“When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.”
“We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.”
“In our age, self-indulgence and self-destruction, rather than self-sacrifice, are the foundations for new heroic myths.”
“You can't fix things with a hug, but you can't make them any worse either.”
“Always, beneath every apparent chaos, order waits to be revealed.”
“... one of those librarians who rules the stacks with an intimidating scowl, whispers quiet sharply enough to lacerate the tender inner tissues of the ear, and will pursue an overdue-book fine with the ferocity of a rabid ferret.”
“How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.”
“...,we wasn't born to be all the time scared, we was born happy,”
“But of course we don't notice the descent until we're rocketing along at high velocity.”
“The world is beautiful and glorious. Humanity can be mean, and turn away from what's good.”
“Dogs invite us not only to share their joy but also to live in the moment, where we are neither proceeding from nor moving toward, where the enchantment of the past and future cannot distract us, where a freedom from practical desire and a cessation of our usual ceaseless action allows us to recognize the truth of our existence, the reality of our world and purpose-if we dare.”
“If we were capable of thinking of everything, we would still be living in Eden, rent-free with all-you-can-eat buffets and infinitely better daytime TV programming.”
“The only thing I know for sure is how much I do not know.”
“In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invisible, we have a daily darkness that is night, and we encounter another darkness from time to time that is death, the deaths of those we love, but the third and most constant darkness is with us everyday, at all hours of every day, is the darkness of the mind, the pettiness and meanness and hatred, which we have invited into ourselves, and which we pay out with generous interest.”
“That is the best of all things we can do for one another: Make the dark small.”
“Some will accuse me of being judgmental. Thank you. And proud of it. You wreck a kid's life, I have no pity for you.”
“These days law thinks it's about nothin' but laws. Law don't remember it was once handed down from somewhere, that it once meant not just no, but was a way to live and a reason to live that way. Law now thinks nobody but politicians made it or remake it, so maybe it ain't a surprise some people don't care anymore about law, and even some lawmen don't understand the real reason for law.”
“How passionately we love everything that cannot last...”
“These days, all I ask of Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another...Most good people have a sense of humor. The problem is finding smile-inducing evil people, because the evil are mostly humorless.”
“...in a world where McDonald's now sells salads with low-fat dressing, anything is possible.”
“When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.
We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it presents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it?
Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.”
“Boo fell in at my side. He is the only ghost dog I have ever seen. Animals always move on. For some reason he had lingered more than a year at the abbey. Perhaps waiting for me.”
“I stopped keeping an eye out for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve because, when I was five, my mother told me that Santa was a wicked pervert who would cut off my peepee with a pair of scissors...if I didn't stop chattering about him, he would be certain to put me on his list and look me up.
Christmas was never the same after that, but at least I still have my peepee.”
“Nothing is one hundred percent reliable this side of paradise, except that your cell-phone provider will never fulfill the service promises that you were naïve enough to believe.”
“With lead he shaded love into the woman's eyes.”
“Wealth is power, and power is the only thing about which contemporary culture cares.”
“The only way back is the way forward.”
“Ozzie Boone...insists that I keep the tone light in these biographical manuscripts. He believes that pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative. Ozzie counsels me that melancholy is a self-indulgent form of sorrow.
By writing in an unrelievedly dark mode, he warns, the writer risks culturing darkness in his heart, becoming the very thing that he decries.”
“When making his music, he [Elvis Presley] had been the essence of cool, but in his movies he was often a self-parody embarrassing to watch. Colonel Parker, his manager, who had picked movie scrips for him, had served Elvis less well than the monk Rasputin had served Czar Nicholas and Alexandra.”
“Money and beauty are defenses against the sorrows of this world but neither can undo the past. Only time will conquer time. The way forward is the only way back to innocence and to peace.”
“Vice-President Aaron Burr was full of plots and schemes and conspiracies to break the west loose from the United States and form a new nation. Jefferson”
“And, like all the others, I have been manipulated to suit Ted’s needs. I don’t feel particularly embarrassed or resentful about that. I was one of many, all of us intelligent, compassionate people who had no real comprehension of what possessed him, what drove him obsessively.”
“True allegiance is only given willingly.”
“Oh yeah, and Spader was hanging out with a penguin"
-Bobby Pendragon”
“Sometimes you meet someone and you know that your life will be different from then on.”
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