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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2a4da01 | There are many oppressed people across the border, people who are dirt poor and have little chance in life. Then there are those who don't want them anywhere near the table, let alone sitting at the feast. In 1931 the people of Spain voted in their first free election in sixty years. Until that point the country had been controlled by the rich--the landed aristocracy, the church, and the industrialists. But the new Republic had its problems.. | Jacqueline Winspear | ||
| 0dbf577 | I can dance with life again. | Jacqueline Winspear | ||
| 41618ed | In the months following James' death, on thought had returned time and again as she passed others in the street. What secrets did these people hold? What had they endured? She wondered how many people rushing in and out of shops, or on their way to their work, had lost a love, or known deep disappointment or grief, fear, or want, yet summoned the resilience to go on. Those lines across foreheads, those mouths downturned --- what were the ru.. | grief resilience sympathy | Jacqueline Winspear | |
| 412101d | Least I feel as if I'm doing something. Making shells, like. Least I'm not just sitting on my bum while them boys get shot to bits over there. | Jacqueline Winspear | ||
| 6f9d13d | Then as each month, each year passed, it was as if the memory of you - of us... the explosion - were encased in a fine tissue-paper.' ... 'I felt as if I were looking through a window to my own past, and instead of being transparent, my view was becoming more and more opaque, until eventually the time had passed. The time for coming to see you had passed. | Jacqueline Winspear | ||
| 9350b32 | sometimes talked about your offering a place of refuge for the women here." "Well, when she was with the vicar it was different. No one would have said anything to him. He had a regard for her, you see." Maisie nodded. "Thank you. You've been most kind." She turned to leave, but as the Paiges were about to step into the house, she looked back as if forgetting something. "Oh, one last thing, Mr. Paige. Could you tell me how much longer Miss .. | Jacqueline Winspear | ||
| bb3f9e2 | corridors of power are littered with Fascist leanings; anything to save the upper classes through disenfranchisement of the common man while allowing the common man to think you're on his side. | Jacqueline Winspear | ||
| 38a0da2 | Grannies to the rescue. | Jacqueline Winspear | ||
| af1f052 | I saw an old woman dressed in seatcovers, sewn into a dress, a man in a jacket made from a flag. It gave them an air of desperate grandeur, like guests at an asylum ball. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 749836e | Busy is good, isn't it? Busy means we're hard at it, achieving our ends or "goals." Haven't had time to stop, or look around or think. That's considered the sign of a life well lived. Although people complain of it - another year gone, where did that one go? - tacitly, they're proud. Otherwise they wouldn't do it: you put your time where your priority is." | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 03741d0 | Albert Einstein wrote, 'A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by .. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 98ac7da | And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 53d3fe1 | At other times I sit and wait. If nothing comes, I've discovered that it's better just to write something - anything. You can always tear up the piece of paper and throw it away. But if you don't begin, then nothing comes. You have to submit. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 9aacf5d | A time before Flanders and Auschwitz had shown that, given the means of killing and the opportunity to use them, the species, far from being a pinnacle in creation, was actually lower on the scale than all others in its genus or family. | humanity-and-society | Sebastian Faulks | |
| c293892 | And when I die all the memories of my own life will go to the grave with me, God willing, and Dick will never have to look back at them. And his children will never even know what my life was like. They'll know nothing of grinding stones and being hungry and ashamed all day and being beaten by a teacher who couldn't write himself and being sure you kept your mind so empty that you had no thoughts at all. And that's what I've done for them, .. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 7f78ed2 | Under the treaty of Sevres in 1920 Greece had been given Smyrna, and by 1922 the Greek army was trying to push its way up the Aegean coast. The Turks, however, had found a leader in Mustafa Kemal (Kemal Ataturk) with no regard for treaties and a committed hatred of the Greeks. He drove their army back into Smyrna, and then did what any Turkish leader would have done: massacred them. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 1929d80 | The Turks moved in the next day and killed everyone in sight, including the staff of the nursing home. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 6186321 | Alcohol provokes stupidity; opium provokes wisdom. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 3041b0e | What had gone completely was the memory of what made her human, her ways and her thoughts. The withholding of these details was like a torment. When he tried to bring her back to mind, he could not hear the voice, he could not imagine one aspect of her, the way she looked or talked, the expressions of her face, her walk, her gestures. It was as though she were dead and he bore the responsibility for killing her. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 54457ba | She had grown accustomed to people's responses to her. Many of them assumed that there was a polar choice between marriage and work and that the more enthusiastically she had embraced her job, the more vigourously she must have rejected the idea of children or male partnership. Elizabeth had given up trying to explain. She had taken a job because she needed to live; she had found an interesting one in preference to a dull one; she had tried.. | women | Sebastian Faulks | |
