Michael Dorris · 372 pages
Rating: (15.7K votes)
“Don't ask so many questions and they will all be answered.”
― Michael Dorris, quote from A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
“How long does it last?" Said the other customer, a man wearing a tan shirt with little straps that buttoned on top of the shoulders. He looked as if he were comparing all the pros and cons before shelling out $.99. You could see he thought he was pretty shrewd.
"It lasts for as long as you live," the manager said slowly. There was a second of silence while we all thought about that. The man in the tan shirt drew his head back, tucking his chin into his neck. His mind was working like a house on fire
"What about other people?" He asked. "The wife? The kids?"
"They can use your membership as long as you're alive," the manager said, making the distinction clear.
"Then what?" The man asked, louder. He was the type who said things like "you get what you pay for" and "there's one born every minute" and was considering every angle. He didn't want to get taken for a ride by his own death.
"That's all," the manager said, waving his hands, palms down, like a football referee ruling an extra point no good. "Then they'd have to join for themselves or forfeit the privileges."
"Well then, it makes sense," the man said, on top of the situation now, "for the youngest one to join. The one that's likely to live the longest."
"I can't argue with that," said the manager.
The man chewed his lip while he mentally reviewed his family. Who would go first. Who would survive the longest. He cast his eyes around to all the cassettes as if he'd see one that would answer his question. The woman had not gone away. She had brought along her signed agreement, the one that she paid $25 for.
"What is this accident waiver clause?" She asked the manager.
"Look," he said, now exhibiting his hands to show they were empty, nothing up his sleeve, "I live in the real world. I'm a small businessman, right? I have to protect my investment, don't I? What would happen if, and I'm not suggesting you'd do this, all right, but some people might, what would happen if you decided to watch one of my movies in the bathtub and a VCR you rented from me fell into the water?"
The woman retreated a step. This thought had clearly not occurred to her before.”
― Michael Dorris, quote from A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
“These boots were made for dancing"(260)”
― Michael Dorris, quote from A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
“I'm not what they expect. About once a year I get discovered, get called a diamond in the rough.”
― Michael Dorris, quote from A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
“She'd have the two of them eating out of her shoe. I've watched her in action, but I could never get away with it. And, I console myself, being cute hasn't made her all that happy.”
― Michael Dorris, quote from A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
“Skeptics,” he said, “suffer from the skeptics’ disease—
the problem of being right too often.”
― Scott Adams, quote from God's Debris: A Thought Experiment
“We have an idea of what is right or wrong. And we can debate moral issues as ideas. But moral *standards* are not ideas; they exist in the form of observable measurable behavior. What one sees, hears, and feels every day, by observing how people around one behave, inculcates such standards of behavior.”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“Così sentivo diventare comprensibile per me la strana ostinazione di quel cuore casto, che si chiudeva per un certo tempo, opponendo al proprio desiderio di sfogarsi la maggior rigidezza, fino al momento dell'inevitabile slancio in cui tutto l'essere si concede, fino alla dimenticanza di se stesso, a questo umano bisogno d'affetto, di espansione, di carezza e di lacrime...”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Insulted and Humiliated
“Men are boys in bigger packages.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from The Next Always
“Ah, clever clogs, but it will have happened in one of my alternative lives. You know--the lives hot-shot scientists tell us we are living at the same time as this one we know about. Which being so, how do you know that what happens in one of your alternative lives doesn't sometimes leak through into your consciousness in this life, and make you sad that you aren't living that particular alternative life instead of this one? Don't you sometimes feel depressed for no reason you can think of? I do. And maybe that's why. We've had a leak from an alternative life and want that life now. Like wanting an ice cream when you were little, which you knew was in the freezer, but your mom wouldn't let you have it.”
― Aidan Chambers, quote from Postcards from No Man's Land
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