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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a8c496b | Leechfield Will Grease The Planet! | Mary Karr | ||
| c51c471 | Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild, elsewise every raped baby would grow up to raped. | Mary Karr | ||
| 5e3a124 | As for the actual validity of the notion [of] an immovable self, ever-firm, you're there only by half, at best... You'll spend decades trying to will 'same self' into being. But you'll keep shape-shifting. Probably everyone must, so long as the body's treading sod or drawing breath. What's unalterable as bronze is the image of your radiant friend that morning barefoot on the porch, with sun in her rampant hair. She's holding out the bowl o.. | Mary Karr | ||
| 97947a7 | God has a dream for me? I say. I love that idea. It sounds like a Disney movie. I know, Margaret says. Her pale round face opens up. Everybody uses the phrase or . That has a neo-Nazi ring to it. I like the Disney version. I feel you, she says, and I sit for a minute silently disbelieving she's a nun. She adjusts her heavy glasses, and her eyes once again magnify. Let's eat a cookie and pray for each other's disordered attachments, she s.. | Mary Karr | ||
| d4578c9 | I ALMOST FELT A WEIRD POWER OVER MOTHER DURING SUCH TIME. SHE HAD A HOLD ON ME, AT LEAST. AND HER GRIP FELT LIKE SHE WOULD HANG ON NO MATTER WHAT I YANKED HER THROUGH. BY THIS TIME IT WAS HURRICANE SEASON. | Mary Karr | ||
| 1918d6f | VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God Ninety percent of what's wrong with you could be cured with a hot bath, says God through the manhole covers, but you want magic, to win the lottery you never bought a ticket for. (Tenderly, the monks chant, embrace the suffering.) The voice never panders, offers no five-year plan, no long-term solution, no edicts from a cloudy white beard hooked over ears. It is small and fond and local. Don't look for your init.. | poetry wisdom | Mary Karr | |
| c5bca08 | sister was. But I couldn't resist such a clear shot. So I said her | Mary Karr | ||
| 49189fd | I don't know whether it was that night or some other I found the soliloquy from Richard the Second. I only know that finding it let me sail off some blind cliff face into full-blown flight: --Of comfort no man speak: Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes | Mary Karr Cherry | ||
| 11189b7 | I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down; how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger." | flow growth | Mary Karr | |
| 7323d97 | Her mother's injunction on competing with other girls is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down: "You just have to be smarter than the ones who are prettier and prettier than the ones who are smarter" | female-success mother pretty smart | Mary Karr | |
| b0275cf | You're inside at the kitchen table wolfing cereal when she says, 'you have accomplished a great thing.' You say, 'and what would that be, bwana?' Meredith says, 'you're your same self.' The truth of this flickers past you, gnat-like. For years, you've felt only half done inside, cobbled together by paper clips, held intact by gum wads and school paste. But something solid is starting to assemble inside you. You say, 'I am my same self. .. | memoir | Mary Karr | |
| a07f7ef | Nature heals itself. A tree falls down, another grows in its place. | Iain Rob Wright | ||
| e7c7fbf | When she erupted into rippling peals of laughter, he was offended. True, it had not been much of a proposal, but it was the first of his life and meant a great deal to him. Then her infectious laugh grabbed him and pulled him in to laugh along with her. | Celeste Bradley | ||
| 654dc1f | No amount of careful grooming seemed to erase their impression that he was actually a foul and frightening ogre. It was enough to give a fellow self-doubts. | regency-romance romance royal-four spy | Celeste Bradley | |
| 13c2e2b | It was if the devil himself had devised the perfect earthly torture for Lady Alicia Lawrence. "Now how will I occupy myself when I get to hell?" | historical-romance regency-romance romance royal-four snarky-quotes spy | Celeste Bradley | |
| 0a6d920 | All at once I felt myself haunted by a terrible vision, of a world without guidance: a land of emptiness, where all was ruled by the madness of chance. How could one endure such a place, where all significance was lost? I myself would mean nothing, but would merely be a kind of self-invention: a speck upon the wind, calling itself Wilson. I felt my spirit waver, as if it were toppling into the abyss before me. | humor religion | Matthew Kneale | |
| fd014e5 | Undoubtedly, the place to start with Chinese fiction is with Cao Xueqin's eighteenth-century classic, A Dream of Red Mansions, a sweeping epic about family life and Confucian practices in feudal China, including numerous subplots, a gazillion characters, and a touching love story. | Nancy Pearl | ||
| 8833a1e | One of my top ten favorite novels in any category is Stephanie Plowman's The Road to Sardis, a heartbreaking retelling of the events of the Peloponnesian War, which broke out in 431 B.C. between longtime rivals Athens and Sparta, and lasted for twenty-seven years. | Nancy Pearl | ||
| f5ef764 | All great empires are destined to eventual mediocrity and extinction. No dynasty lasts forever. | Iain Rob Wright | ||
| 76f8fa9 | Both Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae and Tides of War: A Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War are well-told accounts of crucial events in Greek history. | Nancy Pearl | ||
| a4560b6 | Three books set in Iran--first a novel about two lovers caught up in the Iranian Revolution, then two books about Iran since the Revolution: The Persian Bride by James Buchan The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran by Robin B. Wright Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran by Elaine Sciolino | Nancy Pearl | ||
| aa27c7a | Wild Life by Molly Gloss Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle | Nancy Pearl | ||
| e2ae341 | The best place to begin is with the Library of America's two-volume collection, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s & 40s and Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. Together they include all the major writers as well as bring some lesser-known authors to a wider audience. In general chronological order, here are some depths to which you can lower yourself: | Nancy Pearl | ||