| b6e3604 | the following September I started at the grammar school. This was in a red-brick building of the kind beloved by Victorian optimists. In | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 7880d80 | she had discovered that ageing and what they called "maturity" were myths, that all the years did was disqualify you from various pleasures, one by one." | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| c5ca147 | How do you 'clear' your thoughts? You have only other thoughts with which to do the job; 'thoughts', therefore, are both blockage and broom. I suppose what we mean is that we should stop reasoning and try to 'feel' - which presumes that what we 'feel' is more valuable than anything we think ... | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 05ef6f8 | It was more wonderful than making love with a negro boxer on Mr Singer's billiard table. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 39b71c7 | Cheers,' she said as I left, 'and don't forget you're seeing Matt and I on Monday.' I thought for a moment she'd said 'matineye', an East End pronunciation of 'matinee'. Was I meant to review it? | grammar | Sebastian Faulks | |
| e12ecba | I've missed you, Frank.' 'I haven't breathed since you left. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| a126b87 | In God's name, she thought, let the more loving one be someone else; for me it is beyond endurance. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 068533c | Yet on the dusky veranda she had seemed like a force of nature that had somehow sought out the landscape of his longing and moulded itself to each contour. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 0352229 | Ockham's razor. The simplest explanation was usually correct. They | Brad Thor | ||
| 6a7f9a0 | Now I see my children and I know that they are figures in a lantern show, that their sense of permanence is an illusion, because all around us time is unstoppable. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 7e2a35a | The deeper into the sensation she went, beneath his weight and his urging, the more it was like going into a room of utter darkness, which she felt was familiar from a time before her birth; it was something other, or beyond; it was like death, or very near it. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 4bfc1ed | In Frank I have found something beyond me, beyond my understanding, this is where some incredible core of me is destined to be even if not in this life. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 2d3a604 | I will think of you every day. All the time. If ever you should think of me and wonder what I'm doing, I'm thinking of you. That's all I'll be doing. Nothing else. | romantic | Sebastian Faulks | |
| 0e1417b | They had seen things no human eyes had looked on before, and they had not turned their gaze away. They were in their own view a formidable group of men. No inferno would now melt them, no storm destroy, because they had seen the worst and they had survived. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 1bf1c12 | Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without the sound of fathers and their children, without young men at the facto.. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 64c5617 | There is only one life; it is therefore perfect. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 85b36d9 | The partition between love and anger is thin. I suppose it's a need to protect the self from further wounding that makes people scream at the one they love. | anger-and-love love relationships | Sebastian Faulks | |
| 01a0841 | He found himself in the ironic position of being the indispensable man in a political world that regarded all leaders as disposable. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| 37f0ef8 | It is well known, that when one side only of a story is heard, and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it, insensibly. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| bef9bd7 | the second paragraph of the Declaration that is very much an expression of Jefferson's imagination. It envisions a perfect world, at last bereft of kings, priests, and even government itself. In this never-never land, free individuals interact harmoniously, all forms of political coercion are unnecessary because they have been voluntarily internalized, people pursue their own different versions of happiness without colliding, and some sembl.. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| 0348675 | a lifelong disciple of Lord Chesterfield's maxim that a gentleman was free to do anything he pleased as long as he did it with style. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| 522ad6d | the all-time master of exits wanted to make his final departure from the public stage the occasion for explaining his own version of what the American Revolution meant. Above all, it meant hanging together as a united people, much as the Continental Army had hung together once before, so that those who were making foreign policy into a divisive device in domestic politics, all in the name of America's revolutionary principles, were themselv.. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| 3f6dd0f | Upon learning that Washington intended to reject the mantle of emperor, no less an authority than George III allegedly observed, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." True to his word, on December 22, 1783, Washington surrendered his commission to the Congress, then meeting in Annapolis: "Having now finished the work assigned me," he announced, "I now retire from the great theater of action." In so doing, he became th.. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| 5f3eea9 | As far as his contemporaries were concerned, there was no question about his stature in American history. In the extravaganza of mourning that occurred in more than four hundred towns and hamlets throughout the land, he was described as the only indisputable hero of the age, the one and only "His Excellency." | Joseph J. Ellis |