“Sometimes I wonder why words can't actually make us bleed.”
“I always thought saying sorry was more about alleviating
guilt, that apologies were designed for the mouth, not for
the ears.”
“We all screw up. We all wish we were stronger than we are, and not one of us will get through this life without regret.”
“It's weird when someone gets you understands what you would never say not even to yourself.”
“But I’m not the one digging her grave; I didn’t open her hole in the earth when I drove away that night or when I couldn’t make her come with us. My dad dug it years ago; he forced her to lie down in it and kept her there by fear and beatings. And when she tried to get out, he stomped her back in. She has been lying there for twenty-five years. Her muscles have atrophied, her joints have stiffened, and she can’t see anything except him and the tight little space she calls home. I don’t know how she’ll get out; I can tug and pull and yank, but it won’t make any difference. She was right: she’s gotta solve it her own way.”
“You think I’m sixteen, so I don’t know what love is, right?”
She shakes her head, sad smile on again. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s the only time we really get to love someone completely. Without fear. After that first big breakup, we keep ourselves a little more protected, a little more hidden.”
“This is why they say you should look before you leap. They say a lot of things. Carpe diem. Even platitudes contradict each other. Man, this has to be the longest fall ever if I have the time to think all this.”
“Finally, Jace suspects it's a bad sign that he is referring to himself in the third person.”
“The sky is freckled with stars.”
“I don't have to agree with her to love her.”
“Words are flowing through my brain like logs down a river.”
“I didn't know that an apology could actually help; I always though saying sorry was more about alleviating guilt, that apologies were designed for the mouth, not for the ears.”
“Isn't it too convenient just to forgive yourself, let yourself off the hook? What will keep you from doing it again, then?”
“You’re not gonna name it Dog, are you?”
“In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom—in anarchy—such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor—raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is—and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws—the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve Board on this side—are slightly different; that’s all. And it is this that is threatened by anarchists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us,”
“Introversion- along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness- is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living in the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man's world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.”
“Now is the winter of our discontent.”
“I skim through the issue [of Elle] and reach the offending photo, a montage that ridicules rather than glorifies our idol. It is one of the mysteries of our trade. You work for weeks on a subject, it goes back and forth among the most skillful pairs of hands, and no one spots the glaring blunder that a neophyte would spot in a second.”
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