarke | ||
| ed21fd4 | The trees, the stones and the earth had taken him inside themselves, but in their shape it was possible still to discern something of the man he had once been. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 0493fc8 | Shape-changing and so on were all very well in the past. It makes a vivid incident in a story, I grant you. But surely, Strange, you would not want to practise it? A gentleman cannot change his shape. A gentleman scorns to seem any thing other than what he is. You yourself would never wish to appear in the character of a pastry-cook or a lamplighter ... | Susanna Clarke | ||
| e78af47 | He had a very young man's belief in the absolute rightness of his own cause and the absolute wrongness of everyone else's. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 7b049da | He was one of those people whose ideas are too lively to be confined in their brains and spill out into the world to the consternation of passers-by. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 4ce8bcd | There was no one there. Which is to say there was someone there. Miss Wintertowne lay upon the bed, but it would have puzzled philosophy to say now whether she were someone or no one at all. They | Susanna Clarke | ||
| ed981d2 | Childermass was still there. He had taken his dinner at one of the tables and was now doing the household accounts. As Mr Norrell entered, he looked up and grinned. "I believe Mr Strange will do very well in the war, sir. He has already out-manoeuvred you." On" | Susanna Clarke | ||
| a8fc58f | she bore so many of the signs and disfigurings of extreme old age that she was losing her resemblance to other human beings and began instead to resemble other orders of living creatures. Her arms lay in her lap, so extravagantly spotted with brown that they were like two fish. Her skin was the white, almost transparent skin of the extremely old, as fine and wrinkled as a spider's web, with veins of knotted blue. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| f16c775 | But if you are going to take up a profession - and I cannot see why you should want one at all, now that you have come into your property - surely you can chuse something better than magic! It has no practical application. | magic profession | Susanna Clarke | |
| 25699d4 | The brown fields were partly flooded; they were strung with chains of chill, grey pools. The pattern of the pools had meaning. The pools had been written on to the fields by the rain. The pools were a magic worked by the rain, just as the tumbling of the black birds against the grey was a spell that the sky was working and the motion of grey-brown grasses was a spell that the wind made. Everything had meaning. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| bee3fd4 | The shop was kept by a man called Shackleton who looked exactly as you would wish a bookseller to look. He would never have done for any other sort of shopman - certainly not for a haberdasher or milliner who must be smarter than his customers - but for a bookseller he was perfect. He appeared to be of no particular age. He was thin and dusty and spotted finely all over with ink. He had an air of learning tinged with abstraction. His nose w.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 71f3496 | Where in the world have you been?" demanded Strange. "Walking," she said. Her voice was just as it had always been. "Walking! Arabella, are you quite mad? In three feet of snow? Where?" "In the dark woods," she said, "among my soft-sleeping brothers and sisters. Across the high moors among the sweet-scented ghosts of my brothers and sisters long dead. Under the grey sky through the dreams and murmurs of my brothers and sisters yet to come.".. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 2f9f017 | an evil set of men who wedded general stupidity to wickedness of purpose). | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 4375fe9 | Nan told me Clegg had been hanged for stealing a book, but the charge Robert Findhelm brought against him was not theft. The charge Findhelm brought against him was book-murder. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 2f327b9 | Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant. "This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?" he said. "My kingdoms?" exclaimed the gentleman in surprize. "Oh, no! This is Scotland!" | Susanna Clarke | ||
| c97e2bd | is like asking a politician to achieve high office without the benefit of bribes or patronage. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| cc09066 | Their religion is of the strictest sort, Stephen. Almost everything is forbidden to them except carpets." Stephen watched them as they went mournfully about the market, these men whose mouths were perpetually closed lest they spoke some forbidden word, whose eyes were perpetually averted from forbidden sights, whose hands refrained at every moment from some forbidden act. It seemed to him that they did little more than half-exist. They migh.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| ed80ea2 | Chaston wrote that a great many fairies harboured a vague sense of having been treated badly by the English. Though it was a mystery to Chaston -- as it is to me -- why they should have thought so. In the houses of the great English magicians fairies were the first among the servants and sat in the best places after the magician and his lady. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 478013f | At that moment their conversation was interrupted by a most barbaric sound - a great horn was being blown. A number of men rushed forward and heaved the great town gates shut. Thinking that perhaps some danger threatened the town, Stephen looked round in alarm. "Sir, what is happening?" "Oh, it is these people's custom to shut the gate every night against the wicked heathen," said the gentleman, languidly, "by which they mean everyone excep.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| feddfb2 | They had come in secret, having an idea that Dr Greysteel, and perhaps even Mr Strange, might try to prevent them going, or else insist upon accompanying them -- and they had no wish for male companionship upon this occasion. "They will want to be talking about it," said Aunt Greysteel, "they will be trying to guess how she came to this sad condition. But what good will that do? How does that help her?" | Susanna Clarke | ||
| ec9257d | If I were you, Mr Lascelles," said Childermass, softly, "I would speak more guardedly. You are in the north now. In John Uskglass's own country. Our towns and cities and abbeys were built by him. Our laws were made by him. He is in our minds and hearts and speech. Were it summer you would see a carpet of tiny flowers beneath every hedgerow, of a bluish-white colour. We call them John's Farthings. When the weather is contrary and we have war.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 0c10285 | Oh! it is an excellent thing," enthused a lady. "See how the darkness of the mirror behind the figures sets off Mr Strange's head." "People always imagine that magicians and mirrors go together," complained Mr Norrell. "There is no mirror in that part of my library." "Artists are tricky fellows, sir, forever reshaping the world according to some design of their own," said Strange. "Indeed they are not unlike magicians in that. And yet he ha.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| a9a639c | Hush, sir!" whispered the man, "Your voice. It is too loud. You will wake him up!" "Wake him up? Who?" "The man under the hedge, sir. He is a magician. Did you never hear that if you wake a magician before his time, you risk bringing his dreams out of his head into the world?" "And who knows what horrors he is dreaming of!" agreed another man, in a whisper." | Susanna Clarke |