Margaret MacMillan · 570 pages
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“The delegates to the peace conference after World War I "tried to impose a rational order on an irrational world.”
― Margaret MacMillan, quote from Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
“The glories of the past compensated for the imperfections of the present.”
― Margaret MacMillan, quote from Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
“In the fluid world of 1919, it was possible to dream of great change, or have nightmares about the collapse of order.”
― Margaret MacMillan, quote from Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
“Wilson agreed reluctantly to their attempts: “I don’t much like to make a compromise with people who aren’t reasonable. They will always believe that, by persisting in their claims, they will be able to obtain more.”
― Margaret MacMillan, quote from Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
“There are only two perfectly useless things in the world,” he quipped. “One is an appendix and the other is Poincaré!”
― Margaret MacMillan, quote from Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
“I will no longer allow anyone to manipulate my mind and control my life in the name of love.”
― Miguel Ruiz, quote from The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
“I'm an old man, and she's gone now. So don't worry, okay?”
― Rebecca Stead, quote from When You Reach Me
“(...) Le tiré de la camisa, queriendo besa su piel.
Él se apartó y se irguió.
-¿En la sala de guerra, amor? ¿Y si entra alguien?
Yo me puse en pie y le quité la camisa.
-Entonces tendrán una historia muy buena que contar.
-¿Una historia muy buena? - dijo él, y fingió que se ofendía.
-Demuéstrame lo contrario.
A él se le iluminaron los ojos con el desafío.”
― Maria V. Snyder, quote from Fire Study
“You aren't a bit romantic, are you?" he asked, amused.
She sat back and stared at him. She was beginning to think that Neal required a keeper. He seemed to have the craziest ideas. "Romance? Isn't that love stuff?" She asked finally.
"It's more than just love. It's color, and-and fire. You don't want things magnificent and filled with-with grandeur," he said, trying to make her understand. "You know, drama. Importance. Transcendent Passion."
"I just want to be a knight," Kel retorted, putting her used tableware on her tray. "Eat your vegetables. They're good for you.”
― Tamora Pierce, quote from First Test
“All at once he found his mind drawing a parallel between that destiny and his own existence; all at once questions of life arose before his vision, like owls in an ancient ruin flushed from sleep by a stray ray of sunlight. Somehow he felt pained and grieved at his arrested development, at the check which had taken place in his moral growth, at the weight which appeared to be pressing upon his every faculty. Also gnawing at his heart there was a sense of envy that others should be living a life so full and free, while all the time the narrow, pitiful little pathway of his own existence was being blocked by a great boulder. And in his hesitating soul there arose a torturing consciousness that many sides of his nature had never yet been stirred, that others had never even been touched, and that not one of them had attained complete formation. Yet with this there went an aching suspicion that, buried in his being, as in a tomb, there still remained a moribund element of sweetness and light, and that it was an element which, though hidden in his personality, as a nugget lies lurking in the bowels of the earth, might once have become minted into sterling coin. But the treasure was now overlaid with rubbish--was now thickly littered over with dust. 'Twas as though some one had stolen from him, and besmirched, the store of gifts with which life and the world had dowered him; so that always he would be prevented from entering life's field and sailing across it with the aid of intellect and of will.
Yes, at the very start a secret enemy had laid a heavy hand upon him and diverted him from the road of human destiny. And now he seemed to be powerless to leave the swamps and wilds in favour of that road.
All around him was a forest, and ever the recesses of his soul were growing dimmer and darker, and the path more and more tangled, while the consciousness of his condition kept awaking within him less and
less frequently--to arouse only for a fleeting moment his slumbering faculties. Brain and volition alike had become paralysed, and, to all appearances, irrevocably--the events of his life had become whittled
down to microscopical proportions. Yet even with them he was powerless to cope--he was powerless to pass from one of them to another. Consequently they bandied him to and fro like the waves of the ocean. Never was he able to oppose to any event elasticity of will; never was he able to conceive, as the result of any event, a reasoned-out impulse. Yet to confess this, even to himself, always cost him a bitter pang: his fruitless regrets for lost opportunities, coupled with burning reproaches of conscience, always pricked him like needles, and led him to strive to put away such reproaches and to discover a scapegoat.”
― Ivan Goncharov, quote from Oblomov
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