“Has all the trappings of a mystery novel, doesn't it?”
“I didn't know what I wanted. Maybe I never had. The emotional distance was never worth the togetherness, and yet I didn't learn. Nothing had changed. Had he reached for me, I would have forgotten to behave sensibly. Desire has no reason, and the need for intimacy had never stopped. I had not conjured up the images in years, his lips on mine, his hands, the urgency of our hunger. Now I was tormented by the memories.”
“A significant portion of the human race has no idea what it is like to be attached to short legs, and I am forever finding myself indignantly pumping along like a handcar in a world of express trains.”
“Desire has no reason, and the need for intimacy had never stopped. I had not conjured up the images in years, his lips on mine, his hands, the urgency of our hunger. Now I was tormented by the memories.”
“The older I got, the more I was of the opinion that love can be experienced in many different ways. There is no right or wrong way to love, only in how it is expressed.”
“You can never be real sure who's all right and who ain't... It's real hard to know these days, that's for damn sure.”
“Most of us feel isolated and paranoid during stressful times. We feel alone in the wilderness.”
“Like every other mortal who has ever been touched by suicide, I had the fallacious belief that I could have done something to stop it.”
“It is hard to leave your iron lung, Dr. Scarpetta.”
“I’m too old for change,” she explained. “I’m too old to pursue good health and new relationships. The past breathes for me. It is my life. You are young, Dr. Scarpetta. Someday you will see what it is like to look back. You will find it inescapable. You will find your personal history drawing you back into familiar rooms where, ironically, events occurred that set into motion your eventual estrangement from life. You will find the hard furniture of heartbreak more comfortable and the people who failed you friendlier with time. You will find yourself running back into the arms of the pain you once ran away from. It is easier. That’s all I can say. It is easier.” “Do”
“i had fired 9-millimeters before and didn't like them. they weren't as accurate as my .38 special. they weren't as safe, and they could jam. i had never been one to substitute quantity for quality, and there was no substitution for being informed and practiced”
“And yet. And yet. If asked - if pressed - Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It's an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone - not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, whose unhappiness seems to have no bounds, whose unhappiness is defined now by what he does not have, which is almost everything. He will always, in his mind, be the salesman who no longer has anything to sell. A man who longs for the open road but who cannot ever take it. Whereas Honora, oddly, now has more purpose than she ever did before. She is a dutiful wife who tends to her husband in spite of his weaknesses. She is a woman with ingenuity. She is a woman without illusions. She is a woman who, above all, is too busy trying to make a go of it to fret about her marriage.”
“In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable about, SNOOTs’ attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives’ attitudes about contemporary culture. We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs’ importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely manhandled and corrupted by supposedly educated people. The Evil is all around us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT’s cheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people’s English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails: We are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else.”
“His gaze turned cold as he faced her. ‘Sure, she’s attractive. A stone wall would be attractive if it looked like that. It’s her attitude I don’t like. There’s more to love than just getting your itches scratched.”
“ذلك أننا لا نعرف ابدا أين يتوقف التأكيد المشروع للهوية وأين يبدأ التطاول على حقوق الآخرين ! ألم أقل منذ قليل أن كلمة هوية, صديق مزيف ؟ فهي تبدأ بالكشف عن تطلع مشروع وتصبح فجأة أداة حرب. إن الانزلاق من جهة الى أخرى غير مُدرَك, كأنه طبيعي, وجميعنا نستسلم له أحيانا. نفضح الظلم, وندافع عن حقوق شعب يعاني, ونجد أنفسنا في الغداة شركاء في مذبحة.”
“Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.”
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