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Added by mika_ on 3 Jan 2014 10:17
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Read in 2014

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People who added this item 3 Average listal rating (2 ratings) 9 IMDB Rating 0
Embassytown - China Mieville
Favorite line(s):

"As an immerser I progressed to the ranks I aspired to--those that granted me a certain cachet and income while keeping me from fundamental responsibilities. This is what I excelled at: the life-technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah that we call floaking."

"'A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.'"

"Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth."

"The return to anywhere you last visited as a child is difficult, especially when it's a door."

"Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on."

"'I don't want to be a simile anymore,' I said. 'I want to be a metaphor.'"

"If language, thought and word were separated, as they just had been, there was no succulence, no titillating impossible. No mystery. Where Language had been there was only language: signifying sound, to do things with and to."


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 1 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 9 IMDB Rating 0
The Homecoming Singer - Jay Wright
Excerpt from "Billie's Blues"

"You spin in the yard,
hanging clothes, watering the lawn,
humming along with the radio,
to the blues, and after all these years,
you still sometimes forget the words."

Excerpt from "A Non-Bithday Poem for my Father"

"It is not a metaphor my father needs,
but a way of getting down
what it means to spring from the circle,
and come back again."

Excerpt from "Moving to Wake at Six"

"The town is changing voices,
changing faces, moving from one
life to another, and I am still
at the point of choosing to move
and wake, or fall off again,
one of those who cannot scurry
to the solemn cluck of a clock,
one who cannot give up
the frightening warmth of shroud-like clothes,
where perhaps I could wake,
under a tinted window,
to conjure up a glazed lake,
a bearded man and a boy,
and a vision that could be my own."

Excerpt from "Morning, Leaving Calle Gigantes"

"Drunken and content, I move,
but am caught in a circle of little girls,
flying from the church like doves.
They do not speak,
but come with their small hands
folded piously near their pink chasubles.
Frightened, I walk as they,
as if we could not speak,
or walk upon anything solid,
almost as if we were plucked
from a garden to float in clear air,
silently spinning, as if the wind
would take us dancing over the traffic bridge,
past the market, until we would learn
to whisper, to beg to be released
and dropped where we would wither in good light.
I think that they could walk so forever,
unburdened by my smell,
waiting for me to speak,
or break the circle,
waiting, perhaps, for me to tear my shirt,
and scream, fall and roll stuttering
at their innocent feet,
rise and rip their innocent chasubles,
growl and gnaw at their innocent hands,
curse and drag them down on the bridge,
caught in their calm eyes.
They would not speak.
They have no language
to contain that kind of desire.
No Jesus can teach them
to flock like doves,
where I am waiting to stay my death
with theirs."

Excerpt from "Jalapena Gypsies"

"You are always
in the beginning
of some prophecy
that you will not believe
to save your life.

You travel in cities
that travel in you,
lost in the ache
of knowing none."

Excerpt from "Night Walk"

"Death is the language of these streets
though death will never own them/
When it is all done
so much of your life
is how & what you speak/
if you go away
you carry the speech in your bones/
Nothing is invented there/in you
you come to that
even though the streets cluck their triumph
& you sit in the dawn
with the old man piercing your tongue."


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 1 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 8 IMDB Rating 0
Soothsayers and Omens - Jay Wright
Excerpt from "The Master of Names"

"...you take my hand
in a whisper almost like silence,
and lead me into the mystery
of the names you carry like crosses."

Excerpt from "Baptism in the Lead Avenue Ditch"

"Under this water,
all sound comes like thunder.
Familiar voices are lost.
God's man has his hand,
like a mask, over my face,
and still I suck up mud
and the taste of dry grass,
hear the deep tone of a bell
struck at the bottom of an ocean,
see fire chase down flashes of light,
feel my head swell.
I rise in pure water,
unashamed.
You see me,
and find me washed clean."

