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Also: Block Quotes
“For time to be meaningful, it needs to be filled by distance; for distance to be meaningful, it needs to fill an appropriate measure of time. .”
“If you get one photograph that's good from a trip, that's plenty.”
“Sommigen spelen op een podium vele optredens. Anderen spelen thuis en geven maar een paar concerten per jaar. Sommigen spelen voor duizenden mensen, anderen voor slechts een paar. Het maakt niet zo veel uit. Alles wat telt is te zoeken naar een gezond en harmonieuze relatie tussen muziek en jezelf.” Hein Van de Geyn
“Unfortunately, illusion is sometimes the only element that keeps us sane, and you don't rob others of it when they need it most.” “The great joke is that any wisdom most of us acquire can seldom be passed on to others. I suspect this reality is at the heart of most of old people's anger.” “The real gladiators of the world are so humble in their origins and unremarkable in appearance that when we stand next to them in a grocery-store line, we never guess how brightly their souls can burn in the dark.” James Lee Burke, Swan Peak
‘Kán je schaken?’ vroeg die.
“There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.” John Irving, A Widow for One Year
“The sympathy passed between them like a letter slipped under a door.” John Irving, A Widow for One Year
“There is no intolerance in America that compares to the peculiarly American intolerance for lack of success.” John Irving, A Widow for One Year
“I felt that she was interrogating me and in fear of her interrogation
I blurted out whatever I thought she wanted me to say, which was always the opposite to what
she wanted me to say, that's if she wanted me to say anything. Howard Jacobson Kalooki Nights
“Als ik in een jaar één echt goede foto heb gemaakt, ben ik heel blij.” Tino Soriano, in PF, maart 2008
“De wereld wil een andere VS [...] Ik wil dat het imago van Amerika hersteld wordt, niet omdat het me iets kan schelen of anderen ons wel of niet waarderen, maar omdat ons leiderschap nodig is.”
Madeleine Albright Het Parool, 21 februari 2008
“Deze dagen voor kerst zijn ongewoon stil en donker. Bomen, hagen en struiken zijn wit berijpt. Het licht moet vroeg op.” Jan Elemans (De moeder van al mijn boeken, 2007)
“Wie gevonden heeft, heeft slecht gezocht”
Dirk Roofthooft
“De Belgen hebben het buskruit niet uitgevonden, maar ze weten er wel goed raad mee.”
Bart Dirks
“And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation, and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared.”
Michael Chabon
“The labels had been lettered lovingly; his father had always expressed that emotion best through troubling with details. In this fatherly taking of pains -- in his stubbornness, persistence, orderliness, patience, and calm -- Josef had always taken comfort.”
Michael Chabon
“Het is bizar, denk ik terwijl ik Richard bekijk,
hoe snel hij kan omslaan van amicaal naar bedreigend, van
bijna timide naar demonisch. Er ontbreekt in zijn
karakterstructuur een soort verloopstuk dat zijn
handelen kan temperen. Dat maakt hem waarschijnlijk
tot zo'n goede acteur.
[...]
[...]
[...]
[...]
Don Duyns, Buigen
“Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.”
Een lichaam vertrouwd
Hanny Michaelis
“Wat er in uw
diepste innerlijk gebeurt is uw volle liefde waard, hieraan moet u op de een
of andere manier werken, en niet teveel tijd en teveel moed verspillen aan
het verhelderen van uw houding ten opzichte van de mensen.”
“New Year's Eve was another bad night for me to get through.
My parents had always delighted in New Year's Eve, listening to its
aproach on the radio, city by city, until it arrived in Los Angeles.
The firecrackers went off and the whistles and horns blew and the amateur drunks
vomited and husbands flirted with other men's wives and the wives
flirted with who ever they could. Everybody kissed and played grab-ass
in the bathrooms and closets and sometimes openly, especially at midnight, and
there were terrible family arguments the next day not to mention the
Tournament of Roses Parade and the Rose Bowl game.”
