1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6755
6756
6757
6758
6759
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3e78a23 | One aspect of human resilience, in all its marvelousness, was the ability to recalibrate, to adjust to new circumstances with astonishing speed. | Maile Meloy | ||
| 83faa7c | you--die? | Maile Meloy | ||
| 8e5c97c | People regressed, around their families, to the age at which they had been angriest. | Maile Meloy | ||
| c97877f | They could talk about shallow things without judgment and deep things without self-consciousness. | Maile Meloy | ||
| ce06dd3 | But the commandments were absolute. The stone tablets Moses brought down from the mountain had not said Thou shalt not kill except when fighting Nazis, or in self-defense, or in some other situations, listed below. Thou shalt not steal unless thou art near death with hunger fighting in a just cause, or hath a family to support, or if perhaps an irresistible opportunity to get rich presenteth itself. | Maile Meloy | ||
| 311cc4d | They had started one of those wish-fulfillment kids' adventure books, where the boy hero has exactly the qualities he needs to triumph, at every moment... She'd been bored and annoyed, and at one point she tried to explain to Sebastian why it wasn't her favor-ite of his books. But Sebastian had loved the book unreservedly. Why hadn't she just read the fucking thing with gusto and relished every moment with her son? Why had she brought her a.. | child childhood hero judgment kid life reading | Maile Meloy | |
| ed9d9a2 | It takes experience to know what is a catastrophe (Richard Hughes, 'A High Wind in Jamaica'), | Maile Meloy | ||
| b9185af | and braking, | Maile Meloy | ||
| 933b2c4 | He who delays the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out. | Maile Meloy | ||
| 9dc1c07 | But how could you measure your own pain against the pain of the world? | Maile Meloy | ||
| 52fb860 | Maybe the Fates snipped with their scissors when they wanted to snip. | Maile Meloy | ||
| 54bba36 | Benjamin called it "estro-lock," the way the two women could talk for hours and lose track of time. They ended up in conversation across any table, screening out noise from kids and men. They could talk about shallow things without judgment and deep things without self-consciousness." | Maile Meloy | ||
| 74fde96 | Civilization, her mother had told her since she was small, was a series of agreements about what was good for everyone, enforced by law. And civilization was only a thin veneer over the savagery and greed that were the human default. | Maile Meloy | ||
| c81ecb6 | The gyre that pulls this sunrise ocean moves west from Africa across the equator then caresses this thumb of land on Mexico's flank. The Gulf Stream carries the warm waters farther north. Like the ocean currents, airflow also moves in a circular pattern, captive to the earth's rotation, pulled one way or the other on either side of the equator: the Coriolis effect. This force can act upon the spiraling of water down drains, counterclockwise.. | Ellen Meloy | ||
| c68f60d | In the hallowed tradition of squishy doughball liberals, I believe that science, reason, kindness, and understanding--maybe a little food--can set the world right. B | Ellen Meloy | ||
| 0269e30 | It has come quickly, this crushing, industrial love of paradise. The pervert-free, less-trammeled, hundred-mile-view days were little more than two decades past, not so very long ago. Yet already my own history sounds like another country. | Ellen Meloy | ||
| 4dfc413 | Sometimes the desert exhilarates me to the point of soaring. Other times I am so heartsick I cannot bear up against the despair, a palpable, aching longing. Longing for this wild beauty to last and for me never to die and no longer be able to feel, see, hear, taste, and breathe it. A yearning to die before the desert's wild heart is lost so I do not have to witness it. A longing to be a better person, for the world to be a better place, for.. | Ellen Meloy | ||
| 571da04 | One of the reasons I decided to enter this profession," one of the Riot Librarrrians wrote, "was because I'm in love with information, and the library remains one of the few spaces in our lives where information is not a commodity.... There's a subversive element to librarianship that I adore." | library service | Marilyn Johnson | |
| 37208e3 | We were bleeding information from the nose and ears, though dazed and disoriented was not how I experienced it. Most of the time, I felt like I was three years old, high on chocolate cake and social networks, constantly wired, ingesting information and news about information, books and books about books, data and metadata--I was, in other words, overstimulated yet gluttonous for more. | technology | Marilyn Johnson | |
| 718e3d0 | I understood--I thought I understood--then things changed, or I learned the next thing that made everything I knew before obsolete. | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| a7d3132 | Agate, population 70, is one of those towns that people describe as 'blink and you'll miss it.' Lois A. Engel loved living in the blink. | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| 008ca0e | One graduate student told me, "When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts," and I promptly added her to my address book. Knows how to make hill forts--who can say when that will come in handy?" | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| 9729f5a | Writers seldom just stop writing. We're like serial killers in that way. You have to stop us, because we cannot stop ourselves. | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| 88ddb55 | Some of these tools were ingenious, including sets of playing cards for Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan--regular fifty-two-card decks, but with images and information about archaeological practices, famous cultural sites, and notable artifacts; the reverse sides could be pieced together to form a map of the most iconic site for each country. | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| 00f372b | The Johnson boy came to Tommy's mind, how he couldn't get off drugs, and then Tommy thought of Marilyn Macauley and her husband, Charlie, and then his mind went to his older brother, who had died a few years back, and he thought how his brother--who had been in World War II, who had been at the camps when they were being emptied--he thought how his brother had returned from the war a different man; his marriage ended, his children disliked .. | Elizabeth Strout | ||