"Walking Chapultepec"

"These gardens circle up
and lose you.
You can hear the call
of forbidden hunting
going on under you.
Every tree has a dull eagle
fixing you with his impertinent eyes.
A man in white invites you to a fountain,
where another, with cancer-eaten jaws
quaking like the gills of fish,
swims toward your leg.
You walk where nothing will release you,
and only your tenacious separateness
will convince you that you are dreaming."

Excerpt from "Altars and Sacrifice"

"Above him,
God's vicar sits like the rain
and sends his messenger to earth,
into these shadows,
with the instrument
as sharp as God's teeth,
with a need like ours."


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 1 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 8 IMDB Rating 0
Dimensions of History - Jay Wright
Excerpt from "Tamborito"

"I am solid.
I am the measure of the house.
I sleep with my grainy eyes
plucking the shadows from the room."

"Bambuco"

"Face to face,
in faith,
my face,
a lyric mask,
becomes you.
I am at your grill again.
Your ribbon laces my ox
to your door.
Invite me, woman,
to the music of your middle.
I go one foot before the other,
leap back,
begin again from heel to toe.
You mirror my hesitation.
My nerve is in your back.
One foot before the other.
Leap back.
I pinch your waist,
and guide you through
the labyrinth of love's
first petals.
I take your straight body
through the maze of my arms.
I fold my arms,
and touch the swords of yours.
I pass,
unbalanced by your face.
I court your kisses
while your body fades.
My life
is the middle of this dance.
My heart unfolds
to accept this cross,
the stone of our customary light.
Fire-ladened, river-burdened,
a bird indeed,
a blue knit shawl of moonlight,
you chase yourself before me,
you measure my soul's intent,
my clan craft,
the weight of my memory,
the distance of my father's fire.
I spread this shrunken white veil,
and call your step across the river.
I kneel,
and hear your familiar voice
call me home."

"Mater Dolorosa"

"Lady, I look upon your axe;
naive, I nail it in a corner
with the sword the book gives you.
I oil a rose to purple leaves.
I ponder over brown blood.
My sun must not compete with your
chrome halo.
Your clinched mouth, opened only
in astonishment at your violation,
I cannot see. I cannot get your eyes
bead right.
I have you in the water, or floating in the veil
the sun weaves from the mist.
I want to review your suffering,
the losses you accept.
You fold them under your body,
away from me. You raise your axe.
Wine of the blood is tree deep.
Mother, I need your word
to sit upon my golden stool.
Mother, I petition you for silence
at my burial.
Mother, I am heartsick
kneeling to fix your pain.
Why should I tint your arms with grief
when it is my still body
that you hold?"

Excerpt from "What is Good"

"Composed, I am saved
by my mother's reason,
my neighbors' needs,
my will to go beyond the stillness
of my gods' dreams.
Luminous breath,
teach me compassion for this
my complex body."

"What is True"

"I argue my woman into compassion.
Light upon light, through darkness,
she gives me what is true.
Radiant light is in the riverbed,
morning's collocation,
the linchpin of the hours' flow.
The source of illumination
is in the jaw of the willow,
clinching the earth, the juice
that inches from the broken cactus ear.
A lily dead upon the water veils the altar.
A star ascending reaches its
own domain, its own rest.
But here we balance in the moon fall,
and chart the absence in a curve,
upon a clock,
the solitary body where the world ends.
Composed,
we name the caves from which we rise.
Profane and strange, our dead arrive
with linen and scented candles,
salt beer, sweet wine,
tapered beads, a bright
wood for the altar.
It seems that nothing in this light
will fade or be used up.
And so I take their meanings
from my woman's sign,
their changes from her absence.
I take her passion for my head,
her craft into my heart.
Love measures me.
Love pays me out.
Love gives me my domain.
My radiance is a red bead,
a white feather on a bow,
balanced on my grave."