“In fact, because of the uncertainty principal, particles will do whatever they can get away with for as long as they can. Virtual particles have no scruples and misbehave whenever no one is watching. (A physicist from Amsterdam even suggested that they are Dutch.)”
Lisa Randall, Ph.D.
(The Dutch physicist referred to is
Prof.dr. Robbert Dijkgraaf.
“I like to refer to the permissive policy of quantum mechanics,
tolerating anything whatsoever as long as it happens quickly enough for it to
remain undetected.”
“What I most dislike about myself is the fact that I think I'm
capable of achieving anything. If somebody came up to me and said,
"We're just having a bet over there and my mate reckons that you
couldn't swim the English Channel." And I'd say, "Really? Gimme the
fookin' trunks!" Now I can't swim, but I'd still give it a go.”
“A teen-ager discovers that deceit is almost as seductive
as sex, and much more easily accomplished. It may be especially
easy to deceive loved ones - the people who love you are the least willing to acknowledge your deceit. But if you love no one, and feel that no one loves you, there's no one with the power to sting you by pointing out that you're lying. If an orphan is not adopted by the time he reaches this alarming period of adelescence, he may continue to deceive himself, and others forever.”
“If you break little promises you'll break big ones.”
“Security is measured by the numbers of promises kept.
Every child understands a promise - if it is kept -
and looks forward to the next promise. Among orphans, you build security slowly but regularly.”
Weightless
Weightless, suspended in the deep cool
Rosemary Bocek
“Conceive a dell, deep-hollowed in forest secresy; it lies in dimness and mist: its turf is dank, its herbage pale and humid. A storm or an axe makes a wide gap amongst the oak-trees; the breeze sweeps in; the sun looks down; the sad, cold dell becomes a deep cup of lustre; high summer pours her blue glory and her golden light out of that beauteous sky, which till now the starved hollow never saw.”
“Er zijn heel goede huwelijken met af &
toe daverende ruzie, & slechte huwelijken zonder één onvertogen woord.
“I was the morning of my hundredth birthday. I shaved the final
mirror-disk of old tired face under the merciless glare of the bathroom
lighting. It was all very well telling oneself that Humphrey Bogart
had that sort of face; but he also had a hairpiece, half a million
dollars and a stand-in for the rough bits.”
“The fog had become thicker and was that sort of green
they call a pea souper. The shoe shops were prisms of
yellow light and past them, buses were ambling; trumpeting
aimlessly like a herd of dirty red elephants looking for a place
to die.”
“Stock stared at me. His head looked like that of a statue that
someone had found and rolled home so that all the delicate parts
had broken off.”
“Owen had the defective memory of the severely embarrassed.
He didn't want to remember it. Moments continued to stick in his
mind as contexts melted into forgetfulness.”
“It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into
dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding
these beginnings.”
“Gangbare paden leiden naar goede doelen,
dwaalsporen leiden naar hogere doelen.
Probleem is: lang niet alle dwaalsporen.”
“I was sufficiently English to find it
difficult to say nice things to people I really liked,
and I really liked Barney.”
“Men's friendships are something that women wonder at and fear slightly.”
“Vertigo, as all its victims know, is not a fear of falling
but an atavistic desire to fly,
which is why so many of its sufferers are aviators.”
“Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense
to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”
“Er is geen vrijheid in de zandwoestijn,
“I watched the waves moving down on to the shore.
Each shadow darkened until one, losing its balance, toppled forward.
It tore a white hole in the green ocean and in falling brought
its fellow down, and that the next,
until the white stuffing of the sea burst out of the lengthening gash.
[...] Outside the waves were tripping over, crashing on to and falling through
the foamy, hissing scar-tissue of their predecessors.
I wondered how long before we would begin doing the same.”
“Trots? Dat is een raar woord. Ik ben wel tevreden.”
“Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again”
“Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones
as we can.”
“The geese came in from the north, flying in a slightly broken V.
