“That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.”
“To be is to do - Socrates.
To do is to be - Jean-Paul Satre.
Do be do be do -Frank Sinatra.”
“To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.”
“You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages--they haven't ended yet.”
“egregious.
most people think that word means terrible or unheard of or unforgivable. it has a much more interesting story than that to tell. it means "outside the herd."
imagine that - thousands of people, outside the herd.”
“I concluded that the best thing for me and for those around me was to want nothing, to be enthusiastic about nothing, to be as unmotivated as possible, in fact, so that I would never again hurt anyone.”
“My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die.
There is evil for you.
We cannot get rid of mankind’s fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true.
I give you a holy word: DISARM.”
“If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.”
“I was the great marksman, anyway. If I aimed at nothing, then nothing is what I would hit.”
“the late twentieth century will go down in history, i'm sure, as an era of pharmaceutical buffoonery.”
“I identified a basic mistake my parents had made about life: They thought that it would be very wrong if anybody ever laughed at them.”
“To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of un-differentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed.”
“the actress playing Celia could ask why god had ever put her on earth.
and then the voice from the back of the theater could rumble: "to reproduce. nothing else really interests me. all the rest is frippery.”
“People talk a lot about all the homosexuals there are to see in Greenwich Village, but it was all the neuters that caught my eye that day. These were my people -- as used as I was to wanting love from nowhere, as certain as I was that almost anything desirable was likely to be booby-trapped.”
“To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. I have caught life. I have come down with life.”
“To be is to do’ — Socrates.
‘To do is to be’ — Jean-Paul Sartre.
‘Do be do be do’ — Frank Sinatra.”
“My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die.”
“Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.”
“To all my friends and enemies in the buckeye state. Come on over. There's room for everybody in Shangri-La.”
“Any city in any country, including my own hometown, was to me just another place where I might live or might not live.”
“That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.”
“Adolf Hitler a ajuns cancelar al Germaniei in 1933, pe cand eu aveam de-abia un an. tata, care nu-l mai vazuse din 1914, i-a transmis cele mai calde felicitari si un cadou, pictura lui Hitler in acuarela, Biserica minorita din Viena.
Hitler a fost incantat. avea amintiri placute despre tata, din cate spunea, si l-a invitat in Germania, ca oaspete personal, sa ia seama la noua ordine sociala pe care o construia, sperand ca aceasta va dura vreo mie de ani, daca nu mai mult.
mama, tata si Felix, care avea noua ani pe-atunci, au plecat din Ohio in Germania, pentru 6 luni, in 1934. [..] si imediat ce s-au intors acasa, tata s-a apucat sa-si arboreze cadoul favorit de la Hitler, pe bratul orzontal al morii de vant. era un steag nazist, mare cat un cearceaf. era un lucru misterios, exuberant, si, din cate zicea mama, comunitatea era mandra si in acelasi timp invidioasa pe tata, pe ea si pe Felix. nimeni in Midland City nu intretinuse vreodata relatii de prietenie cu un sef de stat.
pana si eu apar intr-o poza din ziar. una cu toata familia noasta, in strada, in fata atelierului, privind in sus catre steagul nazist. sunt in brate la Mary Hoobler, bucatareasa noastra, care, incetul cu incetul, m-a invatat tot ce stia ea despre mancaruri si prajituri.
pe cand pozam toti in strada pt fotografia din ziar, tata avea 42 de ani. dupa cum spunea mama, in Germania trecuse printr-o profunda transfigurare spirituala. isi redefinise scopurile in viata. nu-i mai era de ajuns sa fie artist. avea de gand sa se faca profesor si activist politic. sa fie purtatorul de cuvant in America al noii ordini ce abia se nastea in Germania, dar care, cu timpul, urma sa devina salvarea lumii.
asta a fost, evident, o greseala.”
“The boat is tied to shore. There aren't any oars in place. She isn't going anywhere. She wears a summer dress and a garden hat. Somebody has persuaded her to pose in the boat, with water around her and dappled with shade. She is laughing. She has just been married, or is about to be married. She will never be happier. She will never be more beautiful.”
“Twenty-fours hours of sleeplessness had made her, in my eyes, anyway, and idealized representation of compassionate, long-suffering women of all ages everywhere.”
“And it's special meaning for me was this: It is proof that sometime back when my father was a young, young man, he must have had a moment or two when he felt that he might have reason to take himself and his life seriously.”
“he was the heir to a fortune earned principally by a quack medicine known as “Saint Elmo’s Remedy.” It was grain alcohol dyed purple, flavored with cloves and sarsaparilla root, and laced with opium and cocaine. As the joke goes: It was absolutely harmless unless discontinued.”
“For some reason, the less you pay for a watch, the surer you can be that it will never stop.”
“It's a widely accepted principle," he says, "that you can claim a piece of land which has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, if only you will repeat this mantra endlessly: 'We discovered it, we discovered it, we discovered it. . . .”
“That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes. ***”
“Jealousy is a very stupid thing. It only leaves the bitterest taste behind-regret.”
“Cuando la gente pregunta cómo nuestros fotográfos hacen las fotos más estupendas del mundo, ellos podrían encogerse de hombros y decir "f/8 y estar allí". Pero estar allí significa mucho.”
“Time flew over me, its black wings spread.”
“Generally, writers descend from a lesser tribe, and whatever claim to beauty we have shows up on the printed page far more often than it does in our mirrors. Even as I writer these words I think of dozens off writers, both male and female, who make a mockery of this generalization. But comeliness among writers is rare enough to be noteworthy.”
“So, there is one thing I wanted to ask you..." he smiles and laughs a little "...what gave you the idea to use yourself as a fire alarm to wake you assignment? Because that, my dear, was brilliant.”
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