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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6645a4e | Cause I'm a Christian. Or was. And Christ's love doesn't work, is what we feel in the Army. That kind of shit gets you killed here, it's an eye for an eye here, if Christ's love was real this whole war couldn't be happening. | David James Duncan | ||
| 457f155 | This was what Joon thought Christianity meant! Food and medicine for the body, and stories for the heart if you begged for them. Then he came here, found a country full of people begging not to hear the stories, went to seminary, and found out why. No food. No medicine. No doing unto others. Just a bunch of men learning how to bellow the stories at others whether they wanted to hear them or not! | David James Duncan | ||
| ccdccff | Besides a Scientist Marion is also a Pacifist and an Atheist. This means she is basically against most things, such as War, Sports, and God. | David James Duncan | ||
| 7d07a67 | It's strange the way everybody has their own pet notion about Jesus, and nobody's pet notion seems to agree with anybody else's. | David James Duncan | ||
| d81c1a0 | choke on blood, if I speak. But then words well right up with the blood, I'm helpless to stop them: "I know you hate the mill," I tell him, and tears come the instant I speak. "I know you love baseball, and aren't doing what you want. But at least Vera fights. She says her dopey prayers no matter what!" I lean against the door, gasping for air and strength to finish. "All I want is for you to fight, Papa. To fight to stay alive inside! No m.. | David James Duncan | ||
| d2eae83 | He reminded me of a kid in my first-grade class, Mikey. Mikey used to talk about his pencil at Show'n'Tell. It was a fat green pencil with the school's name and district number stenciled on it. Every kid in the class had an identical pencil. But that didn't stop Mikey. He would hold it up for us to see, read the stenciled name and number to us, tell us it was a gift from his grandma, or his dad, or his uncle, tell us how green it was, and h.. | David James Duncan | ||
| c47c86a | Baseball -and I mean professional baseball- has got damned near every problem that churches and religion have got. | David James Duncan | ||
| 210debd | I remember my own childhood vividly . . . I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them.' Maurice Sendak, in conversation with Art Spiegelman, The New Yorker, 27 September 1993 | Neil Gaiman | ||
| 9474e67 | And he sailed off through night and day And in and out of weeks | Sendak Maurice | ||
| 7de18c2 | I remember my own childhood vividly . . . I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them." MAURICE SENDAK, IN CONVERSATION WITH ART SPIEGELMAN, THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 27, 1993" | Neil Gaiman | ||
| 6987206 | Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World's Oldest Paintings, Jean-Marie Chauvet | Victoria Finlay | ||
| 90e9167 | Gloria | Victoria Finlay | ||
| 853f704 | Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Victoria Finlay | ||
| b3cc8b1 | The rum and Coke tastes just awful. He wishes he had Susan's plain Coke. | Ann Beattie | ||
| 299b8bb | I guess that I have been thinking about how graceful you were, and although it is none of my business, I wondered whether you might not be paying a price for being that way. . . . People want to have an easy fix on other people, and since you are Cindi Coeur, it's easy to assume that someone who satirizes our shortcomings has set herself above us. | Ann Beattie | ||
| ea1f095 | Then the auctioneer introduced himself [,,,,]. He started to speak into the microphone, a maddening, jammed-up sequence of words that crashed like bumper cars, after which everything sorted itself into some kind of sense again, and after the fact you could understand most of what he'd said. | Ann Beattie | ||
| a950a1c | To the right, the clouds have more shape and against the blue look like the figures of a Wedgwood dish. What a fine fucking bowl beneath which they have all been caught and asked to swim out their days! Look at it this way," people used to say to Mack. "Things could be worse"--a bumper sticker for a goldfish or a bug. And it wasn't wrong -- it just wasn't the point." | Lorrie Moore | ||
| b0bda70 | At all the funerals for love, love had its neat trick of making you mourn it so much, it reappeared. Popped right up from the casket. Or, if it didn't reappear itself, it sent a relative of startling resemblance, a thin and charming twin, which you took home with you to fatten and cradle, nuzzle and scold. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| acc5c4b | Good God," cries the Mother. Everything inside her suddenly begins to cower and shrink, a thinning of bones. Perhaps this is a soldier's readiness, but it has the whiff of death and defeat. It feels like a heart attack, a failure of will and courage, a power failure: a failure of everything. Her face, when she glimpses it in a mirror, is cold and bloated with shock, her eyes scarlet and shrunk. She has already started to wear sunglasses ind.. | parenthood | Lorrie Moore | |
| 60bf39f | It's a fast but wimpy tumor," he explains. "It typically metastasizes to the lung." He rattles off some numbers, time frames, risk statistics. Fast but wimpy: the Mother tries to imagine this combination of traits, tries to think and think, and can only come up with Claudia Osk from the fourth grade, who blushed and almost wept when called on in class, but in gym could outrun everyone in the quarter-mile fire-door-to-fence dash. The Mother .. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 6929815 | It's bad enough when they refer to medical science as 'an inexact science,' " says the Mother. "But when they start referring to it as 'an art,' I get extremely nervous." | medicine | Lorrie Moore | |
