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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #s
I am still in the thrall of one insatiable desire, which hitherto I have been neither able nor willing to check-I cannot get enough books! Books indeed have a special charm. Gold, silver, gems, splendid clothing, a house of marble, beautiful paintings-things such as these give but a superficial pleasure. But books delight us through and through-they talk with us, then give us good counsel, they enter into a living and intimate companionship with us." (1346) ↗
God in His infinite wisdom blessed humans with redundant tongues: one to outfit the mouth for speech. And a mother tongue to give it meaning... Though it wags out such inconceivable beauty, attached to the mother tongue lies one much maligned woman. ↗
The Duke has decreed that the Castle is not cold." The gentleman's lips are almost blue from this lack of cold. "And the Duke is right and correct in this as in all things." ...some very beautiful tapestries line the walls, but many of them are also full of holes. Perhaps the Duke has decreed that there are no moths, either. ↗
American houses...' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean? ↗
Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.” The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up- mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back. A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like paths of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched shadowless figures of ghosts. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life. ↗
Is this the truth we knew, and then forgot? Maybe the lies are all that we've got But aren't they beautiful? ↗
