“Loss is like a shrapnel wound, I said, where the piece of metal's got stuck in a place where the surgeons daren't go, so they decide to leave it. It is painful at first, horribly painful, so that you wonder you can live with it. But then the body grows around it, until it doesn't hurt anymore. Not like it used to be. But every now and again there are these twinges when you are not ready for them, and you realize it is still there, and it's always going to be there. It is a part of you. A still, hard point inside.”
― Robert Wilson, quote from A Small Death in Lisbon
“They crossed the Mondego and Dao rivers to Viseu and headed south to Coimbra and Leiria.”
― Robert Wilson, quote from A Small Death in Lisbon
“The chinese character for "strife" is represented by two women under the same roof.”
― Robert Wilson, quote from A Small Death in Lisbon
“The portuguese never put anything behind them except a chair to eat lunch.”
― Robert Wilson, quote from A Small Death in Lisbon
“Eva was a between-the-lines talker. She left the sayable unsaid and said what she meant without saying it.”
― Robert Wilson, quote from A Small Death in Lisbon
“Boldly fruity, but clean and dry. The spice holding from the top to the bottom, as long as an Atlantic cruise.”
― Robert Wilson, quote from A Small Death in Lisbon
Robert Wilson
Born place: in Stamford, The United Kingdom
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“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden & Civil Disobedience
“Everything about me remembers everything about you”
― Kami Garcia, quote from Beautiful Redemption
“I was a bad child. Fortunately, I’ve come a long way since then. Now I’m a bad man.”
― Brent Weeks, quote from The Black Prism
“But if there was a heaven this is what it would have felt like. Touching the aether with my bare hands I could never have anticipated this, not from him.”
― Samantha Shannon, quote from The Bone Season
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Romancing Mister Bri...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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