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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| df231cd | What you have to do, if you get caught in this gumption trap of value rigidity, is slow down - you're going to have to slow down anyway whether you want to or not - but slow down deliberately and go over ground that you've been over before to see if the things you thought were important were really important and to . . . well . . . just stare at the machine. There's nothing wrong with that. Just live with it for a while. Watch it the way yo.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| eb9c338 | What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of. Now Chris's body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern rem.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 74bef39 | partisan of the governor, said angrily that the legislature would prevent the school from losing its accreditation. Phaedrus asked how. The student said they would post police to prevent it. Phaedrus pondered this for a while, then realized the enormity of the student's misconception of what accreditation was all about. That night, for the next day's lecture, he wrote out his defense of what he was doing. This was the Church of Reason lectu.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 340d205 | The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| fc50221 | Lo que me gustaria hacer ahora es usar ese tiempo para conversar sobre algunas cosas que se me vienen a la mente. Vamos con tanta prisa la mayor parte del tiempo que nunca tenemos muchas oportunidades de charlar. El resultado es una especie de interminable superficialidad cotidiana, una monotonia que deja a la persona preguntandose, anos mas tarde, adonde se fue el tiempo y lamentando que se haya ido. Ahora que tenemos algo de tiempo, y lo .. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 60cbfc6 | We're in such a hurry most of the time we never get a chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day to day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering where all the time went and sorry that it's all gone. | inspirational philosophy-of-life zen-buddhism | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 7b588b3 | But in the secondary America we've been through, of back roads, and Chinaman's ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasn't much feeling of loneliness. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 2229026 | duller than ditchwater. Yah | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| a975e9c | The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 5e1f3c6 | Birisi nankorse ve siz ona nankor oldugunu soylerseniz, en fazla ona bir ad takmis olursunuz ama hicbir seyi cozmus olmazsiniz. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| fb98db8 | You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| e0c5348 | If one accepts the premise that all knowledge comes to us through our senses, Hume says, then one must logically conclude that both 'Nature' and 'Nature's laws' are creations of our own imagination. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| a8a16f4 | poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 2f3a059 | To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that's out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He's likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees... | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 897414e | The parties are advised to chill. | Alex Kozinski | ||
| c8e633f | Oops | humor mistress-of-the-night | Michael Chabon | |
| df0ccf0 | e tipico dell'adolescente immaginare la fine del mondo come un accessorio del proprio contesto | Don DeLillo | ||
| 7d1acc8 | mouth cat's-cradled with filaments of gleaming cheese. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 35d9ab4 | A girl's affections should never be won unsought. | Anne Brontë | ||
| 245825a | My goal is to go home and take a nap. | Laurie Halse Anderson | ||
| a09aafc | Revolution, and this is-- | Belva Plain | ||
| 6975a4a | I was made for the library, not the classroom. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 4fb72ac | Do you want to be like Goethe or any of those so-called geniuses who marry a nothing hausfrau? | Nathaniel Branden | ||
| b4ad00a | The thing I want you to understand," Ayn was saying, "is that no matter how hard the battle, it can be won. You can break through." | Nathaniel Branden | ||
| bc8fe8e | Is Death miles away from this house, Reaching for a window in Cincinnati Or breathing down the neck of a lost hiker In British Columbia? Is he too busy making arrangments, Tampering with air brakes, Scattering cancer cells like seeds, Loosening the wooden breams of roller coaster To both with my hidden cottage That visitors find so hard to find? Or if he stepping from a black car Parked at the dark end of the lane, Shaking open the famil.. | my-number | Billy Collins | |
| b77164d |
C'e nessuno che voglia unirsi a me nel lanciare alcuni sassi verso quegli insegnanti che amano porre la domanda: < |
Billy Collins | ||
| e1ae007 | Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin. I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter. I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on. I find it difficult to ignore the temptation. Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter. | Billy Collins | ||
| 847ba5e | I would rather eat at the bar, but such behavior is regarded by professionals as a form of denial, so here I am seated alone at a table with a white tablecloth attended by an elderly waiter with no name- ideal conditions for dining alone according to the connoisseurs of this minor talent. I have brought neither book nor newspaper since reading material is considered cheating. Eating alone, they say, means eating alone, not in the company of.. | poetry | Billy Collins | |
