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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 239753e | Right there! See the blue on its head? See the long tail?" "Oh, there he is," I said, just to bring this little farce to an end. I couldn't see the bird, and I knew I wasn't going to see the bird, and I was rapidly tiring of the whole enterprise. "Beautiful, isn't he?" "Gorgeous," I agreed. "I'd have hated to miss him." | Lawrence Block | ||
| 2b9e3b9 | regummed. A regummed stamp is one which has lost its original gum somewhere along the way, only to have it replaced with new gum. When the equivalent is performed on, say, a Rembrandt oil painting, we call it restoration; when such restoration is performed on a postage stamp, we're more apt to regard it as a crime against nature, and a clear-cut example of philatelic fraud. | Lawrence Block | ||
| 9e4e3af | Wait a minute. Can a general worldwide collector care more about some countries than others? Is there a Most-Favored Nation clause in his contract with philately? Ah. Wouldn't you know it? Now I've got a topic for next month's column. . . | Lawrence Block | ||
| dbebfc0 | Perhaps I've just mounted the initial stamp on a page that used to be blank. Perhaps I've filled the final space on that page. Or, as is more often the case, perhaps I've added a fifteenth stamp to a page, thus reducing its number of blank spaces from nineteen to eighteen. In any event, I'm looking at progress--and I take a moment to enjoy it. | Lawrence Block | ||
| c0b207d | After all, doesn't part of philately's attraction lie in the grip it holds on us? It is our eagerness to locate and acquire and add to our albums that testifies to our commitment to the hobby. If we weren't obsessed with stamps, we'd limit our engagement with them to the mailing of an occasional letter, and find other uses for our time and money. We praise a book by stating that we couldn't put it down. So what sort of endorsement is it to .. | Lawrence Block | ||
| b386979 | I found the various plebiscite regions of considerable interest before I owned any of their stamps. In the course of remaking the map of Europe after the World War--we wouldn't come to call it World War I until its sequel was upon us--plebiscite elections were held in various disputed regions, to determine the wishes of the inhabitants and settle the matter accordingly. An extraordinary Wilsonian notion, that; the citizenry was to decide fo.. | Lawrence Block | ||
| 5ad9ea4 | I was delighted to see them, and wondered at the bargain I'd landed, until I learned enough about them to realize that what I had were Seebecks. One N. F. Seebeck had a contract with the government of Nicaragua to supply the country with stamps, and retained the right to reprint them for the collector market. He apparently did so in great profusion, and one result a century later was that my own personal interest in the stamps of Nicaragua .. | Lawrence Block | ||
| 98df96f | The accumulator, with his acquisitions stuffed into boxes in no apparent order, is every bit as acceptable a philatelist as the collector trying slowly and painstakingly to fill, with flawlessly centered, post office-fresh examples, all the spaces in a single hingeless album. We're all in this together, and I figure whatever system we devise for ourselves is just fine. | Lawrence Block | ||
| e1cff06 | The House at Sugar Beach, New York Times reporter Helene Cooper's memoir of her girlhood as a member of the Liberian upper crust. | Lawrence Block | ||
| 3836e03 | Now I can't say I approve of counterfeit stamps. But it's hard for me to work up a lot of indignation at a forger who's been dead for the better part of a century. I wouldn't want to buy a fake sold as a genuine stamp, or an official reprint under the illusion that it's an original, but in certain cases and at the right price any of these oddities might find a welcome in my collection. They all make the philatelic universe even more interes.. | Lawrence Block | ||
| 4ff5cd6 | Some are errors. There's Malta 20a, for example, the 2-1/2p dull blue; it's supposed to be surcharged "One Penny," but this variety has it "One Pnney." It's affordable, and visually remarkable, and I picked up my copy when it was offered in a block of four, with three non-erroneous companions." | Lawrence Block | ||
| 049aad2 | When I have a look at my own albums, it strikes me how thin they'd be but for war and rebellion. | Lawrence Block | ||
| c92d653 | It took a while to tell but it hadn't taken all that long to live; | Lawrence Block | ||
| 2e5f847 | He patted his breast pocket again, and of course it was still empty, cigarettes hadn't mysteriously appeared in it since he last checked. He walked over to the desk and shook a cigarette out of the pack and lit it, relaxing as the nicotine soothed the anxiety it had largely created. That was all smoking did for you, it poured oil on waters it had troubled in the first place, and what earthly good did it do him to know that? He'd known that .. | Lawrence Block | ||
| b96967b | I told Carolyn it was a great day for running, and she told me there was no such thing. | Lawrence Block | ||
| c11d9d5 | What does it all | Lawrence Block | ||
| 2678d6a | One begins a journey with an eye on one's destination. Somewhere along the way, one learns (if one's lucky) that it's the journey itself that's important. One buys a stamp album with the intention of filling it--but it is in moving toward this goal that satisfaction lies, not in attaining it. | Lawrence Block | ||
| eda0a0c | Pain can stay the same while you change around it. And, like a thumb of constant size, what it blocks out depends on how close it gets to you. At arm's length a thumb obscures a small fragment of the day. Held close enough to your eye it can blind you to everything that matters, relegating the world to a periphery. | Mark Lawrence | ||
