“A little style is a good thing, but you can’t trust a person who won’t be ugly in front of you.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“No matter where you go, poor people have the capacity to endure. Some people even compliment us on it, as if endurance is all we can achieve.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“Some people act like it’s a sign of weakness if you want to belong, but I think most human beings yearn to find at least one open door in their lifetime.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“Empathy is what separates human beings from teenage boys.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“The poor aren't defeated. We're domesticated.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“Oppression doesn’t make people noble. Give any of us a little comfort, and we’ll kill to keep it. The despised become despicable.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“It’s easier to hold onto a bad idea if you never share it, and it’s harder to defend one if you let it out.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“The ancient Egyptians believed the god Anubis met each of us on the other side, and that he stood before a great scale on which our hearts were set. There each was weighed, tested, for its worth.
Was this the heart I wanted measured?”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“There are people who say life is dull. Just a series of mundane events. But I can’t agree. Things happen. Bet on that.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“Don’t focus on the mishaps; consider the pleasures instead.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“I don’t have much faith in institutions, but I still believe in people.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“Before September 11, the skinny, jittery black guy made security think one thing: drug mule. But after the attacks, security only cared about bombs. So it was the Arab guys, the Puerto Ricans and Indians, even white men, that got searched. I was too dark to make people worry on a plane. Still caused fear in elevators.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“I’m always looking for the monster. Not even just in horror. I want them in everything. Just give me the monsters. Logical conclusions don’t satisfy. Monsters satisfy, absolutely.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“The success of any society must be judged by the life of its worst off. No other calculation will do.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“The shame wasn't in discovering that she had a price; everyone had one of those. Maybe it was just in learning, so concretely, that this was what she cost.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“Time alone is pornography for people with families.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“Human beings are no damn good,” he said. “We are even worse than animals. We like ...”
He trailed off, cleared his throat, but his voice hardly reached a whisper.
“We like monsters,” he said.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“I don’t know what to say about the hygiene of the male species.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“Fuck the meek. The despised will inherit the earth!”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“People hear that you grew up religious, and they can’t imagine you’d have a complex relationship with faith. If you believe one part, you must believe it all. But who gets more chances to see the absurdities than the devout? An answer that’s satisfying on Sunday becomes contradictory by Wednesday night. Belief is a wrestling match that lasts a lifetime.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“A little style is a good thing, but you can't trust someone who won't be ugly in front of you.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“This was one benefit of being a grown man and not a kid: I wanted to impress this woman, but not to the point of getting myself killed.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“Seeing America by bus is like touring the Louvre in a Porta Potti.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“And you can fool yourself if you’re raised in New York. Think that somehow your birthplace alone makes you cosmopolitan. But it isn’t true. We’re rubes too.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“Think of King Jesus as our greatest doubter. Who saw the order of society and taught us to defy it. Who saw the ugly urges in ourselves and taught us to resist them. As we navigate through the powerful tides, doubt is our rudder.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“It’s frightening to step into a place and understand you’re a victim. I’m not talking about a bad feeling or a vague sense. I mean knowing. A quick fire runs through your heart and limbs. You go stiff because you’re aware something’s about to happen, but you can’t think clearly enough to escape.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“The poor aren’t defeated, we’re domesticated.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
“It's hard to fake faith, in yourself or anything else.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine
Victor LaValle
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“The morning was hot, and the exercise of reading left her mind contracting and expanding like the main-spring of a clock, and the small noises of midday, which one can ascribe to no definite cause, in a regular rhythm. It was all very real, very big, very impersonal, and after a moment or two she began to raise her first finger and to let it fall on the arm of her chair so as to bring back to herself some consciousness of her own existence. She was next overcome by the unspeakable queerness of the fact that she should be sitting in an arm-chair, in the morning, in the middle of the world. Who were the people moving in the house--moving things from one place to another? And life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing, as in time she would vanish, though the furniture in the room would remain. Her dissolution became so complete that she could not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly still, listening and looking always at the same spot. It became stranger and stranger. She was overcome with awe that things should exist at all. . . She forgot that she had any fingers to raise. . . The things that existed were so immense and so desolate. . . She continued to be conscious of these vast masses of substance for a long stretch of time, the clock still ticking in the midst of the universal silence.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Voyage Out
“So ignorance increases ignorance, and knowledge”
― Stephen R. Donaldson, quote from The Illearth War
“We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
“You get an astronaut's life whether you want it or not. Leave it all behind for a world you know nothing about. That's just the deal.”
― Joe Hill, quote from 20th Century Ghosts
“Spațiile lui Riemann sunt lipsite de orice fel de omogenitate. Fiecare dintre ele se caracterizează prin forma expresiei care definește pătratul distanței dintre două puncte infinit învecinate. ... Rezultă de aici că doi observatori aflați învecinați pot să repereze într-un spațiu riemannian punctele care se află în imediata lor vecinătate, dar nu pot, fără stabilirea unei noi convenții, să se repereze unul față de celălalt. Fiecare vecinătate este deci ca o mică bucată de spațiu euclidian, dar racordarea dintre o vecinătate și următoarea nu e definită și poate fi făcută într-o infinitate de moduri. Spațiul riemannian cel mai general se prezintă, astfel, ca o colecție amorfă de bucăți juxtapuse fără a fi legate’ (Albert Lautmann, Les schèmas de structure, Hermann, 1938, pp.23, 34-35); această mulțime poate fi definită independent de orice referire la o metrică, prin condiții de frecvență sau, mai curând, de acumulare valabile pentru un ansamblu de vecinătăți, condiții total diferite de cele care determină spațiile metrice și tăieturile lor (chiar dacă un raport între cele două feluri de spațiu trebuie să decurgă de aici). Pe scurt, dacă urmăm frumoasa descriere a lui Lautmann, spațiul riemannian este un pur patchwork. Are conexiuni sau raporturi tactile. Are valori ritmice care nu se regăsesc în altă parte, chiar dacă pot fi traduse într-un spațiu metric. Eterogen, în variație continuă, este un spațiu neted, în măsura în care este amorf, nu omogen. (Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari)”
― Gilles Deleuze, quote from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
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Dark VisionsBookQuoters 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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