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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f0b284f | It's just an old fella. Mostly bald. Walking dainty like his feet's tender. And still singing. With some things in his hand. He puts them down on a drum. Sits on a milk crate in the shade. Pulls on a pair of gumboots. Then he snatches up the things from beside him and shuffles out in the sun and leans against the verandah post and I see him clear enough. Singlet. Baggy arse shorts. Thick specs. He's short and thick this fella. Red in the fa.. | irony music violence | Tim Winton | |
| 1c46048 | discretion will generally keep a fella safe. | safety secrecy taciturnity | Tim Winton | |
| afe7ddf | The sea is one rare wild card left in the homogenous suburban life. | Tim Winton | ||
| a29df54 | What does it mean for a community to edit itself like this, to so spurn the past - or perhaps fear it - that the slate must be wiped clean for each new generation? What self-hatred does this betray? | Tim Winton | ||
| a40e75d | During those years of travel I saw that architecture is what we console ourselves with once we've obliterated our natural landscapes. | Tim Winton | ||
| 6e50690 | elbows-out walk like a scorpion all burred up for a fight | anthrpomorphism lyricism | Tim Winton | |
| 2af2952 | Please God, whatever I was I am no longer....All is forgotten, if not forgiven--it could have come to that. But I don't trust the thought. I don't know if it's because it would be too easy or too terrible to imagine no one cares anymore. | insignificance memory remorse self-knowledge time | Tim Winton | |
| 8fb7dc5 | For the first time in my life I know what I want and I have what it takes to get me there. If you never experienced that I feel sorry for you. But it wasn't always like this. I have been through fire to get here. I seen things and done things and had shit done to me you couldn't barely credit. So be happy for me. And for fucksake don't get in my way. | social-awareness | Tim Winton | |
| 3e81aa2 | Don't you see it Jaxie Clackton, you are an instrument of God.' 'Oh, I said, you mad fucker. You been out under the moon too long. | premonition religion | Tim Winton | |
| eee4020 | The spent shell come out the .243 shining like a bright idea. | Tim Winton | ||
| d8674fc | sort of worked, our arrangement. Before I couldna seen the sense in it. But two of us getting meat and wood, two of us keeping a look out, it was more efficient that one bloke faffing about on his own. And it wasn't we had anything in common exactly but we was another human to talk to. | companionship | Tim Winton | |
| 9d63c2f | In the end he wore me down. Always asking. And the answer I give him is still the only one I have. What do I want? Peace. And it actually shut him up. He didn't niggle me about it. It was like he got it straight off. I don't just want quiet, neither. I want peace. | peace philosophy | Tim Winton | |
| 385128e | I suspect that God is what you do, not what or who you believe in. But people do shit things all the time, I said. There's something wrong with us. Perhaps. And maybe not. But when you do right, Jaxie, when you make good -- well, then you are an instrument of God. Then you are joined to the divine, to the life-force, to life itself. That's what I believe. That's what I hope for. And it's what I have missed. That's all jumblyfuck to me, I sa.. | kindness life-force love | Tim Winton | |
| 0c833f6 | Liam Rector's "Song Years": "Change is hard and hope is violent"." | Tim Winton | ||
| 039c153 | I spose it's wrong to pray that someone dies... But I've thought about all the prayers. If that's what I was doing them years...Asking something, someone, anything, for a big black anvil to fall from the sky like in the cartoons. Kerang! On Wankbag's head. Because nothing else was gunna save [me]... | death irony religion salvation | Tim Winton | |
| aaac802 | Say I hit your number, called you up, you'd wonder what the fuck, every one of youse, and your mouth'd go dry. Maybe you're just some stranger I pocket-dialled. Or one of them shitheads from school I could look for. Any of youse heard my voice now you'd think it was weather. Or a bird screaming. You'd be sweating sand. Like I'm the end of the world. | introspection self-aggrandisement | Tim Winton | |
| 6af964a | Where was I? Who was I? What was I? ... And for a long time Fintan took it just like that. Giving them nothing. And it was horrible and incredible and it all piled up on me, squashing me in, forcing me down, until something cracked and all in one moment it was like everything landed. All the birds landed. The sunlight landed. The song landed. All the decent things in him landed. On me. On my head. And I knew where I was, and who I was, and .. | Tim Winton | ||
| f4d81f0 | So we had some blues, me and Fintan. He said we were merely conducting civilised conversation. But sometimes it was like he didn't know how close he was to getting his head stove in. Or maybe he didn't care. Even so, everything was peaceful more or less. Until the wind came round from the north. | Tim Winton | ||
| e7221f2 | Jesus, I told meself, harden the fuck up. She heard me say that once, Mum. To me little cousin out by the laundry where he was bawling, his knee bleeding a tiny bit. She had that disgusted look on her face. What? I said. I didn't do nothin. You're no better than your father, she said. Listen to you, Jaxie, you sound just like him. I didn't talk to her for three days. | kindness mercy | Tim Winton | |
| b31cae0 | Drug dealing worse than kiddy fiddling, is it? Stop that, now! There's no need and you've no right. You think the Catholics care how they make their money? They bloody love gangsters, it's their bread and butter. Good God, child, you wouldn't know the half of it. You wouldn't have the faintest notion. | irony roman-catholicism | Tim Winton | |