| 1a47cff | A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a "true reflection of our history," whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future." | librarians librarianship libraries library library-and-information-science library-science | Marilyn Johnson | |
| eac4a31 | I regretted my human form briefly; it would be so much easier to drag and rope information into the brain as neatly as one dragged and dropped information on the computer. Perhaps I was suffering from a touch of information sickness? If I could weed out my thoughts...There was one reliable cure I've found, a bit of the hair of the dog--the release in reading. Not a manual: something with a narrative, a chute built by a writer and waxed unti.. | peace reading | Marilyn Johnson | |
| 5ccb4a2 | I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children--and was.. | libraries obituaries | Marilyn Johnson | |
| 76cdbf4 | Whole chapters of contemporary history are disappearing into the ether as e-mails get trashed and webpages are taken down and people die without sharing their passwords. | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| 62099ec | March 11: Marilyn arrives at Greenson's home and tells him she is going to Palm Springs. After memorizing Nunnally Johnson's script for Something's Got to Give, Marilyn learns it has been rewritten by George Cukor and Walter Bernstein. Marilyn is sent forty pages of modifications, but she refuses to play the part as rewritten. | Carl Rollyson | ||
| cb09d67 | April 22: "I'm a bookworm and proud of it," Marilyn tells columnist Erskine Johnson." | Carl Rollyson | ||
| 7cd9031 | Homo sapiens who lived in caves put trash in front and slept in the back; not so in the caves occupied by Homo heidelbergensis. Those humans, probably the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis, lived like frat boys 700,000 to 300,000 years ago, "flinging shit everywhere"--and the idea of slovenly boy and girl ancestors fascinated me. "Big heavy stone tools . . . probably solved things with brute force. Commandos without .. | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| f1e92c2 | March 30: Marilyn approves of Johnson's script. | Carl Rollyson | ||
| 3a577c8 | bone grease with dried meat and berries to make pemmican, the energy bars of a thousand years ago, and with a pouch of pemmican, the Native Americans were good to travel far and wide. (If you can't pack portable food, you spend most of your time hunting and foraging). | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| 05112e5 | One of the advantages of living in the Ice Age would be that there are not very many people around. You're constantly moving, and you have to live by your wits. You can't just have fifteen different kinds of tools, you can't carry them. And no villages--no village idiots. Imagine a world free of idiots!" Idiots, he liked to point out, "don't survive in environments with lions." | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| 184ea18 | February 12: Nunnally Johnson completes a new draft of Something's Got to Give. Marilyn later writes on the script, "We've got a dog here." She pencils in several suggestions and rejects some lines as "not funny." | Carl Rollyson | ||
| 4068750 | The convention that there were two sides to every story eliminated the third and fourth and fifth sides. Even dividing the past two and a half million years into the "Neolithic" (the new stone age) and the "Paleolithic" (the old stone age) was reductionist. "Write this down," he said. "Dichotomies are for idiots." | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| 9ff2ef9 | Place is not the background of archaeology--it's the point. As any archaeologist will tell you, context is everything. | Marilyn Johnson | ||
| 4c1f43d | Weird fiction is a strange beast, an eclectic genre (or subgenre). It originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the works of authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, and M. R. James, and has since developed over the course of the last hundred years to encompass new writers such as China Mieville, M. John Harrison and others. Weird fiction is notable for its generic uncertainty; it exists at the boundary .. | Helen Marshall | ||
| c7b972f | who can but shiver and forgive in the damp theatrical airs of dawn? A | M. John Harrison | ||
| 3f3e0cf | Horse-chestnut flowers bobbed like white wax candles above the deserted pavements. An oblique light struck into the street - so that its long and normally "profitless perspective seemed to lead straight into the heart of a younger, more ingenuous city - and fell across the fronts of the houses where he had once lived, warming up the rotten brick and imparting to it a not unpleasant pinkish colour." | M. John Harrison | ||
| 9651808 | In the water-thickets, the path wound tortuously between umber iron-bogs, albescent quicksands of aluminum and magnesium oxides, and sumps of cuprous blue or permanganate mauve fed by slow, gelid streams and fringed by silver reeds and tall black grasses. The twisted, smooth-barked boles of the trees were yellow-ochre and burnt orange; through their tightly woven foliage filtered a gloomy, tinted light. At their roots grew great clumps of m.. | M. John Harrison | ||
| 5e27643 | The momentum of the charge carried Cromis twenty yards into the press without the need to strike a blow: Northmen fell to the hooves and shoulders of his horse and were trampled. He shouted obscenities at them, and made for the knoll, the smugglers a flying wedge behind him. A pikeman tore a long strip of flesh from the neck of his mount; Cromis hung out of the saddle and swung for the carotid artery; blade bit, and splashed with the piker'.. | M. John Harrison | ||
| 31b620c | But it wasn't until much later that I learned the sad facts of his death or the sadder ones of his life. By then I could be found in the pavement cafes of Sour Bridge, with a set of my own. | M. John Harrison |