Excerpt from "Landscapes: The Physical Dimension"

"High and higher,
I aspire to ride a blue air,
to ride the blue of Mary, Yemanya.
I need no lacquered Christ,
scourged, a dog, an alabaster semblance.
And yet I cloth my chapels
in gold, maroon and reds.
I light them with a million candles
to enhance my Mary's blue."


mika_'s rating:
Excerpt from "Guadalajara"

"These spires above my house are doves,
lifted by grace above the earth's eruption."

Excerpt from "Orchid"

"But you see that, even here,
love raises its resolved head,
where there is only the borrowed
smell of tomcats,
and the hope of vanilla
flowing from a generous cup."

Excerpt from "Saltos"

"There is a dance that waits
for the fisher who would know me,
and a moment when dried fruit will speak
with the sun's voice.
There is a moment when I will know myself
balanced on brown-red earth
that still wears the blue veil of an ancient desire."


mika_'s rating:
Excerpt from "Boleros 13"

"All gifts are brass to one who rises from the sea,
even if the gift recalls a dance and a divining,
and every divination, a betrayal.
What is the boy but a boy who waits
for his solitude to tell him who will relieve it?"

Excerpt from "Saints' Days 25"

"I say, those who know
know I would be ruled by faith,
but that I profess nothing,
and have no anodyne for the spasms
of a speechless heart."

Excerpts from "Saints' Days 26"

"Life here is so level
a quick spray of fireflies at dusk
comes as a starburst over July."

"I will open a temple,
where joy becomes more than a body
raised and pressed to a penitent's tongue"

Excerpt from "Saints' Days 28"

"The monarchy shapes itself again;
God's many voices fashion redemption's wheel,
but nothing saves you, for no one sees you."


mika_'s rating:
Excerpt from "The Continuing City: Spirit and Body"

"I am the dark glass of some other spirit
who will know me, the bone sound
of some other resonant body.
I await my completion in a strange house,
my soul's rags falling in pride from its door."

Excerpt from "The Measure"

"I have learned to accept my presence as act,
my act as a placement of time.
I hold now, by my presence,
to have held the first light,
and, in my imperfection,
to have held the vision of my own absence.
This is the one you marry, so lightly."

"Transcendent Night"

"Your feather hands
are love's nest in winter,
and yet I fly,
or do I dream I fly?
And I would fly
to nestle near your child's lake,
to press my needs upon your feather hands.
There at the lake,
in the shadow of the celt
I find there,
I dance in your spine's darkness;
I clothe you in your spirit's darkness
and in your body's darkness.
I awake to the light of your total darkness.
I keep, for my constant spring,
your feather hands upon my eyes.
My eyes will always take
the dark path to your heart.
My heart will drink its light
from the only heavy hands
you offer me.
Death of the dark. Death of the light.
I live in my spirit's web of love's
transcendent night."

Excerpt from "Inscrutability"

"Though I live in the essential
condition of vision,
what truth I know
is a burden in my ear,
sign and countersign
of the light's discoveries."

Excerpt from "The Buried Barn's Own Nocturn"

"night's dawn is the one
dolorous light by which I set my sun"

Excerpt from "Compassion's Bird"

"No elastic universe can redeem
the pain of my heart's red shift, the python
embrace of madronos. I have gone
into the dense light of dream, origin
of love's structured star, love's own mandarin."


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 104 Average listal rating (41 ratings) 8 IMDB Rating 0
Atonement - Ian McEwan
"A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it."

"A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended."


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 11 Average listal rating (7 ratings) 6.1 IMDB Rating 0
The City & the City - China Mieville
"It was here in the crosshatch that the students might stand, scandalously, touching distance from a foreign power, a pornography of separation."

"We are all philosophers here where I am, and we debate among many other things the question of where it is that we live. On that issue I am a liberal. I live in the interstice yes, but I live in both the city and the city."


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 15 Average listal rating (9 ratings) 8.4 IMDB Rating 0
Un Lun Dun - China Mieville
"'Book covers are tougher than their insides, and I needed something heavy-duty.'"