When they flew above the booms and crashes of southern Falluja, it was
as if they had hit a force field - the V dissolved into a tangle
of confused circles, the migration stopped, the birds veered past
each other in the sky, seemingly trapped above a sliver of apocalypse.”
In een afdeling van de sportschool staan apparaten naast en tegenover elkaar, langs een gangpad. Witte bouwsels van vierkante stalen balken, met katrollen en kabels die stapels gewichten trekken. Een paar mensen maken hun ronde. Ze zitten of liggen en zwoegen aan de handvaten, trekken en duwen de gewichten op, en nog eens op. Tien, vijftien, twintig maal, dan een minuut pauze, en opnieuw, vijftien, twintig keer. Na een paar weken merk ik hoe aangenaam die minuut kan zijn. Als ik mijn best heb gedaan, en bijna niet meer kan, dan vliegt die minuut voorbij. Ik zit, ellebogen op de knie‘n en hoofd in mijn handen, stil voor me uit te kijken, verbaasd zonder te weten waarover. Dromend, peinzend over bijna niets. Een prachtminuut. Dan ontwaken, en verder. Duwen, trekken, weer een keer, verder en zwaarder. Op naar nog zo'n minuut. In a wing of the fitness center, steel machinery is lined up on two sides of a path. The structures are painted white. Beams welded together, wheels and steel cables fastened to stacks of weights, with a seat and handles connected to every individual contraption. A few people make their round. The sit or they lie down and work on the handles, pushing and pulling up the weight stack, up, and up again. Ten, fifteen, twenty times, then a break of a minute to catch breath and again, fifteen, twenty times. After a few weeks I find out how pleasant that minute can be. If I've done my best and gone near the limit, that minute flies by. I'm sitting, ellbows on my knees, face in my hands, staring away without seeing, baffled by nothing in particular. Dreaming, pondering about almost nothing. A beautiful minute. Then waking up, and moving on. Pushing, pulling, once more, harder. On my way to another minute like that.
“[...] That curious mixture of passion and pity that is the
essence of love.”
“Everyone's fear is different. And because bravery is just the
knack of suppressing signs of your own fear, bravery is different too.
The trouble witth being only nineteen is that you are frightened
of all the wrong things; and brave about the wrong things.”
“Summer rain is cleaner than winter rain.
Winter rain strikes hard upon the granite, but summer rain is
sibilant soft upon the leaves. This rainstorm pounced hastily like
an inexperienced lover, and then as suddenly was gone.
The leaves drooped wistfully and the air gleamed with green
reflections. It's easy to forgive the summer rain: like
first love, white lies or blarney, there's no
malignity in it.”
“It was chaos. Not the sort of chaos that results from an explosion,
but the kind that takes years to achieve. Spend five years hiding
things, losing things and propping broken things up, then give it two years
for the dust to settle thickly and you've got Byrd's studio.”
“By comparison with the cold cobbled alleys,
the hotel restaurant was a scene of throbbing gaiety.
A small orchestra was
playing "Lights of Moscow" and the waiters were clattering metal
dishes and semaphoring with table napkins, and there was the air
of subdued hysteria
that you get in a big theatre when the orchestra is tuning up.”
“It was a fine Paris evening, Gauloises and garlic sat lightly on the air,
and the cars and people were moving with the subdued hysteria that the French
call élan.”
“A man saves his most bitter hatred for those who have seen him at his
most vulnerable, for those who despise him and for those who
grant him a desperately needed favour.”
“When old men decided to barter young men for pride and profit, the
transaction was called war.”
“A father is a leader and a loner, a sinner and a saint, a man and a boy.
He is blood, he is soul, and he is heart.
A father walks with you to the door of the future,
and knows he can't go with you,
and sets you free.”
“By their needs and by their love [...] these children had created a father.”
‘Whatever path you take, there is a league of bad road,’
said Domingo solemnly. I hoped it was just another proverb.
