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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5c96d5f | He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside or is it all America? | John Updike | ||
| 9a182ec | He realizes that the heat on his cheeks is anger; he has been angry ever since he left that diner full of mermaids. | John Updike | ||
| 9416a59 | It's the truth. It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time. | John Updike | ||
| 2b73539 | He must try to stop swearing; he wonders why he's doing it. To keep them apart, maybe; he feels a dangerous tug drawing him toward this man. | John Updike | ||
| 87a9c18 | I felt the superb iron of Barth's paragraphs, his magnificent seamless integrity and energy in this realm of prose--the specifically Christian--usually conspicuous for intellectual limpness and dishonesty. "Man is a riddle and nothing else, and his universe, be it ever so vividly seen and felt, is a question.... The solution of the riddle, the answer to the question, the satisfaction of our need is the absolutely new event.... There is no w.. | John Updike | ||
| d55c928 | The late novelist and critic John Updike once noted that the trouble with writing book reviews is that it is "almost impossible to...avoid the tone of being wonderfully right." | Kathryn Schulz | ||
| 003141a | This is a bad world; nor have I had cause to leave it with regret. | Horace Walpole | ||
| e65f43b | A man--Buck--wrote a vindication in the seventeenth-century, and Horace Walpole in the eighteenth, and someone named Markham in the nineteenth ... " "And who in the twentieth?" "No one that I know of." "Then what's wrong with your doing it?" "But it wont' be the same, don't you see? It won't be a great discovery." He said it in capitals. A GREAT DISCOVERY. Grant smiled at him. "Oh, come, you can't expect to pick GREAT DISCOVERIES off bushes.. | Josephine Tey | ||
| ef378dd | Historic justice is due to all characters. Who would not vindicate Henry the Eighth or Charles the Second, if found to be falsely traduced? Why then not Richard the Third? | Horace Walpole | ||
| 53029a1 | In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last. --Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford (1717-1797) | Robert Wachter | ||
| a120159 | Horace Walpole, the writer and politician, meanwhile, once saw Mademoiselle la Chevaliere d'Eon, known in her day as a transvestite-diplomat-spy, teaching fencing to the Cosways' guests in the midst of a party.16,17 | Jon Meacham | ||
| 1d8aa3a | If you love good roads, conveniences, good inns, plenty of postilions and horses, be so kind as to never go into Sussex. We thought ourselves in the northest part of England; the whole country has a Saxon air, and the inhabitants are savage." - To George Montagu, Esq., August 26, 1749" | insult sussex travel | Horace Walpole | |
| 4d76945 | What makes bitter things sweet? Hunger. | Alcuin | ||
| 8ba961e | All very ancient history, except that of the illuminated Jews, is a perfect fable. It was written by priests, or collected from their reports; and calculated solely to raise lofty ideas of the origin of each nation. Gods and demi-gods were the principal actors; and truth is seldom to be expected where the personages are supernatural. The Greek historians have no advantage over the Peruvian, but in the beauty of their language, or from that .. | Horace Walpole | ||
| 94249ca | Serendipity is another word in the luck family. Invented by Horace Walpole in 1754, it appropriately began life as a misprint. Walpole wrote a letter to Horace Mann developing the idea of serendipity from a 'silly fairytale' about chance called The Three Princes of Serendip. But Walpole had made a mistake: the real title of the story was The Three Princes of Sarendip (the ancient name for Sri Lanka). Before its current fashionable | Ed Smith | ||
| df13834 | Serendipity is another word in the luck family. Invented by Horace Walpole in 1754, it appropriately began life as a misprint. Walpole wrote a letter to Horace Mann developing the idea of serendipity from a 'silly fairytale' about chance called The Three Princes of Serendip. But Walpole had made a mistake: the real title of the story was The Three Princes of Sarendip (the ancient name for Sri Lanka). | Ed Smith | ||
| 78dfcc9 | My veracity is dearer to me than my life," said the peasant; "nor would I purchase the one by forfeiting the other." | Horace Walpole | ||
| 9a494ab | My soul abhors a falsehood | Horace Walpole | ||
| 71c1cd2 | If something foreign arrives at Paris, they either think they invented it, or that it has always been there. --Horace Walpole | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 99c8d22 | And you mother still close to me, | Aldo Capitini | ||
| affd2ef | At a time of shuddering devastation, they stepped in as the dragon-slayers. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 4b4b906 | diadem, Cleopatra took part throughout the trip in religious | Stacy Schiff | ||
| b94623b | There was good reason why Cleopatra's subjects viewed time as a coil of endless repetitions. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 028d405 | Dimitri had driven his mother back to Montreux from the Lausanne hospital at dusk on July 2, in his blue Ferrari, on the last day of his father's life. Vera had sat silently for a few minutes and then uttered the one desperate line Dimitri ever heard escape her lips, "Let's rent an airplane and crash." | mourning | Stacy Schiff | |
| 6fc0e98 | A good-sized Ptolemaic vessel could carry three hundred tons of wheat down the river. At least two such ships made the trip daily--with wheat, barley, lentils--to feed Alexandria alone. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| de7ebb6 | You could not really bargain away your soul before it was established that you had one. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| a43ecf4 | They were inculcated with a firm sense of noblesse oblige, as with a respect for hierarchy; the Slonim girls knew well how to decode a social situation, and what they could rightfully expect from one. In part these seemed to be survival tactics for living in an uncertain time. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 979633b | She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one. | egypt history women women-empowerment | Stacy Schiff | |
| 7dc5db0 | Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 70e9c35 | published, Beverly minister John Hale had produced | Stacy Schiff | ||
| f18b887 | Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous intersections in history: that of women and power. Clever women, Euripides had warned hundreds of years earlier, were dangerous. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 8930c4f | Apollodorus came, Caesar saw, Cleopatra conquered. | cleopatra egypt julius-caesar | Stacy Schiff | |
| f2ff2ad | The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra. It has been perhaps best defined as a Greek era in which the Greeks played no role.) | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 4f54ada | In this world," he reminded a French friend, "it is not faith that saves us, but defiance." | Stacy Schiff | ||
| c1ff938 | History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy. | history | Stacy Schiff | |
| 701f7cf | Witchcraft tied up loose ends, accounting for the arbitrary, the eerie, and the unneighborly. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| e563b24 | We have believed in any number of things - the tooth fairy, cold fusion, and benefits of smoking, the free lunch - that turn out not to exist. We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| df73ed6 | Only a small, supernatural figure remained at the scene of the crime.* He did resolve one mystery while in Salem: indeed the devil needs conscious human collusion to work evil. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 36d8959 | To one visitor Alexandrian life was "just one continuous revel, not a sweet or gentle revel either, but savage and harsh, a revel of dancers, whistlers, and murderers all combined." | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 52f1277 | He was the type of person who believed he alone could do the job adequately and afterward complained that no one had helped. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 7687ec5 | We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are. We | Stacy Schiff | ||
| c51ee65 | but from an early age she would have known literarily what she at twenty-one discovered empirically: there were days you felt like waging war, and days when you just needed to go home. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| ba1d57a | With her death Egypt became a Roman province. It would not recover its autonomy until the twentieth century. | Stacy Schiff | ||
| 4990017 | Vera assumed her married name almost as a stage name; rarely has matrimony so much represented a profession. It was one of the ironies of the life that - born at a time and place where women could and did lay claim to all kinds of ambitions - she should elevate the role of wife to a high art. [...] Traditionally, a man changes his name and braces himself for fame; a woman changes hers and passes into oblivion. This was not to be Vera's case.. | marriage name-change | Stacy Schiff |