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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0c69a5b | Say I told you so. They're the four most satisfying words in the English language. You could rupture something trying to keep them inside you. | Richard Russo | ||
| bc6df0c | Yes. He loves us all. "No!" Tunic emphatically disagreed. "God does not." Well, fuck him, then, Raymer thought, giddy with heat and blasphemy. Shame on God. "Because a shirker is a coward." No, God is." | Richard Russo | ||
| 2d4d012 | books by her favorite "Golden Age" British mystery writers--Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, and Agatha Christie--evil" | Richard Russo | ||
| 3204d15 | I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read. Around | Richard Russo | ||
| 2b17560 | Because if you were God, it stood to reason your real enemy would be boredom. Sully | Richard Russo | ||
| 5161b03 | The more you had, it seemed to me, the larger your border that needed defending. | Richard Russo | ||
| b53b547 | ragged piece of thin glass jutted out of the socket, all that was left of the | Richard Russo | ||
| b56bc37 | begin laughing too, though they have no idea why. Which | Richard Russo | ||
| 839d0d7 | It's now widely agreed in progressive social circles that all humankind constitutes a single superorganism. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 1543992 | Since others have explained my theory, I can no longer understand it myself. | Albert Einstein | ||
| d05db95 | On the radio, Klavdia Sulzhenko sang "The Blue Kerchief." The war had died; that song was getting old; then again, so was I. But" -- | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 90b06b6 | Jimmy decided to get drunk--not just drunk enough to enjoy life (here he grinned, and Cecily smiled back), not just drunk enough to fuck Cecily for instance up the ass without a rubber, not just drunk enough to hear bees buzzing round his ears and wake up in another bad place he'd never seen before with crushed bugs on the walls and men maybe standing over him looking down at him with their teeth drawn away from their lips, and puke cold an.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 6e70b16 | A vertical movement toward market incentives is noticeable, nonetheless. As industrial capitalism arises in England in the eighteenth century, new economic structures raise the stakes for commercial ventures: tantalizing rewards lure innovators into private enterprise, and the codification of English patent laws in the early 1700s gives some reassurance that good ideas will not be stolen with impunity. Despite this new protection, most comm.. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 3f76338 | but the little operative codenamed GREINER, whom I was frankly beginning to consider defeatist, insisted that the Soviets had antidotes to everything, even unfortunate facts. I | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 0a17707 | I'm sure you've noticed, continued Comrade Luria, how much aestheticians like to prate about the impotence of form without content, or content without form. But in music, perfect form and content together can remain as stillborn as a law without the seal of Heaven on it. There has to be emotion . . . | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 9701a80 | as a certain classical slaveholder once wrote, nothing is more painful than days of joy recollected in days of misery. So | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 50504c4 | But illusions don't die all at once-- | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 665efa2 | By your command, sir, I said. But Elena was still the one I loved. Knowing that I loved her, I knew who I was. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 081d6bc | the skin of her naked throat was as perfect as a political idea. She | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 17cae7e | After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 7222414 | Could it be that everything in this world remains so fundamentally pure that nothing can ever be more than half ruined? | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 754e671 | And so we all write stories to suit ourselves, and I wish happy endings, happy landings to all of us | William T. Vollmann | ||
| d29d58a | We should have known that the only reason that Shostakovich's nightmare restored us to ourselves was so we'd be compelled to drink the cup of anguish. It | William T. Vollmann | ||
| ffa36cb | Life calls for the highest order of deafness; then we can be, so to speak, happy. It | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 98d050d | Mitya was almost ready to confess which chord it was which actually caused him to see rainbow icicles. Soon | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 84a4438 | whatever fate sends us quickly becomes us, and we grow blind to what we might otherwise have been. And | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 17ec9d8 | Rejected content will come out somewhere else. That | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 94c11cc | The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles; that | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 11b8518 | So many revolutionaries are intellectuals, a class of people whose aspirations tend to run ahead of their capabilities. Just | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 77d018b | A squat black telephone, I mean an octopus, the god of our Signal Corps, owns a recess in Berlin (more probably Moscow, which one German general has named . | William T. Vollmann | ||
| a79eafa | After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 1d5b74b | I know it's ridiculous, but I sometimes feel that my love for her is the only thing that's genuine about me. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| d44a12f | The shortest man, codenamed RIMSKY, said to me that freedom means understanding our place within the laws of history; we are more free when we acknowledge our submission to the law of gravity than when we foolishly deny it. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| c5c0555 | For propaganda, of course. It's all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to? | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 64d9b3d | sunglasses make the world quieter and safer, as if you are viewing things behind smoked windows fronting your skull-house: you are inside and the world is outside, and the world cannot see into you; mirror sunglasses double the armor), | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 25711be | A pianist can sometimes resemble a slow underwater swimmer, and a lover likewise swims within the sea of the other, far down where no waves can reach; overhead, the piano's lid, heavier than a coffin's, shuts out extraneous vibrations, while simultaneously demarcating the boundary between water and air. It's too perfect underwater; that's what kills us, the perfection! | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 85ebae4 | The awareness in an animal's eyes is alien beyond knowledge, whereas the gaze from within the dark-glass haunted him because he nearly comprehended it. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 2673e54 | I believe in one thing--that only a life lived for others is a life worth living. | Albert Einstein | ||
| 868c16e | he and the cardinal agree it would be better if Luther had never been born, or better if he had been born more subtle. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| be7036a | When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function. | guilt law | Hilary Mantel | |
| 43b4747 | his greatest ambition for England is this: the prince and his commonwealth should be in accord. He doesn't want the kingdom to be run like Walter's house in Putney, with fighting all the time and the sound of banging and shrieking day and night. He wants it to be a household where everybody knows what they have to do, and feels safe doing it. He says to Rice, 'Stephen Gardiner says I should write a book. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 05bcd76 | Mrs Thatcher has told one of her interviewers that she had nothing to say to her mother after she reached the age of fifteen. Such a sad, blunt confession it seems, and yet not a few of us could make it. The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them. Hilary Mantel | Helen Garner | ||
| 68f1f23 | People confuse early rising with moral worth; | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 52aaa7a | He does not even hate Francis Weston, any more than you hate a biting midge; you just wonder why it was created. | Hilary Mantel |