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 135 Average listal rating (56 ratings) 8.1 IMDB Rating 0
"...when one is speaking of the essence of things, it often happens that one can only speak in generalities. Concrete things certainly do command attention, but they are often little more than trivia. Side trips. The more one tries to see into the distance, the more generalized things become."

"'It's not a question of better or worse. The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you're supposed to go up and down when you're supposed to go down. When you're supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you're supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there's no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness. "I am he and / He is me: / Spring nightfall." Abandon the self, and there you are.'"

"'...I am trying to get a grasp on my new self. I am neither a container nor a medium of passage. I am trying to establish myself here on the face of the earth.'"


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People who added this item 1 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 7 IMDB Rating 0
A Rose for Emily - William Faulkner
"For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the
grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.
Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-grey hair."


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 8 Average listal rating (6 ratings) 7.5 IMDB Rating 0
"How can I be secure? (Pause.) Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what’s beyond measure? That’s a sickness. That’s a trap. There is no measure. Only greed."

"What is our life: (Pause.) it’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment?"


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 53 Average listal rating (36 ratings) 8.1 IMDB Rating 0
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains."


mika_'s rating:
"Fortune favors the brave, I told myself and stood up. I think that kind of stuff often enough that I figure when I was alive I must have been an English teacher. Either that or just an annoying dickhead."


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People who added this item 3 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 8 IMDB Rating 0
Days Between Stations - Steve Erickson
"...he felt as though in a womb of haze, anticipating the inevitable cradle."

"...nothing ever traversed the horizon these days but for the sun at dawn; and every other horizon supported only the walls."


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People who added this item 1 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 6 IMDB Rating 0
In Viriconium - M. John Harrison
"I thought I heard a reedy voice speak indistinctly in the gloom. I put the tapestry down and walked quickly out into the sunshine."


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People who added this item 59 Average listal rating (34 ratings) 7.7 IMDB Rating 0
The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman
"'It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will,' said Silas, 'take a graveyard'"

"'I am a Hound of God. I travel my own road, into Hell and out of it.'"

"'Wherever you go, take yourself with you.'"


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People who added this item 2 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 6 IMDB Rating 0
Viriconium nights - M. John Harrison
"I went to Viriconium in a century which could find itself only in its own symbols, at an age when one seeks to unify one's experience through the symbolic events of the past."


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People who added this item 3 Average listal rating (2 ratings) 3.5 IMDB Rating 0
Tom Sawyer Detective - Mark Twain
"...everything's so solemn it seems like everybody you've loved is dead and gone, and you 'most wish you was dead and gone too, and done with it all."


mika_'s rating:
"We talked in whispers not because there was any one to hear, but because there was still such a freshness of mind between us that our thoughts were a little frightened, I think, to find themselves at last in words. And so they went softly."




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"The beginning of philosophy is to know the condition of one's own mind."

"Give thyself more diligently to reflection: know thyself: take counsel with the Godhead: without God put thine hand unto nothing!"

"If you seek Truth, you will not seek to gain a victory by every possible means."

"Is there smoke in the room? If it be slight, I remain; if grievous, I quit it. For you must remember this and hold it fast, that the door stands open."


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 658 Average listal rating (495 ratings) 7.6 IMDB Rating 0
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
"'Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.'"

"It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care."

"No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."


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People who added this item 9 Average listal rating (6 ratings) 6.5 IMDB Rating 0
Kraken - China Mieville
"'...we're facing a wave of St. Johns. A bit of an epidemic of eschatologies. We live,' he said, too flatly for any humour to be audible, 'in the epoch of competing ends.'"

"Men unfold and people are generators and ink rides a man."

"'You think something like memory won't grow spikes to protect it? That's what angels are: they're spikes.' Memory's defences. Their content irrelevant: the fact of them, and their pugnacity, was all."

"The best thugs were all psychologists."

"He glanced beyond the walls, at the strange night, in which gods were ignored and memories were out hunting the future."

