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#1

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence

tags: dh-lawrence, self-pity

1109 likes

#2

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

tags: atheism, religion

8912 likes

#3

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

7613 likes

#4

“They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school's relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America.”
― Stephen King, Carrie

tags: carrie, high-school, young-love

45 likes

#5

“She knew with suddeness and ease that this moment would be with her always, within hand's reach of memory.

She doubted if they all sensed it - they had seen the world - but even George was silent for a minute as they looked, and the scene, the smell, even the sound of the band playing a faintly recognisable movie theme, was locked forever in her, and she was at peace.”
― Stephen King, Carrie

tags: carrie, memory, nostalgia

45 likes

#6

“He who has never left his hearth and has confined his researches to the narrow field of the history of his own country cannot be compared to the courageous traveller who has worn out his life in journeys of exploration to distant parts and each day has faced danger in order to persevere in excavating the mines of learning and in snatching precious fragments of the past from oblivion.”
― Al Masudi, From The Meadows of Gold

tags: history, perseverance, travel

11 likes

#7

“When a man dies, his wife is burned alive with him, but if the wife dies before her husband, the man does not suffer the same fate. If a man dies before marriage, he is given a posthumous wife. The women passionately want to be burned because they believe they will enter paradise.”
― Al Masudi, From The Meadows of Gold

tags: funeral-rites, ritual, sexism

2 likes

#8

“The sciences were financially supported, honoured everywhere, universally pursued; they were like tall edifices supported by strong foundations. Then the Christian religion appeared in Byzantium and the centres of learning were eliminated, their vestiges effaced and the edifice of Greek learning was obliterated. Everything the ancient Greeks had brought to light vanished, and the discoveries of the ancients were altered out of recognition.”
― Al Masudi, From The Meadows of Gold

tags: ancient-greece, byzantium, christianity, religion, science

2 likes

#9

“An agile, well-trained, brave elephant, ridden by a good mahout, its trunk armed with the kind of sabre known as a qartal and covered with chain mail, while the rest of its body is protected by sheets of bark and iron, surrounded by 500 men to defend it and protect it to the rear, can fight against 6000 men on horseback.”
― Al Masudi

tags: battle, elephants, war

5 likes

#10

“It was at this time that backgammon was invented and began to be popular. It is a kind of paradigm of how wealth is acquired, which in this world is not the reward of intelligence or ability, just as luck is not a product of skill... If luck favours the player, he gets what he wants; if it doesn't, a skilled and prudent man cannot win that which fortune only bestows on whom it likes. It is thus that the good things of this world are apportioned by chance.”
― Al Masudi, From The Meadows of Gold

tags: backgammon, chance, fortune, luck, skill, wealth

6 likes

#11

“A little arrogance (or even a lot) isn't such a bad thing, although your mother undoubtedly told you different. Mine did. "Pride goeth before a fall, Stephen", she said... and then I found out - right around the age that is 19 x 2 - that eventually you fall down, anyway.”
― Stephen King

tags: arrogance

18 likes

#12

“He fell silent. For several moments they all did, and the quiet had the feel of a deliberate thing. Then Eddie said, "All right, we're back together again. What the hell do we do next?”
― Stephen King, The Dark Tower

tags: reunion, uncertainty

28 likes

#13

“What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage.”
― Stephen King, The Dark Tower

tags: imagination, laughter, mordred

32 likes

#14

“There'a a phrase, "the elephant in the living room", which purports to describe what it's like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, "How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn't you see the elephant in the living room?" And it's so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth; "I'm sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn't know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture." There comes an aha-moment for some folks - the lucky ones - when they suddenly recognize the difference.”
― Stephen King

tags: abuse, alcohol, drugs, elephant-in-the-room

659 likes

#15

“Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet...”
― Stephen King, The Dark Tower

tags: destruction, folly, imagination, war

16 likes

#16

“A man who can't bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.”
― Stephen King, The Dark Tower

tags: habits

255 likes

#17

“I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.”
― Stephen King, The Dark Tower

tags: fear, writers, writing

40 likes

#18

“How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books - gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's?"

If he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one?"

Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled. "Touché. He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story...”
― Stephen King, The Dark Tower

tags: reading-for-pleasure, storytelling

30 likes

#19

“The road and the tale have both been long, would you not say so? The trip has been long and the cost has been high... but no great thing was ever attained easily. A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time.”
― Stephen King, The Dark Tower

151 likes

#20

“And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live.”
― Stephen King , The Dark Tower

tags: happy-endings

805 likes

#21

“Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.”
― Charles Bukowski

tags: fear, inspiration, writer-s-block, writing

283 likes

#22

“It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

tags: aliens, intelligent-life, pessimism

12 likes

#23

“Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

tags: futility, pessimism, posterity, the-future

18 likes

#24

“I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

tags: happiness, love, protection, responsibility, self-sufficiency, solitude

89 likes

#25

“Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

tags: emotions, experience, feel, pain

197 likes

#26

“The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn't tainted with guilt and regret.”
― P.D. James

tags: embarrassment, fear, guilt, marriage, regret

2 likes

#27

“I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

tags: love, regret

22 likes

#28

“It was a strange feeling going into a church I did not know for a service that I did not really believe in, but once inside I couldn't help a feeling of warmth and security. Outside there were wars and road accidents and murders, striptease clubs and battered babies and frayed tempers and unhappy marriages and people contemplating suicide and bad jokes, but once in St. Martin's there was peace. Surely people go to church not to involve themselves in the world's problems but to escape from them.”
― Michael Palin, Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years

tags: church, contemplation, peace, problems, religion

8 likes

#29

“I am very cautious of people who are absolutely right, especially when they are vehemently so.”
― Michael Palin, Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years

tags: argument, black-and-white, debate, shades-of-grey

101 likes

#30

“[There] are people who make a complete and utter mockery of 'democracy' and 'equality' - they're the casualties of the primitive rules of competition which run our society, and the welfare state just keeps them alive. That's all.”
― Michael Palin, Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years

tags: capitalism, competition, democracy, equality, poor, poverty

14 likes

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