“(...) ¿qué era el tiempo si nadie podía medirlo, si nada podía acusar su paso? El tiempo solo se mostraba en las hojas secas, en las heridas que cicatrizaban, en la carcoma que devoraba, en el óxido que se extendía, y en los corazones que se cansaban. Si nadie estaba allí para señalarlo, el tiempo no era nada, absolutamente nada.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“He had learned from experience that what he succeeded in putting down on paper was only ever a pale reflection of what he had imagined, and so he had come to accept that this would only be half as good as the original, half as acceptable as the flawless, unachievable novel that had acted as a guide, and which he imagined pulsating mockingly behind each book like some ghostly presence.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“Striving to achieve a dream is never a waste of time.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“Before cruelly vilifying them from a great height, the mudslingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavors were by and large a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavor, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“Merrick belonged to that class of reader who was able to forget with amazing ease the hand moving the characters behind the scenes of the novel.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“If Wells recognized any merit in [Henry] James, it was his undeniable talent for using very long sentences in order to say nothing at all. p. 516”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“[A] writer’s most powerful weapon, his true strength, was his intuition, and regardless of whether he had any talent, if the critics combined to discredit an author’s nose for things, he would be reduced to a fearful creature who took a mistakenly guarded, absurdly cautious approach to his work, which would end up stifling his latent genius.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“Time could only be seen in the falling leaves, a wound that healed, a woodworm's tunneling, rust that spread, and hearts that grew weary. Without anyone to discern it, time was nothing, nothing at all.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“(...) el tiempo nunca se pierde tratando de conseguir un sueño.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“And now that Wells had heard him laugh, he wondered whether the so-called Elephant Man had not in fact been smiling at him from the moment he stepped into the room, a warm, friendly smile intended to sooth the discomfort his appearance produced in his guests, a smile no one would ever see.
As he left the room, he felt a tear roll down his cheek.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“...the wrath of God pales beside that of man.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“We are the authors of our own fate-we write it each day with every one of our actions.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“Why had his mother gone to the trouble of bringing him into the world if the most exciting moment in his life was having been made lame by a bayonet?”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“Time is a river sweeping away all that is born towards the darkest shore.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“Sometimes the best way to find out what we want is to choose what we do not want.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“¿Se han preguntado alguna vez qué es lo que convierte en responsables a los hombres? Yo se lo diré: que solo tienen una oportunidad de hacer cada cosa. Si existieran máquinas que nos permitieran corregir hasta nuestros errores más estúpidos viviríamos en un mundo lleno de irresponsables.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“It is a question of will, Mr. Wells," he said, striving to imbue his slurred voice with a tone of authority. "That's all.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“Intelligence could not thrive where there was no change and no necessity for change.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“Ultimately it was man's limited senses which established the boundaries of the world.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“...but there are stories that cannot begin at their beginning, and perhaps this is one of them.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“From then on, he was convinced that the universe dazzled mankind with volcanic eruptions, but had its own secret way of communicating with the select few, people like Andrew who looked at reality as though it were a strip of wallpaper covering up something else.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“Hinter jeder Erfindung steckt die Anstrengung eines Menschen, ein der Lösung eines Problems geweihtes Leben, um einen Mechanismus zu erfinden, der den Menschen überlebt und dann zu der Welt gehört, die ohne ihn weitergeht. Solange es Menschen gibt, die sich nicht damit begnügen, die Früchte der Bäume zu verzehren oder Trommeln zu schlagen, damit es regnet, die sich entschließen, ihre Intelligenz zu nutzen, um über die Rolle eines Parasiten im Garten Gottes hinauszuwachsen, so lange wird die Wissenschaft nicht sterben.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“...for what was time if there was no one to measure it, if there was nothing to experience its passing? Time cold only be seen in the falling leaves, a wound that healed, a woodworm's tunneling, rust that spread, and hearts that grew weary. Without anyone to discern it, time was nothing, nothing at all.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“Mientras haya hombres que no se contenten con comer las frutas de los árboles o con aporrear tambores suplicando lluvia, y decidan usar su inteligencia para rebasar el papel de meros parásitos de la obra de Dios, la ciencia nunca sucumbirá.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“Wealth brings poverty in its wake, thought Andrew,”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“Somehow this literary genre, which most people condemned, acted as a sort of counterbalance to Charles's soul; it was the ballast that prevented him from lurching into the serious or melancholy, unlike Andrew, who had been unable to adopt his cousin's casual attitude to life, and to whom everything seemed so achingly profound, imbed with that absurd solemnity that the transience of of existence conferred upon even the smallest act.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“It was the gaze of a person who yearns for something and refuses to believe it will never be hers, because hope is the only thing she has left.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“The answer was obvious: the passage of time, which transformed the volatile present into that finished, unalterable painting called the past, a canvas man always executed blindly, with erratic brushstrokes that only made sense when one stepped far enough away from it to be able to admire it as a whole.”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of Time
“Music makes me forget myself, my real position; it transports me to some other position not my own. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what I cannot do. I explain it by the fact that music acts like yawning, like laughter: I am not sleepy, but I yawn when I see someone yawning; there is nothing for me to laugh at, but I laugh when I hear people laughing.
Music carries me immediately and directly into the mental condition in which the man was who composed it. My soul merges with his and together with him I pass from one condition into another, but why this happens I don't know.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from The Kreutzer Sonata
“To me...she was spring. It was as if while imprisoned inside the dark cage of the inner family...I had completely frozen into snow...and then there she was--fresh, clear spring. It was almost inevitable that..I would fall in love with her. -Hatori”
― Natsuki Takaya, quote from Fruits Basket, Vol. 2
“For example, she did not mind at all if Christendom should be done for, stove in, kaput, screwed up once and all. She did not mind that the Christers were like everybody else, if not worse.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman
“I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale."
George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot . . .
PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! . . .
So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.
They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reasons that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from A Man Without a Country
“And yet. And yet. If asked - if pressed - Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It's an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone - not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, whose unhappiness seems to have no bounds, whose unhappiness is defined now by what he does not have, which is almost everything. He will always, in his mind, be the salesman who no longer has anything to sell. A man who longs for the open road but who cannot ever take it. Whereas Honora, oddly, now has more purpose than she ever did before. She is a dutiful wife who tends to her husband in spite of his weaknesses. She is a woman with ingenuity. She is a woman without illusions. She is a woman who, above all, is too busy trying to make a go of it to fret about her marriage.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass
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