"There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it..."


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 1 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 6 IMDB Rating 0
"Acting is nothing more than storytelling."

"If you hear enough applause and laughter at a young enough age, you are doomed to become an actor."

"Theater is of the moment. Breathless self-praise, no matter how descriptive, can never recapture its impact after the fact."


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 99 Average listal rating (65 ratings) 7.7 IMDB Rating 0
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
"There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet."

"Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!"


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People who added this item 4 Average listal rating (3 ratings) 7.7 IMDB Rating 0
"The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space."

"...the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation."


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"The enemy of the moment is not as important as our own inner weakness. If this is not mended we are already defeated, though no foreign conqueror stands within our walls."


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People who added this item 1 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 7 IMDB Rating 0
True West - Sam Shepard
"There's gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning."


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People who added this item 19 Average listal rating (14 ratings) 8 IMDB Rating 0
Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
"'Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.'"

"Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth."

"'Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.'"

"I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books."


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People who added this item 5 Average listal rating (3 ratings) 6.7 IMDB Rating 0
Cymbeline (New Penguin Shakespeare) - William Shakespeare,John Pitcher
"No, 'tis slander,
Whose edge is sharper than the sword, whose tongue
Outvenoms all the worms of Nile, whose breath
Rides on the posting winds and doth belie
All corners of the world"

"The lamb entreats the butcher: where's thy knife?
Thou art too slow to do thy master's bidding,
When I desire it too."

"Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust."

"Kneel not to me:
The power that I have on you is, to spare you;
The malice towards you to forgive you: live,
And deal with others better."


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 72 Average listal rating (40 ratings) 7.4 IMDB Rating 0
"Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there's nobody to live in it."


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 13 Average listal rating (10 ratings) 7.7 IMDB Rating 0
King Rat - China Mieville
"I can squeeze between buildings through spaces you can't even see. I can walk behind you so close my breath raises gooseflesh on your neck and you won't hear me. I can hear the muscles in your eyes contract when your pupils dilate. I can feed off your filth and live in your house and sleep under your bed and you will never know unless I want you to."

"What paralyzes is fear, his father believed, and what makes fear is ignorance. When we learn, we no longer fear."

"Wasn't it odd and sad, he thought a little hysterically, that it was only on learning that his father was not his father, that he realized how completely his father he had been?"

"He stared down at the city below his feet. It was an illusion. The shimmering motion of the lights he saw was not the real city. They were part of it, to be sure, a necessary part...but the beautiful lights, so much more lively than those above them, were a simulacrum. They merely painted the surface tension. Below that thin veneer the water was still filthy, still dangerous and cold.
Saul held onto that. He resisted the poetics of the city."

"'A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.'"


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People who added this item 16 Average listal rating (8 ratings) 6 IMDB Rating 0
The Immoralist - André Gide
"To know how to free oneself is nothing. What is difficult is to know how to be free."


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People who added this item 14 Average listal rating (7 ratings) 9.1 IMDB Rating 0
"It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!"


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People who added this item 7 Average listal rating (5 ratings) 7.4 IMDB Rating 0
The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco
"I have always found more pleasure in food than in sex, perhaps a mark left upon me by priests."

"People believe only what they already know, and this is the beauty of the Universal Form of Conspiracy."


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People who added this item 19 Average listal rating (14 ratings) 7.6 IMDB Rating 0
Iron Council (Bas-Lag) - China Mieville
"There is no please and no need for it. This language is deep-structured with courtesy. To be rude takes effortful and irregular declensions."


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People who added this item 6 Average listal rating (3 ratings) 9.7 IMDB Rating 0
Lathe of Heaven - Ursula Le Guin
"The insistent permissiveness of the late twentieth century had produced fully as much sex-guilt and sex-fear in its heirs as had the insistent repressiveness of the late nineteenth century."

"I am living a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep."

"I haven't any destiny. All I have is dreams. And now other people run them."

"Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass."