| 981f39a | Paul Cain is an early, influential figure in this genre, who is now quite hard to find even in used bookstores and libraries. His 1932 Fast One was a noir landmark; it | Nancy Pearl | ||
| ac42bdb | The Killer Inside Me is a chilling first-person story of an evil lawman, while Pop. 1280 is a strangely funny version of the same plot. Of all the noir writers, Thompson is the most popular today, in part because several of his novels, including The Grifters, were successfully adapted for film. | Nancy Pearl | ||
| e4b59be | The three grand old men of Cuban literature are Alejo Carpentier (his masterpiece is The Lost Steps); Jose Lezama Lima (whose autobiographical novel Paradiso infuriated Castro); and Guillermo Cabrera Infante (the setting of his novel Three Trapped Tigers--pre-Castro Havana--reminded me of Oscar Hijuelos's A Simple Habana Melody From When the World Was Good). | Nancy Pearl | ||
| 061e38d | Food played a major role in the lives of both Ruth Reichl (longtime New York Times restaurant critic and editor-in-chief of Gourmet, who wrote about her lifelong interest in food in two memoirs, the best of which is the first, Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table) and Patricia Volk (who wrote about her life in Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family). | Nancy Pearl | ||
| 1ddf7ef | Daddy Was a Numbers Runner by Louise Meriwether is the story of Francie Coffin, who is growing up in the spirit-deadening ghettos of Harlem in the 1930s, in a family struggling to survive intact. | Nancy Pearl | ||
| 2ecab86 | In The Jew of New York, Ben Katchor draws on a historical event--the early-nineteenth-century plan to set up a Jewish homeland in upstate New York--to create a weirdly real world of make-believe. Or | Nancy Pearl | ||
| a0c019c | Erskine Caldwell's stories of rural poverty (Tobacco Road) and | Nancy Pearl | ||
| cb92308 | Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina is a coming-of-age novel about Ruth Ann (Bone) Boatwright and a difficult childhood made even harder by her violent and predatory stepfather. | Nancy Pearl | ||
| 692440b | In his dark story collection Poachers, Tom Franklin, who once worked in a grit factory, offers the sad and sorry lives of people stuck in the back-waters of the Alabama River, who tend to subsist on a steady diet of moon-shine and stale crackers. | Nancy Pearl | ||
| f21a97c | English Passengers, a first novel by Matthew Kneale, relates what follows when a group of Englishmen arrive in mid-nineteenth-century Tasmania with different purposes: to find the Garden of Eden, to prove the natives are less intelligent than the British, and to escape from British law. Kneale also describes the tragic life of a young Aboriginal whose experiences are shaped by the arrival of the British. | Nancy Pearl | ||
| a557743 | Amitav Ghosh's multigenerational saga The Glass Palace, set in colonial Burma, India, and Malaya, tells the story of Rajkumar, once a poor Indian boy, who becomes a wealthy teak trader in Burma, and lovely Dolly, former child-maid to the queen and second princess of Burma. | Nancy Pearl | ||
| 54c4b88 | The so-called "scar literature" first appeared in China in the late 1970s, when the men and women who survived the turmoil of Mao's Cultural Revolution began writing about their experiences in both fiction and nonfiction. Two of the best novels are Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, the story of two young boys--children of the hated intelligentsia--who are sent to a remote mountain village to be reeducated, and Dai Houyi.. | Nancy Pearl | ||
| 80d5939 | Before David McCullough went on to fame, fortune, and literary awards with books like John Adams and Mornings on Horseback, he wrote a tragic and riveting account of the great 1889 flood in Pennsylvania, The Johnstown Flood. Kathleen Cambor describes the same disaster in a novel, In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden. | Nancy Pearl | ||
| 89e458e | There are also some moving sections about World War II in Anthony Burgess's Any Old Iron, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, Kit Reed's At War As Children, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, and Nancy Willard's Things Invisible to See. | Nancy Pearl | ||
| e252306 | thought how pretty Pearl was and | Nancy Revell | ||
| e3ab2ee | Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana's richer, more textured version of "Bang Bang" layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l'oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy's Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the mos.. | Viet Thanh Nguyen | ||
| dafe493 | Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| f03d20a | memoir A Ride in the Neon Sun. Here's what she says about traveling: Some people travel with firm ideas for a journey, following in the footsteps of an intrepid ancestor whose exotic exploits were happened upon in a dusty, cobweb-laced attic containing immovable trunks full of sepia-curled daguerreotypes and age-discoloured letters redolent of bygone days. Others travel for anthropological, botanical, archaeological, geological, and other l.. | Nancy Pearl | ||
| f55bd7d | The crops, however, I examine closely, to see what each bird has been feeding upon. Clover. Kinnickkinnick. Snowberries. Wheat. Barley. Crickets. Grasshoppers. Fir needles. Huckleberries. Rose hips. The crops filled with snowberries are breathtaking, looking like a clump of pearls, and nearly as rare; it's always a thrill to open a crop and see nothing but beautiful white berries. Usually in these woods, though, in the autumn, the crops are.. | Rick Bass | ||
| 56949f5 | In Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata, the first of Japan's two Nobel laureates, describes the sad and sorry love affair of a geisha from the country and an intellectual from the city. It's | Nancy Pearl | ||
| 03cf222 | In its descriptions of a family trying to find suitable mates for three sisters, The Makioka Sisters by Junichir o Tanizaki brings to mind the novels of Jane Austen and Anton Chekhov. | Nancy Pearl |