“If you want to really relax sometime, just fall to rock bottom and you'll be a happy man. Most all troubles come from having standards.”
― Thomas Berger, quote from Little Big Man
“You got to knock a man down and put your knife at his throat before he'll hear you, like I did to that trooper. The truth seems hateful to most everybody.”
― Thomas Berger, quote from Little Big Man
“The truth is always made up of little particulars which sound ridiculous when repeated.”
― Thomas Berger, quote from Little Big Man
“Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain't done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.”
― Thomas Berger, quote from Little Big Man
“I expect Custer was crazy enough to believe he would win, being the type of man who carries the whole world within his own head and thus when his passion is aroused and floods his mind, reality is utterly drowned.”
― Thomas Berger, quote from Little Big Man
“It was strange how in no time at all everybody went from fear to being excruciatingly bored, and the very women who yesterday had been helpless victims and just minutes earlier were howling in fright, now began to advance on him threatening with their fists and saying: 'Git on out of here, you old skunk!' Which shows something about the way a female is put together; she will suffer any outrage so long as it is interesting, but bore her and she don't know fear.”
― Thomas Berger, quote from Little Big Man
“I love her still, for if you know anything about that kind of feeling, you know how close it is connected to hopelessness and thus is about the only thing in civilization that don't degenerate with time.”
― Thomas Berger, quote from Little Big Man
“The buffalo eats grass, I eat him, and when I die, the earth eats me and sprouts more grass. Therefore nothing is ever lost, and each thing is everything forever, though all things move.”
― Thomas Berger, quote from Little Big Man
“When you run into a story of more than three against one and one winning, then you have heard a lie.”
― Thomas Berger, quote from Little Big Man
“You might have thought the colonel would be interested in my experiences of five years’ barbarism, but he wasn’t. I wasn’t long in discovering that it is a rare person in the white world who wants to hear what the other fellow says, all the more so when the other fellow really knows what he is talking about.”
― Thomas Berger, quote from Little Big Man
“…What it means is you will fight until you’re all used up. Far from being sour, life is so sweet you will live it to the hilt and be consumed by it.”
― Thomas Berger, quote from Little Big Man
“For he was big, and I don’t care what you say, for every inch a man grows over five foot five, his brain diminishes proportionately. All my life I have had a prejudice against overgrown louts.”
― Thomas Berger, quote from Little Big Man
“Hickok and the others now returned from looking at the saloon sign, and this suck-up who had been talking to me, he asked what happened and another man says: “He put all ten inside the hole of the O, by God!” And everybody was whistling and gasping at the wonder of it—well, not exactly everybody, for there was other scouts and gun-handlers around, people like Jack Gallagher, Billy Dixon, Old Man Keeler, and more who was well known in them days, and they looked thoughtful so as not to display jealousy. As elsewhere in life, there are specialists on one hand, and the audience on the other.”
― Thomas Berger, quote from Little Big Man
“Most of the people I have really cared about in this world, I have elected to the position. I have a belief that a man’s real relatives are scattered throughout the universe, and seldom if ever belong to his immediate kin.”
― Thomas Berger, quote from Little Big Man
Thomas Berger
Born place: in Cincinnati, Ohio, The United States
Born date July 20, 1924
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“There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough to make those of us still full from lunch want to lie down in the hallway and force anyone dumb enough to remain committed to walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their PowerBars and bags of microwave popcorn surely would end up within an arm's length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we would make little toys out of runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort.”
― Joshua Ferris, quote from Then We Came to the End
“Every person has a heart, but we're not always lucky enough to get a glimpse of it. And every heart, even the hardest, has a fragile spot. If you hit it there, it shatters.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, quote from Sister of My Heart
“Reason is the mirror of the mind’s vanity; ultimately, there are few things more boring to observe than self-admiration. Rationality, the great liberator that has freed us from the demands of our lower natures, is also a stern warden, denying our escape to the planes above and beyond intellect.”
― David R. Hawkins, quote from Power vs. Force
“To live as I understand it is to exist within a conception of time. But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time.”
― David Mazzucchelli, quote from Asterios Polyp
“BTW, the roach's name is Max (courtesy of Brianna, "because of I had a puppy, I'd name him Max").”
― Rachel Renée Russell, quote from Dork Diaries Book 2: Tales from a Not-So-Popular Party Girl
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Shield of ThunderBookQuoters 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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