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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e0d1485 | YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. "So we can believe the big ones?" YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING." | lies mercy | Terry Pratchett | |
| dfd1fae | The senior wizards of Unseen University stood and looked at the door. There was no doubt that whoever had shut it wanted it to stay shut. Dozens of nails secured it to the door frame. Planks had been nailed right across. And finally it had, up until this morning, been hidden by a bookcase that had been put in front of it. 'And there's the sign, Ridcully,' said the Dean. 'You have read it, I assume. You know? The sign which says "Do not, und.. | Terry Pratchett | ||
| b4cee3e | Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues. He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, "Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times," and then unroll a lot of supercilio.. | sherlock-holmes-deduction intuition | Terry Pratchett | |
| 8a0a4ad | the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters, | Terry Pratchett | ||
| ecf1883 | Lessee...he'd gone off after the funeral and gotten drunk. No, not drunk, another word, ended with "er." Drunker. that was it." | Terry Pratchett | ||
| 556290c | Thunder rolled . . It rolled a six. | Terry Pratchett | ||
| df30b2e | In order to have a change of fortune at the last minute, you have to take your fortune to the last minute. | Terry Pratchett | ||
| 349792e | When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point- of-view is seldom necessary. | Terry Pratchett | ||
| 88fd5a1 | This was not the time to say "I don't know." The brothers had begging, hungry looks, like dogs waiting to be fed. They wanted an answer. It would be nice if it was the right answer, but if it couldn't be, then any answer would do, because then we would stop being worried...and then his mind caught alight. That's what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there's food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so the.. | religion thinking | Terry Pratchett | |
| 9572167 | I wish I'd been accepted sooner and better. When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes--and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history. We choose our own lives. It is not simply that we decide on the behaviors that construct our experience; when given our druthers, we elect to be ourselves. Most of us would .. | Andrew Solomon | ||
| 86d3604 | Fanatics can justify practically any atrocity to themselves. The more untenable their position becomes, the harder they hold to it, and the worse the things they are willing to do to support it. | prejudice fantasy religion truth | Mercedes Lackey | |
| b8197a1 | That night I wrote in my journal: "Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colors. Someone -- was it van Gogh? -- said that orange is the color of insanity. _Beauty is terror._ We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us." | Donna Tartt | ||
| 7ef98e6 | Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours. | Donna Tartt | ||
| d620deb | I will see you bereft of all that you have, of home and happiness and beautiful things. I will see your nation cast down and your allies drawn away. I will see you as alone and friendless and wretched as am I; and then you may live as long as you like, in some dark and lonely corner of the earth, and I shall call myself content. -Lien, Albino Celestial (Dragon) | revenge dramatic-announcements | Naomi Novik | |
| 28773cf | But it was all the same choice, every time. The choice between the one death and all the little ones. | Naomi Novik | ||
| bc1fb8a | It [Ashfair House] was an old fashioned house--the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in. | damsel-in-distress 2004 jonathan-strange house stereotype | Susanna Clarke | |
| 476ed5b | The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling? | writing the-braindead-megaphone | George Saunders | |
| 02ff900 | What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. | George Saunders | ||
| ba48d19 | In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time,.. | Alan Lightman | ||
| faf70d7 | Because fate would not slight me so unspeakably. I'd seek a noon-day sun if I were paired with one such as you." "Such as me," she repeated blandly. She'd been mocked too often over her lifetime to take offense. Her skin was as thick as armor. "Yes, you. An ignorant, mortal Kmart checkout girl." He took the sharpest knife from his place setting, absently turning it between his left thumb and forefinger. "Kmart? I should have been so luck.. | iad lothaire | Kresley Cole | |
| 2e5046a | The first priest I find, I'm goan to marry you. I'm all in, peekon. | Kresley Cole | ||
| d2c3c50 | I pulled the feather out, jerking him away from the dream. Just like he used to do with me, when I went in alone. The play was shifting, and I knew how bad it felt, to have your dream dragged from your mouth. | Jeff Noon | ||
| acbb1ac | I want to live for something. I don't want to live to get charity food to give me enough strength to go back to get more charity food. | Betty Smith | ||
| 80741b3 | From that moment on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again. | Betty Smith | ||
| 7c101e7 | I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. | words literature reading poetry healing language trauma | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 128d424 | Tell me the story, Pew. . . . It was a woman. You always say that. There's always a woman somewhere, child; a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a fairy godmother, or one as wicked as she is beautiful, or as beautiful as she is good. Is that the complete list? Then there is the woman you love. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 165a36a | Cats can do whatever they want, whenever they want, without regard to what anyone says or does. Rather like Princesses. | humor | Terry Brooks | |
| d47f887 | She's sent the crows out to blind the guests coming for dinner!" What?" | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 59b5837 | If there exists in this universe anything more infuriating and crazy-making than a man, I don't know what it is, thank you, and I don't want to know. | Jill Conner Browne | ||
| d91e188 | Didn't help to ponder things that were forever gone. It only made a body restless and fill up with bees, all wanting to sting something. | Laurie Halse Anderson | ||
| 7df99fa | I can't do everything for you. You must walk alone to find your soul. | Laurie Halse Anderson | ||
| 9c9867d | Eating plain toast will detonate her. "I'll have some honey." When the bread is done I scrape on a microscopic layer of it and pour a cup of coffee, black. She pretends not to listen or watch as I crunch through my breakfast. I pretend that I don't notice her pretending." | Laurie Halse Anderson | ||
| 731aabd | I love you," he whispered, rubbing his jaw against her temple. "And you love me. I can feel it when you're in my arms." He felt her stiffen slightly and draw a shaky breath, but she either couldn't or wouldn't speak. She hadn't thrown the words back in his face, however, so Ian continued talking to her, his hand roving over her back. "I can feel it, Elizabeth, but if you don't admit it pretty soon, you're going to drive me out of my mind... | judith-mcnaught elizabeth ian | Judith McNaught | |
| d482131 | Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| a880d21 | Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections. | want physical home | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 7463f91 | Ah, this is fine," he cried triumphantly, holding up a small medallion on a chain. He dusted it off, and engraved on one side were the words "WHY NOT?" "That's a good reason for almost anything - a bit used perhaps, but still quite serviceable." | Norton Juster | ||
| ce5addc | And now," he continued, speaking to Milo, "where were you on the night of July 27?" "What does that have to do with it?" asked Milo. "It's my birthday, that's what," said the policeman as he entered "Forgot my birthday" in his little book. "Boys always forget other people's birthdays." | Norton Juster | ||
| f779b98 | If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. Time: the whisper beneath that word is death. With this unanswerable weight hanging heavier and heavier over one's head, the vision becomes cloudy, nothing is what it seems... How then, can I trust my memory .. | mortality | James Baldwin | |
| 4032e02 | There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. | James Baldwin | ||
| 76d068a | All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. | James Baldwin | ||
| 89bfe03 | There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. | life | Willa Cather | |
| aba94ed | He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page. | words power-of-words news | Robert Cormier | |
| 1d8eb2e | Play the game, but don't believe in it - that much you owe yourself ... Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 28333a7 | Cat, I'll let you in on a little secret. We don't all love our jobs every day. And doing something you have passion for doesn't make the work part of it any easier...It just makes you less likely to quit. | passion persistence work life knitting georgia job | Kate Jacobs |