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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b97f838 | The words of history are also the words of war. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 1782e4c | I sensed that this was a small part of what contributed to the passivity with regard to the Three Gorges Project in Fuling. The vast majority of the people would not be directly affected by the coming changes, and so they weren't concerned. Despite having large sections of the city scheduled to be flooded within the next decade, it wasn't really a community issue, because there wasn't a community as one would generally define it. There were.. | Peter Hessler | ||
| e952740 | But there were reports that Jiang and other members of the Old Guard were resisting retirement, and experts said that the Beidaihe meetings would be the first battleground of the political transition. Communist China had never had an orderly succession--for half a century, every transfer of power had involved coups or power struggles. | Peter Hessler | ||
| e9ed113 | One challenge for a foreign correspondent is to figure out how much of yourself to include: If a story is too self-centered, it becomes a tourist's diary. These days, the general trend is to reduce the writer's presence, often to the point of invisibility. This is the standard approach of newspapers, and it's described as a way of maintaining focus and impartiality. But it can make the subject feel even more distant and foreign. When I wrot.. | Peter Hessler | ||
| bb75f61 | The Chinese people had invented the compass, paper, the printing press, gunpowder, the seismograph, the crossbow, and the umbrella; they had sailed to Africa in the fifteenth century; they had constructed the Great Wall; over the past decade they had built their economy at a rate never before seen in the developing world. They could return a rental car with exactly three-eighths of a tank of gas, but filling it was apparently beyond the rea.. | Peter Hessler | ||
| e275e24 | In 1923, National Geographic Magazine claimed that the Great Wall is visible to the human eye from the moon. (In truth, nobody on the moon could see it in 1923, and they sill can't.) For a while, Chinese intellectuals tried to resist such exaggerations, believing rightly that the foreigners had confused both history and geography. But eventually the myths proved appealing to nationalists like Mao Zedong, who used the Great Wall in propagand.. | Peter Hessler | ||
| a7dd227 | Beijing maps featured cloverleaf exchanges that could have been designed by M. C. Escher. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 6a25575 | In China, the transition has been to abrupt that many traffic patterns come directly from pedestrian life - people drive the way they walk. They like to move in packs, and they tailgate whenever possible. They rarely use turn signals. Instead they rely on automobile body language: if a car edges to the left, you can guess that he's about to make a turn. And they are brilliant at improvising. They convert sidewalks into passing lanes, and th.. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 05c69d1 | Nevertheless, Chinese drivers haven't grasped the subtleties of headlight use. Most people keep their lights off until it's pitch-dark, and then they flip on the brights. Almost nobody uses headlights in rain, fog, snow, or twilight conditions - in fact, this is one of the few acts guaranteed to annoy a Chinese driver. They don't mind if you tailgate, or pass on the right, or drive on the the sidewalk. You can back down a highway entrance r.. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 6ebf252 | Average Egyptians take pride in their pharaonic history, but there's also a disconnect, because the tradition of the Islamic past is stronger and more immediate. This is captured perfectly by the design of Egypt's currency. Every denomination follows the same pattern: On one side of a bill, words are in Arabic, and there's an image of some famous Egyptian mosque. The other side pairs English text with a pharaonic statue or monument. The imp.. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 6671075 | For some reason, it had become a tradition for tourists to throw money into the hole in front of the Sphinx. Of all the strange things that foreigners and rich Egyptians did at the ancient sites, this ritual most impressed Sayyid and his family. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 68e95da | Right is not unlimited, but is limited by the laws. | Aeschines | ||
| b6b8040 | Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, who in 1524, aged not quite sixteen, arrived in Vicenza | Bill Bryson | ||
| 705fc2b | If it was your child, do you want your child to suffer three years, three months, three weeks, three hours, three minutes? A turkey chick isn't a human baby, but it suffers. I've never met anyone in the industry -- manager, vet, worker, anyone -- who doubts that they feel pain. So how much suffering is acceptable? That's what's at the bottom of all of this, and what each person has to ask himself. How much suffering will you tolerate for yo.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 966499e | Rape humor is designed to remind women that they are still not quite equal. | Roxane Gay | ||
