637 quotes found
“A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the rui...”
“for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, the idea of argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, phil...”
“But damn if there isn't anything sexier than a slender boy with a handgun, a fast car, a bottle of pills.”
“Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here's the desire to put it inside us, and then the question behind every question: What happens next?”
“Men cannot give a meaning to history that they themselves lack, nor can they honor a past which indicts them for their present failures.”
“If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?" Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Triv...”
“There is no bitterness like that of man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost.”
“Our group takes what I'll call a Post-Atheist stance. Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enoug...”
“Youre going to have to do better than that if you want to get into my metaphysical pants.”
“There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me”
“Ibn Rushd caressing her body had often praised its beauty to the point at which she grew irritated and said, You do not think my thoughts worth praising, then. He replied that the mind and body wer...”
“Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, an...”
“If he believed in souls he would have said she had a good one.”
“Yes, and words are not deeds, Solanka allowed, moving off fretfully. Though words can become deeds. If said in the right place and at the right time, they can move mountains and change the world. A...”
“As if he conveyed by actions what he could never say in words. Would never say in words.”
“He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence, that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the ...”
“The music is all around us, all you have to do is listen.”
“Children get food shelter pocket money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born. 'There are no st...”
“Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rag...”
“As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written...”
