“There's a fine line between being practical and being a candyass, which is a word that my father used to describe someone whom he considered to be the opposite of tough. ... Because I'm very afraid of becoming a candyass, I'll sometimes do things that I know to be impractical just so I don't have to worry about being a candyass.”
― quote from American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon
“At once [the buffalo] is a symbol of the tenacity of wilderness and the destruction of wilderness; it's a symbol of Native American culture and the death of Native American culture; it's a symbol of the strength and vitality of America and the pettiness and greed of America; it represents a frontier both forgotten and remembered; it stands for freedom and captivity, extinction and salvation.”
― quote from American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon
“Every schoolboy knows that the Indians used every part of the buffalo, which is true. But they did not use every part of every buffalo.”
― quote from American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon
“I used to be endlessly troubled by meat-eating people who were uneasy with hunters and hunting. ... How can someone suggest that paying for the slaughter of animals is more justifiable than taking the responsibility for one's food into one's own hands? ... Civilization is a mechanism that allows us to avoid the necessary but ugly aspects of life; most of us do not euthanize our own pets, we don't unplug the life support on our own ailing grandparents, we don't repair our own cars, and we don't process our own raw sewage. Instead, the delegations of our less-pleasant responsibilities is so widespread that taking these things on is almost like trying to swim upriver. It's easier not to do them, and those who insist on doing so are bound to look a little odd.”
― quote from American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon
“Indians only needed so many implements and decorations. If a tribe drove three hundred buffalo over a cliff, they wouldn’t feel obligated to make twenty-four hundred buffalo-hoof spoons and six hundred buffalo-horn charcoal carriers. Rather, they might just take the meat and hides from the best-looking female buffalo, those that weren’t too smashed up or buried under other buffalo. That might be all they touched. After all, their time and energy had value, just as ours does.”
― quote from American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon
“Because it seems like a lot of hassle, liking someone. Your brain runs hot, the cogs inside your mind jarring together until all the oil of your thoughts is burned away. The fire spreads to your chest, where it chars your lungs and turns your heart to embers. And right when you think the flames have burned away everything but your skeleton, the spark skips from your bones to immolate not only your flesh, but your entire life.”
― Krystal Sutherland, quote from Our Chemical Hearts
“But quiet shouldn't be mistaken for weak. Sometimes the most steely resolve is asserted silently.”
― Emma Chase, quote from Royally Matched
“I remember this country back when I was growing up. We went to church, we ate family suppers around the table, and it would never even have crossed a kid's mind to tell an adult to fuck off. There was plenty of bad there, I don't forget that, but we all knew exactly where we stood and we didn't break the rules lightly. If that sounds like small stuff to you, if it sounds boring or old-fashioned or uncool, think about this: people smiled at strangers, people said hello to neighbors, people left their doors unlocked and helped old women with their shopping bags, and the murder rate was scraping zero.
Sometime since then, we started turning feral. Wild got into the air like a virus, and it's spreading. Watch the packs of kids roaming inner-city estates, mindless and brakeless as baboons, looking for something or someone to wreck. Watch the businessmen shoving past pregnant women for a seat on the train, using their 4x4s to force smaller cars out of their way, purple-faced and outraged when the world dares to contradict them. Watch the teenagers throw screaming stamping tantrums when, for once, they can't have it the second they want it. Everything that stops us being animals is eroding, washing away like sand, going and gone.”
― Tana French, quote from Broken Harbor
“It`s remarkable the truly stupid things people can do because it`s expected of them, or they think it`s expected of them.”
― K.J. Parker, quote from Devices and Desires
“Ingrid Visser describes the strategy of a particular quartet of dolphin-hunting killer whales off New Zealand (she prefers the name “orca”): The orca are cruising nonchalantly towards a small group of dolphins. The dolphins head away, but not too fast, as they don’t want to draw the attention of the orca just in case they aren’t really hunting. After following for 30 minutes, one female orca, named Stealth, doesn’t surface the next time the others breathe, nor the next, nor for the following 10 minutes. The three remaining orcas take off towards the dolphins at high speed, which is incredibly dramatic as they hurtle through the surface. The dolphins are fleeing for their lives and they know it; they fly out of the water and don’t even seem to touch down before they are off again. The three orca are closing fast. But suddenly one of the front dolphins goes flying as if it was a tennis ball, tumbling through the air as it turns somersaults. Stealth is also hurtling through the air in the follow-through after hitting the dolphin from below. She grabs the dolphin in mid-air, then falls back into the water with it in her jaws. Together, the four orcas devour the meal. Visser adds, “I have never seen them miss.” * * *”
― Carl Safina, quote from Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
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All the Bright Place...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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