| 9704625 | Even his I love you's," she said, "were like tiny daggers, like little needles or safety pins. Beware of a man who says he loves you but is incapable of a passionate confession; of melting into a sob." | love | Lorrie Moore | |
| 1f6fa48 | This is a political New Year's Eve," says Albert. "We're here to protest the new year, protest the old; generally get a petition going to Father Time." | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 0993559 | Ever since Albert was denied promotion to full-professor rank, his articles on Flannery O'Connor ("A Good Man Really Is Hard to Find," "Everything That Rises Must Indeed Converge," and "The Totemic South: The Violent Actually Do Bear It Away!") failing to meet with collegial acclaim, he has become determined to serve others, passing out the notices and memoranda, arranging the punch and cookies at various receptions." | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 4f78d1b | Blank is to heartache as forest is to bench. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 7d3beb1 | Before he wrote about them," said Quilty, pretending to read the guidebook out loud, "Hemingway shot his characters. It was considered an unusual but not unheard-of creative method. Still, even within literary circles, it is not that widely discussed." | writing | Lorrie Moore | |
| 69b756a | The prospect of a war has seized his brain. It engages some old, ongoing terror in him. As a former soldier, he still believes in armies. But he believes in armies at rest, armies relaxing, armies shopping at the PX, armies eating supper in the mess hall. | war | Lorrie Moore | |
| b777060 | She gazed over at her mother and took a deep breath. Perhaps her mother had never shown Abby affection, not really, but she had given her a knack for solitude, with its terrible lurches outward, and its smooth glide back to peace. Abby would toast her for that. It was really the world that was one's brutal mother, the one that nursed and neglected you, and your own mother was only your sibling in that world. Abby lifted her glass. "May the .. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 307674a | You live if you dance to the voice that ails you. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 0eaa61b | The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 5450e37 | She had bought several plain pine chests to use as love seats or boot boxes, but they came to look to her more and more like children's coffins, so she returned them. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 0674d77 | Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 0b2eddf | He had never been involved with the mentally ill before, but he now felt more than ever that there should be strong international laws against them being too good-looking. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 0b9dbd8 | How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions a.. | story | Lorrie Moore | |
| 1156f9e | She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, "There you go." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush. Still," | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 298803c | Why not admit history's power to divide and destroy? Why attach ourselves to the age-old stories in the belief that they are truer than the new ones? By living in the past, you always know what comes next, and that robs you of surprises. It exhausts and warps the mind. We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgmental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 2464629 | Okay, I'll just go on to the next card." He picks one up, pretending to read. "It says here, 'Darling, is there life on Mars? Yes or no.' " Mack has gone back to thinking about the paintings. "I say no," he says absently. "Hmmm," says Quilty, putting the card down. "I think the answer is yes. Look at it this way: they're sure there are ice crystals. And where there is ice, there is water. And where there is water, there is waterfront proper.. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 020d958 | I steal back into dreams of you, your unmade bed a huge open-faced sandwich. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| e005828 | The speech she made was done in the back, alone, like little shoes cobbled by an elf: spider is to web as weaver is to blank. That one was hers. She was proud of that. Also, blank is to heartache as forest is to bench. But | Lorrie Moore | ||
| a348895 | In the Dictionary 'lumpy jaw' comes just before 'lunacy,' but in life there are no such clues. Suddenly, for no reason, you might start to dribble from the mouth, to howl peevishly at the moon. You might start quoting your mother, out loud and with conviction. You might lose your friends to the most uninspired of deaths. You might one day wake up and find yourself teaching at a community college; there will have been nothing to warn you. Yo.. | literature midlife-crisis lunacy disappointment | Lorrie Moore | |
| 4e49fc2 | What is beautiful is seized," my mother said a final time, speaking of my father, whom she said had been destroyed by too many women, a heart picked over, scratched at, taken, lost. "It came to me in bulky bandages, seeming much larger, much more than it really was." | love-quotes love | Lorrie Moore | |
| 7170852 | On Fridays there were fish fries or boils at which they served "lawyers" (burbot or eelpout), so-called because their hearts were in their butts." | Lorrie Moore | ||
| abd8d2f | A healthy death, like anything -- job promotions or looking younger -- was simply a matter of "feeling good about yourself." Which is where the sedatives came in. Sedate as a mint, a woman could place a happy hand on the shoulder of death and rasp out, "Waddya say, buddy, wanna dance?" | Lorrie Moore | ||
| c6eeac9 | She looked pink and beseeching, though essentially she looked the same, as people do despite the fact they have begun to turn into monsters and are about to tell you something that should require horns or fangs or vaulted eyebrows but never apparently does. | Lorrie Moore |