‘
George asked me when I was feeling low. He asked me at a time when I suddenly wanted to be married. You wouldn't understand; men never feel like that. Men just get married for peace and comfort. They never feel frightened of not being married the way women do sometimes.
’
‘I did her an injustice but sometimes I had the feeling that she would do anything if the price was high enough, for she still had that fundamental insecurity that one bout of poverty can inflict for a lifetime, and no amount of money remedy.
’
"I hate being fond of people, Juliet thought, stirring her
dissolving stock cube with a knife handle, I simply hate it.
I'd much rather loathe them [...]. At least you know where you are, with loathing."
'I feel cast aside,' Laura said. 'Thrown away. Not good enough. Rejected.
"Do I look thirty-eight, Simon thought, or forty-eight? Or seventy-eight? Anyway, what does thirty-eight look like? And does thirty-eight with three children and a mortgage inevitably look quite different from thirty-eight with no commitments and a Porsche?"
"Men were there, it seemed, and then they weren't, and when they weren't, you got on without them."
>
"Almost nobody is happy," Cecily said, "It's rather that
one must devise ways of cheating or eluding unhappiness.
And of course, some people love unhappiness with a passion."
Perhaps all fear is worse than reality, just as all hope is better than fulfilment
She wondered if any sort of moral victory was possible in human affairs or if addressing
and confronting evil only empowered it and produced casualties of a different kind.
"So this Oedipus fellow was a king but he married his mother and blinded hisself
and became a beggar, even though he could figure out riddles and was the brightest fellow around?"
"
Sometimes the heart can sink with a sense of
mortality and loss as abrupt as opening a door
to a shop filled with whirring clocks.
Julia wandered off to investigate the rest of the interior. Was Vera, then, not a virgin? Possibly not, judging by the note of superiority in her tone over the unfortunate Mrs Ruskin. Maybe the dig also constituted some slight revenge on Julia? She imagined Vera rolling robustly naked in a field -- or perhaps on a hillside? -- with one of the comrades. At least Vera would know what sex was like. Salley Vickers, Miss Garnet's Angel
But wasn't it queer that you could get to know a person better when they were dead than when they were alive? Perhaps it was because the dead could not reprove you? It was fear that made one hold back from knowing people. Salley Vickers, Miss Garnet's Angel
But do not make the mistake of believing bad news just for the reason that it is bad. We live in an age, God forgive us, where bad news is supposed to be good. Salley Vickers, Miss Garnet's Angel
Sarah's father had died -- hanging from a rope -- because his daughter had believed a lie: one of those rational-seeming lies which pose as morality because human beings like to think the worst of each other. Salley Vickers, Miss Garnet's Angel
Long ago she had decided that history does not repeat itself; but perhaps when a thing was true it went on returning in different likenesses, borrowing from what went before, finding new ways to declare itself. Salley Vickers, Miss Garnet's Angel
"You've done one thing wrong, Jerry."
"She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions
that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should only love men,
and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything. Yes,
she may have been mad, as she later said, but it was a magnificent folly.
She may have been cruel, but it was cruelty on a heroic scale. How can I
despise the violence of such passion?"
Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he. [...] The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
"A woman in the flower of her prime needs a romantic attachment. It is the knowledge that someone is thinking of you, desires you, longs for the touch of your beautiful body, that keeps the heart young." W.W. Astor to Victoria Sackville-West [Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson]
"What mattered most was that each should trust the other absolutely. 'Trust', in most marriages, means fidelity. In theirs it meant that they would always tell each other of their infidelities, give warning of approaching emotional crises, and whatever happened, return to their common centre in the end." [Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson]
"But death is one flaw that always lands like a fist in the center of the forehead. No matter how many times you see it, or smell its grey rotting odor, or come close to buying it yourself, each time is always like the first. No amount of earlier experience prepares you for it, and after it happens the world is somehow unfairly diminished and bent out of shape."
James Lee Burke
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