Steven Millhauser · 305 pages
Rating: (784 votes)
“For what is genius, I ask you, but the capacity to be obsessed? ...We have all been geniuses, you and I; but sooner or later it is beaten out of us, the glory faded, and by the age of seven most of us are nothing but wretched little adults.”
― Steven Millhauser, quote from Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright
“Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.”
― Steven Millhauser, quote from Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright
“... now and again we would happen to step out of the familiar universe into a sudden sharp shock of sweetly scented air, sudden as spilled perfume, piercing as crystal, dark and sweet as the sound of oboes.”
― Steven Millhauser, quote from Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright
“... it is the purpose of this history to trace not the mere outlines of a life but the inner plan, not the external markings but the secret soul.”
― Steven Millhauser, quote from Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright
“I think given the choice between loving Mare - betrayal included - and never knowing her, I'd chose love. I risked, and I lost, but the risk was still worth it.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from Mistborn
“She wrote, in the last pages, of feeling all the evil of the neighborhood around her. Rather, she wrote obscurely, good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn. Marcello, if you thought about it, was really a good arrangement, but the good tasted of the bad and the bad tasted of the good, it was a mixture that took your breath away. A few evenings earlier, something had happened that had really scared her. Marcello had left, the television was off, the house was empty, Rino was out, her parents were going to bed. She was alone in the kitchen washing the dishes and was tired, really without energy, when there was an explosion. She had turned suddenly and realized that the big copper pot had exploded. Like that, by itself. It was hanging on the nail where it normally hung, but in the middle there was a large hole and the rim was lifted and twisted and the pot itself was all deformed, as if it could no longer maintain its appearance as a pot. Her mother had hurried in in her nightgown and blamed her for dropping it and ruining it. But a copper pot, even if you drop it, doesn't break and doesn't become misshapen like that. "It's this sort of thing," Lila concluded, "that frightens me. More than Marcello, more than anyone. And I feel that I have to find a solution, otherwise, everything, one thing after another, will break, everything, everything.”
― quote from My Brilliant Friend
“One feature of the voucher plan that has aroused particular concern is the possibility that parents could and would "add on" to the vouchers. If the voucher were for, say, $1,500, a parent could add another $500 to it and send his child to a school charging $2,000 tuition. Some fear that the result might be even wider differences in educational opportunities than now exist because low-income parents would not add to the amount of the voucher while middle-income and upper-income parents would supplement it extensively.”
― Milton Friedman, quote from Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
“We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.”
― Ben Okri, quote from The Famished Road
“All their lives they’ve said how Folks that don’t Work should Starve. Now they can’t work but they ain’t ready for what they been wishing on the shiftless of all races.”
― Allan Gurganus, quote from Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
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