| fe2fd4c | Like most people, I'm full of contradictions, but I also don't want to be treated like shit for being a woman. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 3b5bed5 | As told by Kafka's close friend Max Brod: "Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. 'Now at least I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore.' It was the time he turned strictly vegetarian." | kafka vegan veganism vegetarian vegetarianism | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| f512109 | The man who does ill, ill must suffer too. | Aeschylus | ||
| 8c6b2fc | Many fishermen "fin" sharks--that is, slice their fins off, then dump them back into the water to die." | Bill Bryson | ||
| bc9c6b0 | Chem sil'nee liubish' kogo-to, -- prishel k vyvodu on, -- tem trudnee ob etom skazat'. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 1bbc522 | Every time I left our apartment to go searching for the lock, I became a little lighter, because I was getting closer to Dad. But I also became a little heavier, because I was getting farther from Mom. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| cec1c63 | Not in all ways (of course), but the animals you know have power: they have abilities humans lack, could be dangerous, could bring life, mean things that mean things. | nature poetry | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 3657d15 | That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 09ea3a6 | I also reread my Nancy Drew collection every few years. | Ellery Adams | ||
| bda474d | That's a powerful thing, knowing you can reveal yourself to someone. It made me want to be a better person. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 2d2b4e6 | A prosperous fool is a grievous burden. | Aeschylus | ||
| d2ef297 | Bronze is the mirror of the form; wine, of the heart. | Aeschylus | ||
| 154b048 | In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created. We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered--our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure . . . | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| e236098 | It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath. | Aeschylus | ||
| 1c823ef | I would far rather be ignorant than knowledgeable of evil. | Aeschylus | ||
| 686e3d5 | The key is in learning how to live a healthy, satisfying, and serene life without being dependent on another person for happiness. | Robin Norwood | ||
| 293a445 | There is an old joke about a nearsighted man who has lost his keys late at night and is looking for them by the light of a street lamp. Another person comes along and offers to help him look but asks him, "Are you sure this is where you lost them?" He answers, "No, but this is where the light is." | Robin Norwood | ||
| ce37bc8 | The World Wildlife Fund estimated in 1994 that the number of sharks killed each year was between 40 million and 70 million. As | Bill Bryson | ||
| 71827d2 | Eros: Real love is an all-consuming, desperate yearning for the beloved, who is perceived as different, mysterious, and elusive. The depth of love is measured by the intensity of obsession with the loved one. There is little time or attention for other interests or pursuits, because so much energy is focused on recalling past encounters or imagining future ones. Often, great obstacles must be overcome, and thus there is an element of suffer.. | Robin Norwood | ||
| f314586 | Hungry people make poor shoppers. | Robin Norwood | ||
| de8e769 | indiferencia | Robin Norwood | ||
| 041a9a8 | If you have an active faith, and you regularly worship and frequently pray, developing your spirituality may mean trusting that what is happening in your life has its own reason and its own results, and that God is in charge of your partner, not you. Take quiet time to meditate and pray, and to ask for guidance in how to live your own life while you release those around you to live theirs. | Robin Norwood | ||
| d0785ec | Developing your spirituality, no matter what your religious orientation, basically means letting go of self-will, of the determination to make things happen the way you think they should. Instead, you must accept the fact that you may not know what is best in a given situation either for yourself or for another person. There may be outcomes and solutions that you have never considered, or perhaps the ones you've most feared and tried hardes.. | Robin Norwood | ||
| ba87fc7 | it is this very practice of acceptance that allows another to change if he chooses to do so. | Robin Norwood | ||
| 7a106b2 | After all, he had secrets to keep about his sexual identity and behavior, and having a wife made him look more 'normal' than not having one. I guess that was what he meant when he said he needed me. | Robin Norwood | ||
| 1f88835 | Cuando sucede algo emocionalmente doloroso y nos decimos que la culpa es nuestra, en realidad estamos diciendo que tenemos control sobre ello: si nosotros cambiamos, el dolor desaparecera. | culpa dolor | Robin Norwood | |
| a4fa2a1 | True acceptance of an individual as he is, without trying to change him through encouragement or manipulation or coercion, is a very high form of love, and very difficult for most of us to practice. | Robin Norwood | ||
| b185097 | well over a million years ago, some new, comparatively modern, upright beings left Africa and boldly spread out across much of the globe. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6d6ad49 | there's going to come a time when we won't speak for days on end." "There won't." "There will. Every parent thinks it will never happen to them, but it happens to everyone." | Jonathan Safran Foer |