| 7630e43 | We was just kids, we did kid stuff. And we didn't have things to do like people in the city. We couldn't catch the bus to the beach or the movies or hang out in big shopping malls. We had to ride everywhere or shanks it. Go for a milkshake at the roadhouse, check out the tip. Because there was no KFC or Subway. We'd walk along the highway looking for eagle feathers. | country-life | Tim Winton | |
| 2afdee0 | Alexander McCall Smith, Janet Evanovich, John Grisham, Mary Higgins Clark, Robert Crais, C. J. Box, Diane Mott Davidson, James Lee Burke, and Laura Lippman, but there were also fresh names, wonderful writers all, Mary Saums, Dorothy Howell, David Fuller, Charles Finch, Megan Abbott, Christopher Fowler, Patricia Briggs, Deanna Raybourn, and Donis Casey. | Carolyn G. Hart | ||
| 76e13f7 | It's always better to tell a half-truth than a half-lie. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| fe42d1b | The scope of your ignorance, Peter," said Seawoll, "is truly frightening." | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 7f358b7 | A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 4cd6b83 | He did some drugs at university," I said. "Isn't that what it's for?" | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| db6c8f2 | Low sample size--one of the reasons why magic and science are hard to reconcile. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| e004d8e | What, like a giant self-help book? Building a Better You in Only Fourteen Thousand Rooms? | Matthew Woodring Stover | ||
| 7af9259 | she wonders whether the Holy Ghost, conventionally represented as a dove, would not be better portrayed as a parrot. Logic is certainly on her side: parrots and Holy Ghosts can speak, whereas doves cannot. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 44297a0 | It sounded very shallow put that way. Did it matter? Sometimes the human spirit needed the shallows. Sunshine danced on the shallows but was absorbed beyond trace by the depths. | Mary Balogh | ||
| 1202031 | We all have to find our own way in life. It is, I believe, what life is all about. | Mary Balogh | ||
| 74c7167 | Life is fraught with risks, | Mary Balogh | ||
| e79ce13 | Bruce lamented the fact that she had not arrived sooner, when they had really needed her. "I came as soon as I had your letter," she said. "And I think I was able to do something to cheer the children." "It is a miracle they did not take a chill from being taken out so soon after their illness, though," Bruce said. "They did not," Alice said briskly, "so you must not provoke yourself, Bruce." "I do not know how I am to entertain Mary now t.. | Mary Balogh | ||
| a5cc8ff | Since when had shabby men started to look impossibly attractive when immaculately tailored ones merely looked ... well, immaculately tailored? Though it was not shabby exactly, was it, but a certain shabby . It was really very puzzling. | Mary Balogh | ||
| b4244c1 | You don't actually know enough about me to insult me properly. | Ben Aaronovitch | ||
| 04e01e1 | There must be something terribly wrong with her, Camille thought, that she could neither feel nor attract love. Was it possible that her quest for perfection had somehow deadened an essential part of herself? | Mary Balogh | ||
| 9ee3084 | You must be a good girl." "Yes, Uncle," she said. "A pity, though," he said. "His assets and mine combined, Cass. Ah, well, Mr. Westhaven will be a baron one day, though the present baron is said to be in excellent health and is a relatively young man. He could live another twenty years." Chapter 13 MR. Westhaven did not after all wear his best London finery that evening. His shirt did not have quite the quantity of lace at the wrists tha.. | Mary Balogh | ||
| d62cc8c | Two very different men, saying essentially the same thing--that the greatest catastrophe of her life was perhaps also its greatest blessing. | Mary Balogh | ||
| 8de0de6 | And a strong man", she said. "Strong enough to be vulnerable, to take risks, to be honest even when honesty might expose him to ridicule or rejection. And someone who would put himself at the center of my world even before knowing that I would be willing to do the same for him. A man foolish and brave enough to tell me that he loves me even when I have hidden all signs that I love him in return." | Mary Balogh | ||
| 1833bd0 | began | Mary Balogh | ||
| 725df1f | following spring to find himself a | Mary Balogh | ||
| f33706c | I have been very , Anna--for all the obvious reasons," she said. "But in a strange way, that very fact is encouraging, for before all this happened I had dedicated my life to achieving perfection. I wanted to be the perfect lady above all else. Happiness meant nothing to me. Nor did love. They frightened me, for they suggested chaos and the impossibility of achieving perfection. Now that I have been desperately unhappy, I understand that I.. | Mary Balogh | ||
| 4a8938d | having a dream and being on the journey to fulfilling it sometimes brings more happiness than actually achieving it. We have a habit, do we not, of thinking happiness is a future state if only this and that condition can be met. And so much of life passes us by without our realizing how happy we can be in this present moment, or how nearly happy. | Mary Balogh | ||
| 807ba42 | He was a man who seemed careless of his appearance, very different from the gentlemen with whom she had consorted until a few months ago. She would not have afforded him a second glance if she had passed him on the street--or even a first glance for that matter. But during the few minutes she had been forced into his company, she had been aware of a sort of restless energy and raw masculinity about him, and she had been slightly shocked at .. | Mary Balogh |