“Hu’s heart clanged like fifteen buckets in a single well.”
― Shi Nai'an, quote from Outlaws of the Marsh
“When I tell you you’ll fart and pee in your pants with terror.”
― Shi Nai'an, quote from Outlaws of the Marsh
“The old woman’s face was wreathed in smiles.”
― Shi Nai'an, quote from Outlaws of the Marsh
“Truly, flowers open, only to be blown down by the wind.”
― Shi Nai'an, quote from Outlaws of the Marsh
“Li Gui called out, "Sir, if you kill me you will kill two persons."
"How do you make that out?" asked Li Kui, staying the blow.
"At home I support my mother who is ninety years of age, and this is my only means of helping her in her old age," said Li Gui. "I never injure people, but only make them afraid. If you kill me, my old mother will die of starvation."
Li Kui who never twinkled his eyes in chopping off people's heads, paused and thought when he heard this. "Here am I trying to succour my old mother, and yet killing a man who supports his old mother. Heaven will not allow me to live if I do this. No! No! I will forgive this man.
(J.H. Jackson translation)”
― Shi Nai'an, quote from Outlaws of the Marsh
Shi Nai'an
Born place: Suzhou, China
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“Wait!” Juliet pulls away from her father, and once again, she’s breathless and looking up at me. “Declan.”
I hold myself at a distance. The spell is broken. “Juliet.”
She closes that distance, though, and then does one better. She grabs the front of my shirt and pulls me forward. For half a second, my brain explodes because I think we’re going to have a movie moment and she’s going to kiss me. And then it’s going to be super awkward because of her father.
But no, she’s only pulling me close to whisper. Her breath is warm on my cheek, sweet and perfect.
“We were wrong,” she says. “You make your own path.”
Then she spins, grabs her father’s hand, and leaves me there in the middle of the cemetery.”
― Brigid Kemmerer, quote from Letters to the Lost
“If you start by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work towards getting it.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Alkimist
“In one sense, (Duchamp's) “The Large Glass” is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.”
― Robert Hughes, quote from The Shock of the New
“When a prominent Puritan named (all too appropriately, it would seem) John Stubbs criticized the queen’s mooted marriage to a French Catholic, the Duke of Alençon, his right hand was cut off.*”
― Bill Bryson, quote from Shakespeare: The World as Stage
“asked if you had a hand in this,’ she began a moment later. ‘But I think there was no need. It’s obvious you had a hand in it. It’s obvious you are his friend. And if someone has friends, and he loses everything in spite of that, it’s obvious the friends are to blame. For what they did, or for what they didn’t do.’ ‘What could I have done?”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, quote from Time of Contempt
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