| 0f3e5c5 | I see," I said, which is something I very often say when I don't." | Lawrence Block | ||
| c6cba53 | You think he just died of natural causes?" "This is New York. Murder's a natural cause in this city." | Lawrence Block | ||
| fc7b035 | a young Harvard student, traveled west to Oklahoma to live among the Kiowa and participate in the solemn rites of the peyote cult. In one photograph the land appears as a blur of dust, the sky fading to gray, the air darkened by soil worked loose by the wind, the farmhouses | Wade Davis | ||
| 1c332a8 | Sometimes it just is what it is, Wade. There are things we can change and things we can't. The key is knowing the difference. | Barbara Davis | ||
| ad0727e | At the age of sixteen, she had slipped out of a house in the middle of the night and run for all she was worth. Now, twenty years later, she was running again. | Barbara Davis | ||
| f9b462d | Easier isn't always best. | Barbara Davis | ||
| 50d283a | Dreams are like public service announcements from your soul. The only way to get past them is to pay attention to what they're telling us. | Barbara Davis | ||
| 5997b09 | Her eyes were open and glazed, a piercing shade of violet with fixed, bottomless pupils. | Barbara Davis | ||
| cb003ab | don't live a smaller life than you deserve. | Barbara Davis | ||
| 959edcc | the instant her foot touched the driveway, like | Barbara Davis | ||
| b19d491 | There was certainly plenty in her own past that she was reluctant to look at. Because looking made it real. | Barbara Davis | ||
| 4707706 | there's something very healing about the sea. I'm always calmest when I'm near the water, | Barbara Davis | ||
| 1462851 | Do you have a room of your own? Do you have one space where you like to create, or can you do it in different places? A. These days, life comes at you full blast twenty-four/seven. There are so many distractions: TV, with its twenty-four-hour news cycle, the infectious lure of social media, cell phones, e-mail, and always, always an endless list of things that need doing. Having a place that's yours alone, a kind of sanctuary where you have.. | Barbara Davis | ||
| 9f57524 | Men like Stephen don't cheat because they're missing something at home, Christy-Lynn. They cheat because they're missing something inside, so they take what they want and make it theirs, because they need to fill up all that empty space. | Barbara Davis | ||
| f937890 | How can you not believe in never? It's just a word." "No," Missy said firmly. "It isn't. It's all the doors we keep shut. It's the places we won't let ourselves go, the things we won't let ourselves have or be, because we don't think we're good enough or strong enough for more. I know because that used to be me. And then I became a single parent, and I realized I didn't have time for nevers." She paused, her smile thin and tremulous. "All I.. | Barbara Davis | ||
| fea9cfb | learned to keep my distance at an early age. A survival mechanism, you might say. I'm working on it, though. Another thirty years and I should about have it mastered. | Barbara Davis | ||
| 7c6e1c9 | Vulnerable. It wasn't a word she liked the sound of. It was a weak word. A needy word. And she didn't want to need anyone. | Barbara Davis | ||
| 8bcf688 | Men like Stephen don't cheat because they're missing something at home, Christy-Lynn. They cheat because they're missing something inside, so they take what they want and make it theirs, because they need to fill up all that empty space. That's what this woman was. A space filler, something he wanted and took. It wasn't about you. | Barbara Davis | ||
| 8b01839 | But belonging to someone and giving yourself to them were two very different things. One formed out of need, a tidy arrangement mutually beneficial to both parties, while the other involved laying yourself bare--something she'd never been very good at. | Barbara Davis | ||
| 02f8d4c | the word never represents all the doors we keep closed, that when we say never we close ourselves off from the hope that things can ever be different. | Barbara Davis | ||
| c004fb4 | Sometimes grown-ups cry when they're happy. That's what I'm doing. I'm crying because I'm happy. | Barbara Davis | ||
| 5fb0529 | don't just get the life we wish for. We get the life we fight for." The life we fight for." | Barbara Davis | ||
| 972e7c5 | I think I was numb," she said at last. "Not happy. Not unhappy. There were signs, I suppose, that it wasn't Shangri-la, but there wasn't any one thing. It was gradual, you know? Insidious. It wasn't until he was gone that I realized I'd been married to someone I barely knew. I was holding on so tightly I never realized how much we'd both changed. Still, it wasn't enough to leave. At least I didn't think it was." | Barbara Davis | ||
| 8094ded | On August 27 Richard Harding Davis, star of the American correspondents who were then in Belgium, made his way to Louvain by troop train. He was kept locked in the railroad car by the Germans, but the fire had by then reached the Boulevard Tirlemont facing the railroad station and he could see "the steady straight columns of flames" rising from the rows of houses." -- | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 79ab978 | There are things we can change and things we can't. The key is knowing the difference. | Barbara Davis | ||
| 67f478f | drew primarily on the ideas of their contemporary Andrew Jackson Davis, who in turn derived them from the eighteenth-century philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg--or from conversations, as Davis claimed, with Swedenborg's spirit. Davis had already produced an astonishing body of lectures and books developing what he came to call a "harmonial philosophy" in which like attracted like. So great were the similarities and affinities between beings of .. | Barbara Weisberg |