“I am not shy about admitting my modest talents. For example, I am happy to admit that I am better than average at clever remarks, and I also have a flair for getting people to like me. But to be perfectly fair to myself, I am ever-ready to confess my shortcomings, too, and a quick round of soul-searching forced me to admit that I had never been any good at all at breathing water. As I hung there from the seat belt, dazed and watching the water pour in and swirl around my head, this began to seem like a very large character flaw.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“I often find myself in situations where it seems to me like everyone else has read the instruction book”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“A man who discovers his pants are on fire tends to have very little time to worry about somebody else's box of matches”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“What to wear? I could think of no guidelines on what we were wearing this season to a party forced on you to celebrate an unwanted engagement that might turn into a violent confrontation with a vengeful maniac. Clearly brown shoes were out, but beyond that nothing really seemed de rigueur.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“I know family comes first, but shouldn't that mean after breakfast?”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“you can’t use logic on human behavior.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“I had become a perfect fake human, saying the stupid and pointless things that humans say to each other all day long.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“Since I am not actually a real human being, my emotional responses are generally limited to what I have learned to fake.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“The key to a happy life is to have accomplishments to be proud of and purpose to look forward to, and at the moment I had both. How wonderful it was to be me.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“Of course, having information to use is one thing. Knowing what it means and how to use it is a different
story.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“It's terrible to have to depend on someone else.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“I mean, really: what kind of person could possibly dislike me?”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“We can't always do what we think we have to do. So when there's nothing else you can do, you wait... No matter what... pressure... you might feel.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“It’s always me, isn’t it? I’m not really a very nice person, but for some reason it’s always me that they come to with their problems.Oh, Dexter, a savage inhuman monster has taken my boyfriend! Well damn it, I’m a savage inhuman monster, too—didn’t that entitle me to some rest?”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“It's an odd term, girlfriend, particuarly for grown persons. And in practice an even odder concept. Generally speaking, in adults it described a woman, not a girl, who was willing to provide sex, not friendship. In fact, from what I had observed it was quite possible for one to actively dislike one's girlfriend, although of course true hatred is reserved for marriage.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“I was never more alive than when the Dark Passenger was driving.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“Of course it was a terrible thing, and the world would be a much better place without someone in it who could do that, but did that mean we had to miss lunch?”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“It revealed a cruelty that really made one wonder if the universe was such a good idea after all.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“It's that moon again, slung so fat and low in the tropical night, calling out across a curdled sky and into the quivering ears of that dear old voice in the shadows, the Dark Passenger, nestled snug in the backseat of the Dodge K-car of Dexter's hypothetical soul.
That rascal moon, that loudmouthed leering Lucifer, calling down across the empty sky to the dark hearts of the night monsters below, calling them away to their joyful playgrounds.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“And once again I found myself wondering, as I drifted off to stunned and unbelieving sleep:How do these terrible things always happen to me?”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“What do you want a clock for?” “To find out what time it is,” I said. “I think that’s the usual purpose.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“It's always me, isn't it? I'm not really a very nice person, but for some reason it's always me that they come to with their problems.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“It really is better to be lucky than to be good.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“What a terrible thing life can be.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“When faced with people who have very limited conversational skills and no apparent desire to cultivate any it's always easier to simply go along.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“…a cheerful black shadow reared up behind him as he spoke, thundering a happy challenge to my Dark Passenger, which slid forward and bellowed back.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“the faster it ran away from me. And I found myself reasoning that perhaps one more beer would unlock the doors of perception,”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“Still, it's always nice to be around somebody who thinks I am wonderful. It confirms my low opinion of people.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
“It’s an odd term, 'girlfriend,' particularly for grown persons. And in practice it provides an even odder concept. Generally speaking, in adults it described a woman, not a girl, who was willing to provide sex, not friendship. In fact, from what I had observed it was quite possible for one to actively dislike one’s girlfriend, although of course true hatred is reserved for marriage.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dearly Devoted Dexter
Jeff Lindsay
Born place: in The United States
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“So quiet, too, was the sea, and so steady the breeze, that if these sails had been sculptured marble they could not have been more motionless. Not a ripple upon the surface of the canvas; not even a quivering of the extreme edges of the sail, so perfectly were they distended by the breeze. I was so lost in the sight that I forgot the presence of the man who came out with me, until he said (for he, too, rough old man-of-war’s-man as he was, had been gazing at the show), half to himself, still looking at the marble sails,— ``How quietly they do their work!”
― Richard Henry Dana Jr., quote from Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor's Life at Sea
“the use of profanity for effect to be a practice of the weak-minded”
― Terry Fallis, quote from The Best Laid Plans
“There were the endless birthday nights and New Year's Eves of just you in your bed and no one else. There was the welling up at weddings, the glittery eye-prick, when all the couples would get up to dance. Sometimes it felt like your heart was crazed with cracks like your grandmother's old saucers. Sometimes the sight of a Saturday afternoon couple laughing in a park would splinter it completely.”
― Nikki Gemmell, quote from The Bride Stripped Bare
“Advertising,” he wrote, “now compares with such long-standing institutions as the school and the church in the magnitude of its social influence. It dominates the media, it has vast power in the shaping of popular standards and it is really one of the very limited groups of institutions which exercise social control.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties
“Working on a typewriter by touch, like riding a bicycle or strolling on a path, is best done by not giving it a glancing thought. Once you do, your fingers fumble and hit the wrong keys. To do things involving practiced skills, you need to turn loose the systems of muscles and nerves responsible for each maneuver, place them on their own, and stay out of it. There is no real loss of authority in this, since you get to decide whether to do the thing or not, and you can intervene and embellish the technique any time you like; if you want to ride a bicycle backward, or walk with an eccentric loping gait giving a little skip every fourth step, whistling at the same time, you can do that. But if you concentrate your attention on the details, keeping in touch with each muscle, thrusting yourself into a free fall with each step and catching yourself at the last moment by sticking out the other foot in time to break the fall, you will end up immobilized, vibrating with fatigue.
It is a blessing to have options for choice and change in the learning of such unconsciously coordinated acts. If we were born with all these knacks inbuilt, automated like ants, we would surely miss the variety. It would be a less interesting world if we all walked and skipped alike, and never fell from bicycles. If we were all genetically programmed to play the piano deftly from birth, we might never learn to understand music.”
― Lewis Thomas, quote from The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
Letters to the Lost
Alkimist
The Shock of the New
Shakespeare: The Wor...
Time of Contempt
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