Quotes from Beat the Reaper

“Ah, youth. It's like heroin you've smoked instead of snorted. Gone so fast you can't believe you still have to pay for it.”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“When God is truly angry, He will not send vengeful angels.

He will send Magdalena.

Then take her away.”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“It's a weird curse, when you think about it. We're built for thought, and civilization, more than any other creature we've found. And all we really want to be is killers. ”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“what a fascinating mix a hospital can be of people in a huge hurry and people too slow to get out of their way.”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“Calling a tongue piecing 'cosmetic' is a bit of a stretch, since you don't get one because it makes you look better. You get one because you're so desperate for affection that you're willing to gruesomely harm yourself to advertise how well you suck dick.”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“If you're going to be soulless, you should at least consider outsourcing your conscience to someone else.”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“So I'm on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some fuckhead tries to mug me!”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“The journey from shame to resentment is the shortest on there is.”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“The fucking beef industry and the fucking HMO industry,' Friendly says. 'Al-Cowda and HMOsama.”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“But rituals turn us all into fucking idiots. Like those birds that sleep with their heads facing backwards because their ancestors slept with their heads under their wings. Plutarch says carrying new wives across thresholds is stupid because we don't remember that it refers to the rape of the Sabine women - and that's fucking Plutarch, two thousand years ago. We still draw the Reaper with a scythe. We should draw him driving a John Deere for Archer Daniels Midland.”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“that look you get after every bone in your face has been broken at least once and then allowed to set without medical attention”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“Deliverance' is The Godfather for crackers.”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“My medical students. Two cups of human misery in short white coats. One is male and the other one female, and they both have names. That's all I can ever remember about them.”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“Llamar "intervención estética" a un piercing en la lengua es un poco elástico, habida cuenta de que no se lo ha hecho para estar más guapa. Se lo ha hecho porque está tan falta de cariño que no duda en causarse un grave perjuicio a sí misma para anunciar lo bien que chupa la polla.”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“So I'm on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some fuckhead tries to mug me! Naturally there's
a gun. He comes up behind me and sticks it into the base of my skull. It’s cold, and it actually feels sort of good, in an acupressure
kind of way. “Take it easy, Doc,” he says.”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“I should say here that being chronically sleep-deprived is so demonstrably similar to being drunk that hospitals often feel like giant, ceaseless office Christmas parties. Except that at a Christmas party the schmuck standing next to you isn't about to fillet your pancreas with something called a “hot knife.”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

“Camino del parque me pregunta Mershawn cómo sabía que el tío tenía enfisema, y le enumero los síntomas visibles que mostraba. Luego le digo:
- Lección de hoy, Mershawn. ¿Quiénes silban?
- ¿Los gilipollas?
- Vale. ¿Quién más?
Mershawn reflexiona un instante.
- La genet que está pensando en algo y que, de manera subliminal, lo asocia a una canción. Como cuando examinas un nervio del undécimo par craneal y empiezas a silbar "Mantén la cabeza erguida".
- Bien - apruebo -. Pero mucha gente también silba porque subconscientemente intenta incrementar la presión de aire en los pulmones, para hacer que pase más oxígeno entre los tejidos.
- No joda.
- Sin joder. ¿Te acuerdas de los enanitos de Blancanieves, que trabajan en la mina?
- Sí, vale.
- Si tienes silicosis, también te dejas el culo silbando.
- La hostia.
- Eso.
Hasta llegar a la esquina me siento como el Profesor Marmoset.”
― Josh Bazell, quote from Beat the Reaper

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“As the virtual world of electronic communication becomes the world many of us inhabit all the time, in turning to imaginative literature we may not be seeking mere reassurance nor be impelled by mere nostalgia. To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world. In one of T. S. Eliot’s poems a bird sings, “Mankind cannot bear very much reality.” I’ve always thought that bird was mistaken, or was talking only about some people. I find it amazing how much of the real world most of us can endure. Not only endure, but need, desire, crave. Reality is life. Where we suffocate is in the half-life of unreality, untruth, imitation, fakery, the almost-true that is not true. To be human is to live both within and beyond the narrow band of what-happens-now, in the vast regions of the past and the possible, the known and the imagined: our real world, our true Now.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from Tales from Earthsea

“Batman doesn't have to put up with this shit--why should we?”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Be a Woman

“And no matter how much the gray people in power despise knowledge, they can’t do anything about historical objectivity; they can slow it down, but they can’t stop it. Despising and fearing knowledge, they will nonetheless inevitably decide to promote it in order to survive. Sooner or later they will be forced to allow universities and scientific societies, to create research centers, observatories, and laboratories, and thus to create a cadre of people of thought and knowledge: people who are completely beyond their control, people with a completely different psychology and with completely different needs. And these people cannot exist and certainly cannot function in the former atmosphere of low self-interest, banal preoccupations, dull self-satisfaction, and purely carnal needs. They need a new atmosphere— an atmosphere of comprehensive and inclusive learning, permeated with creative tension; they need writers, artists, composers— and the gray people in power are forced to make this concession too. The obstinate ones will be swept aside by their more cunning opponents in the struggle for power, but those who make this concession are, inevitably and paradoxically, digging their own graves against their will. For fatal to the ignorant egoists and fanatics is the growth of a full range of culture in the people— from research in the natural sciences to the ability to marvel at great music. And then comes the associated process of the broad intellectualization of society: an era in which grayness fights its last battles with a brutality that takes humanity back to the middle ages, loses these battles, and forever disappears as an actual force.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, quote from Hard to Be a God

“sleep on things for a night” before acting rash.”
― Tina Reber, quote from Love Unrehearsed

“Umm, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't you suppose to be dead? Currently being chased by two Cabals? You're waltzing around Vancouver, eating in restaurants?" (Ash)
"Hell no," Corey said. "I never waltz. I do the fox-trot sometimes though.”
― Kelley Armstrong, quote from The Rising

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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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