"The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means."

"The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.
Briefly she saw him thus, and what struck her most, of that insight, was his strength. He was the strongest person she had ever known, because he could not be moved away from the center. And that was why she liked him."

"'...he lies because he won't look straight, he's not interested in what's true, in what is, he can't see anything except his mind--his ideas of what ought to be.'"

"'An effective dream is a reality.'"


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People who added this item 1 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 3 IMDB Rating 0
The Lottery - Shirley Jackson
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People who added this item 111 Average listal rating (72 ratings) 8.3 IMDB Rating 0
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes_II
"'I'm a person--a man--and I can't live with just the books and tapes and electronic mazes. You say, "see other women." How can I when I don't know any other women? Something inside is burning me up, and all I know is it makes me think of you. I'm in the middle of a page and I see your face on it--not blurred like those in my past, but clear and alive. I touch the page and your face is gone and I want to tear the book apart and throw it away.'"

"Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything--all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it."

"How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes--how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence."

"P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard."


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"The difference here 'twixt simple and witty folk, if the truth be known, is that your plain man cares much for what stand ye take and not a fart for why ye take it, while your smart wight leaves ye whate'er stand ye will, sobeit ye defend it cleverly."

"A man's most useful friend and fearsome foe is the poet."


mika_'s rating:
"But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge."

"'To light a candle is to cast a shadow...'"


mika_'s rating:
People who added this item 1 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 8 IMDB Rating 0
Polynia - China Mieville
"I suppose I’m saying that Mass 3, like all of them, is exactly what it looks like: an iceberg. No more, no less. Cold, austere, barren. Awesome, of course, because since when were icebergs not? But, and bear with me with this, except for the fact that it’s levitating above London, it seems no more nor less awesome than its cousins in the sea."

"'...there's more than one way to climb things.'"

"It might be warm summer, but you’ll open the curtains onto iced windows. You’ll come out of your house and there’ll be a line of frost bisecting your street."


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People who added this item 12 Average listal rating (9 ratings) 8.9 IMDB Rating 0
"And so providence, or society, or fate, or whatever name you want to give it, has created this hovel for us, so that we can go in out of the storm. It's for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that's just protective coloration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn't give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive--because we have to."

"He suspected that he was beginning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and less than he had once imagined it to be. He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence."

"In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another."


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People who added this item 24 Average listal rating (13 ratings) 8.4 IMDB Rating 0
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
"...one is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event."

"Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in--particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth."


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People who added this item 2 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 10 IMDB Rating 0
The Round House - Louise Erdrich
"While their moral standards for the rest of the world were rigid, they were always able to find excuses for their own shortcomings. It is these people really, said my father, small-time hypocrites, who may in special cases be capable of monstrous acts if given the chance."

"I've read that certain memories put down in agitation at a vulnerable age do not extinguish with time, but engrave ever deeper as they return and return."

"The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation."

"We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see."


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People who added this item 6 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 6 IMDB Rating 0
"Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me."

"Her albino hair illuminated my dreams, shining brighter than moonlight."


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People who added this item 1 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 4 IMDB Rating 0
The Honey Month - Amal El-Mohtar
"O Rose, aren't you sick
of metaphors, of perfection,
of being Queen to a grasping multitude
who've never brushed a thorn?"

"Songs whispered through rivers have a strange charm, after all, a strange and lilting sorrow from the wave."


mika_'s rating:
"Ann: 'Anything that licks anything disgusting isn't kosher.'

Evil Monkey: 'Then our cats are definitely not kosher.'"


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People who added this item 1 Average listal rating (1 ratings) 7 IMDB Rating 0
Tainaron - Leena Krohn
"For, you see, those who constantly drag their houses with them remain unknown to other people. One can gain only a brief glimpse of them, if that; they are always in hiding."

"How we secrete words around us, so that the eye of reality may not see us!"

""...the poor creature who believes that everything is true is the victim of his dreams."


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