Craig Lancaster · 298 pages
Rating: (811 votes)
“Any fighter knows that regret that doesn't inform your future is wasted emotion. If you lose and dwell on the missed opportunity rather than the chances to come, you're finished.”
“I don’t feel sorry for myself. I’m not owed any of that. The opportunities were there, and I did not take them. I find it difficult to live with this sometimes.”
“Ernest Hemingway talked about how writing is opening up a vein and bleeding onto the page. You prepared to do that?”
“Hugo and I sat together in the chapel and didn’t say a word to each other. We’d already said them all, in better times and in better places.”
“nobody really gets what they deserve from this life, that it’s all a question of what you can take while you have the time.”
“The one thing Hugo did better than almost anyone else, the one constant for much of his life, was being taken away in a most ignominious way.”
“You can make yourself crazy, refiguring it all after the fact. You did what you thought was best at the time. You helped a friend. That’s what matters.”
“this much, too: never again will we keep our hearts waiting.”
“I cleared the air again. “Oh, I’m plenty stupid. But not on this. And I’m not cruel. Don’t let him fight again. Hell, you shouldn’t have let him fight tonight. I’m all for that. But it’s not going to kill you to let him go with the knowledge that nobody ever knocked him out cold. Besides, it isn’t me you have to convince anyway.” Squeaky ran the gym, ran the Tuesday night fights, but his daddy, Frank, was the boss. He knew this sure as I did.”
“But how can we be free to look and learn when our minds from the moment we are born to the moment we die are shaped by a particular culture in the narrow pattern of the ‘me’? For centuries we have been conditioned by nationality, caste, class, tradition, religion, language, education, literature, art, custom, convention, propaganda of all kinds, economic pressure, the food we eat, the climate we live in, our family, our friends, our experiences – every influence you can think of – and therefore our responses to every problem are conditioned.”
“Things have changed," Mother answered, her gaze drawn to the southern horizon. "So we change with them.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I’m used to holding on to nothing as tight as I can.”
“In Jerusalem, as elsewhere in Palestine, the Haganah's basic strategy reflected a philosophy propounded by David Ben-Gurion. What the Jews had, they must hold. No Jew was to leave his home, his farm, his kibbutz, his office without permission. Every outpost, every settlement, every village, no matter how isolated, was to be clung to as though it were Tel Aviv itself.”
“Third, don’t confuse an anecdote or a personal experience with the state of the world. Just because something happened to you, or you read about it in the paper or on the Internet this morning, it doesn’t mean it is a trend. In a world of seven billion people, just about anything will happen to someone somewhere, and it’s the highly unusual events that will be selected for the news or passed along to friends. An event is a significant phenomenon only if it happens some appreciable number of times relative to the opportunities for it to occur, and it is a trend only if that proportion has been shown to change over time.”
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