“They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever...and the other one scared me out of my mind.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“Anyway, that's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“You asked me, 'Do you call this living?" And I answer: Yes, it is exactly what I call living. And in my best hypothetical sense, I envy it very much.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you can't find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it. There wasn't room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I'd known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“She's thinking I betrayed her, and she's thinking it now! I can't live with that.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“I'm so busy listening to the heart that I don't even hear when somebody asks me to pass the salt.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“There are people who never pass a certain point in their emotional development. They cannot live a normal free-and-easy, give-and-take life with a sexual partner for more than a short time. Something inside them will not tolerate happiness. The better it gets, the more they have to destroy it.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“I wasn't enjoying the conversation that much. I didn't want to prolong it. It is the sort of man-to-woman infight that I try whenever possible to ascribe to premenstrual tension. I like the theory, but unfortunately in this case I happened to know that it didn't account for Klara, and of course it leaves unresolved at any time the question of how to account for me.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“Only you have to keep practicing and remembering.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“Es extremadamente listo, considerando lo estúpido que es.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
Frederik Pohl
Born place: in New York City, The United States
Born date November 26, 1919
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“Sam found a chair under Robin’s butt and evicted him from it, bringing it over to his pregnant wife.“Sorry, I wasn’t thinking,” Robin apologized.
“Thanks,” Alyssa said to Robin as she sat down, even as she gave Sam a darkly amused look.
“What?” he said. “I was just helping him think.”
― Suzanne Brockmann, quote from All Through the Night
“There is not a living man who does not wish to play the despot when he is stiff: it seems to him his joy is less when others appear to have as much fun as he; by an impulse of pride, very natural at this juncture, he would like to be the only one in the world capable of experiencing what he feels: the idea of seeing another enjoy as he enjoys reduces him to a kind of equality with that other, which impairs the unspeakable charm despotism causes him to feel.”
― Marquis de Sade, quote from Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
“People who are getting close to snapping sometimes start wearing the color yellow. The brighter the color, the closer they are to snapping.”
― Anne Frasier, quote from Hush
“What would have happened had he not been killed? He would certainly have had a rocky road to the nomination. The power of the Johnson administration and much of the party establishment was behind Humphrey. Still, the dynamism was behind Kennedy, and he might well have swept the convention. If nominated, he would most probably have beaten the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Individuals do make a difference to history. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have brought a quick end to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Those thousands of Americans—and many thousands more Vietnamese and Cambodians—who were killed from 1969 to 1973 would have been at home with their families. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have consolidated and extended the achievements of John Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The liberal tide of the 1960s was still running strong enough in 1969 to affect Nixon’s domestic policies. The Environmental Protection Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act with its CETA employment program were all enacted under Nixon. If that still fast-flowing tide so influenced a conservative administration, what signal opportunities it would have given a reform president! The confidence that both black and white working-class Americans had in Robert Kennedy would have created the possibility of progress toward racial reconciliation. His appeal to the young might have mitigated some of the under-thirty excesses of the time. And of course the election of Robert Kennedy would have delivered the republic from Watergate, with its attendant subversion of the Constitution and destruction of faith in government. RRK”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from Robert Kennedy and His Times
“The thousands of wealth have fallen with wonders, said Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov. Do you find this unclear? It certainly sounds like the sort of thing thousands of wealth do. They fall. Does anyone know what the rabbi meant by wonders?”
― Annie Dillard, quote from For the Time Being
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The Orchid Thief: A...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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