| 35d936c | I Love You' Early on, I noticed that you always say it to each of your children as you are getting off the phone with them just as you never fail to say it to me whenever we arrive at the end of a call. It's all new to this only child. I never heard my parents say it, at least not on such a regular basis, nor did it ever occur to me to miss it. To say I love you pretty much every day would have seemed strangely obvious, like saying I'm loo.. | poetry | Billy Collins | |
| a7500b7 | and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page a few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, | Billy Collins | ||
| 06852b7 | On Turning Ten" The whole idea of it makes me feel like I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-- a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. B.. | Billy Collins | ||
| c31dd5a | This is the beginning. Almost anything can happen. This is where you find the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land, the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page. Think of an egg, the letter A, a woman ironing on a bare stage | Billy Collins | ||
| 5172bf1 | Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant I am glad I resisted the temptation, if it was a temptation when I was young, to write a poem about an old man eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant. I would have gotten it all wrong thinking: the poor bastard, not a friend in the world and with only a book for a companion. He'll probably pay the bill out of a change purse. So glad I waited all these decades to record how hot and.. | Billy Collins | ||
| 6286a52 | It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. | Donald A. Norman | ||
| a0221d7 | Theme It's a sunny weekday in early May and after a ham sandwich and a cold bottle of beer on the brick terrace, I am consumed by the wish to add something to one of the ancient themes- youth dancing with his eyes closed, for example, in the shadows of corruption and death, or the rise and fall of illustrious men strapped to the turning wheel of mischance and disaster. There is a slight breeze, just enough to bend the yellow tulips on th.. | hopelessness immortality love poetry | Billy Collins | |
| 834fbae | Building with Its Face Blown Off How suddenly the private is revealed in a bombed-out city, how the blue and white striped wallpaper of a second story bedroom is now exposed to the lightly falling snow as if the room had answered the explosion wearing only its striped pajamas. Some neighbors and soldiers poke around in the rubble below and stare up at the hanging staircase, the portrait of a grandfather, a door dangling from a single hinge... | city exposed food ruined | Billy Collins | |
| 9d9ac96 | On Not Finding You at Home Usually you appear at the front door when you hear my steps on the gravel, but today the door was closed, not a wisp of pale smoke from the chimney. I peered into a window but there was nothing but a table with a comb, some yellow flowers in a glass of water and dark shadows in the corners of the room. I stood for a while under the big tree and listened to the wind and the birds, your wind and your birds, your dar.. | me poetry waiting you | Billy Collins | |
| a4aa61f | Thank-You Notes Under the vigilant eye of my mother I had to demonstrate my best penmanship By thanking Uncle Gerry for the toy soldiers- Little red members of the Coldstream Guards- And thanking Aunt Helen for the pistol and holster, But now I am writing other notes Alone at a small cherry desk with a breeze coming in an open window, thanking everyone I happen to see on my long walk to the post office today and anyone who ever gave me dir.. | poetry | Billy Collins | |
| f937a0f | I drove to the bar Theodosha had called from and parked on the street. The bar was a gray, dismal place, ensconced like a broken matchbox under a dying oak tree, its only indication of gaiety a neon beer sign that flickered in one window. She was at a table in back, the glow of the jukebox lighting her face and the deep blackness of her hair. She tipped a collins glass to her mouth, her eyes locked on mine. "Let me take you home," I said. ".. | James Lee Burke | ||
| a18de70 | You, Reader I wonder how you are going to feel when you find out that I wrote this instead of you, that it was I who got up early to sit in the itchen and mention with a pen the rain-soaked windows, the ivy wallpaper, and the goldfish circling in its bowl. Go ahead and turn aside, bite your lip and tear out the page, but, listen- it was just a matter of time before one of us happened to notice the unlit candles and the clock humming on the.. | poetry reader | Billy Collins | |
| b1f6500 | And the past and the future? Nothing but an only child with two different masks. | Billy Collins | ||
| fd4a2d8 | In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok you would never see him doing such a thing, tossing the dry snow over the mountain of his bare, round shoulder, his hair tied in a knot, a model of concentration. Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word for what he does, or does not do. Even the season is wrong for him. In all his manifestations, is it not warm and slightly humid? Is this not implied by his serene expression, .. | Billy Collins | ||
| 5882b9f | Hangover If I were crowned emperor this morning, every child who is playing Marco Polo in the swimming pool of this motel, shouting the name Marco Polo back and forth Marco Polo Marco Polo would be required to read a biography of Marco Polo--a long one with fine print--as well as a history of China and of Venice, the birthplace of the venerated explorer Marco Polo Marco Polo after which each child would be quizzed by me then executed by dro.. | Billy Collins | ||
| 5bb1f39 | It might interest you to know, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of rain on the roof. I also happen to be the shooting star, the evening paper blowing down an alley and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table. | Billy Collins |