“I think about something I once heard on the radio. About Abraham and Isaac."
"I was afraid you'd say something like that."
"You asked."
"So what about them? I don't really know much about that kind of stuff."
"There was a pastor on the radio who said nobody should ever preach that story. Do you remember how it goes? God tells Abraham that he has to sacrifice his son to prove his faith."
"I agree with the pastor. It sounds like a sick story. Ban that shit."
"But isn't that exactly what we do? Send young men off to a war in the desert and ask them to sacrifice themselves for a belief?”
― quote from The Last Good Man
“Right now there's a commonly-held view among scientists that we know about only four percent of all the matter in the universe. Four percent!"
"So what about the other 96 percent?"
"We astrophysicists call it 'dark matter' and 'dark energy.' Maybe we should just call it ignorance. There's so much that we don't know. It's shocking how little we know. And yet we behave like little gods who think we're in control of everything. Like kids with delusions of grandeur. Isn't that what we've made ourselves into? It's as if we're trying to make ourselves believe that four percent is all there is. That everything else, all that we don't know, doesn't exist. But it does. We know it's there; we just don't understand it.”
― quote from The Last Good Man
“The biggest mistake we can make is to think that we've figured the whole thing out. The people I know who are the greatest skeptics, who are least certain about how the world and the universe works, are also the most intelligent.... Absolute certainty is only for stupid people. It requires a certain intelligence for us to realize how little we actually know.”
― quote from The Last Good Man
“You're only two handshakes away from evil.... Maybe it's the same thing with goodness. We're never far from what's good.... It doesn't seem like such a far-fetched idea that it takes only 36 people to keep evil at bay. Just remember that all of the upheavals in world history, both good and bad, were initiated by individuals.”
― quote from The Last Good Man
“Niels remembered all too well the telex machine that had received updates and warnings from Interpol's headquarters in Lyon. The telex machine had run nonstop. The monotonous sound of the mechanical printer reminded them that the world was a fucked-up place. If anyone wanted a brief, concentrated look into the world's misery, all he had to do was spend 20 minutes in front of the humming machine: serial killers, drug smuggling, women kidnapped for prostitution, cross-border traffic with stolen children, illegal immigration, enriched uranium.... You could get a headache simply from standing in front of the fax machine. It made you want to scream and run away; to jump into the sea and wish that life had never crawled up out of the water, that the dinosaurs still dominated the earth.”
― quote from The Last Good Man
“I like the idea of it. Just look at the world around you. Wars, terror, starvation, poverty, disease. Take the Middle East conflict, for example. An area on earth that contains so much hatred, so many frustrations, that a bomber is always lurking around the next corner, and where checkpoints and walls have become a permanent part of daily life. When I look at such a world from here in my little Danish ivory tower, it's a very appealing idea that there might exist at least--at the very least--36 righteous people on this earth. Small human pillars to ensure that we maintain a minimum of kindness and righteousness.”
― quote from The Last Good Man
“This is what you have to learn. Don’t backtalk. Don’t explain. Don’t protest. Don’t fight it out. Just say, ‘All right, honey,’ and do whatever the hell you want. For example, just this morning, Mark said, ‘Make tacos tonight, babe,’ before he kissed me good-bye. No ‘please’. No, ‘are you feeling like tacos?’ Just ‘make them.’” She tipped her head to the side. “Now, are we having tacos?” She shook her head. “Hell no. We had tacos two days ago. I get he loves my tacos, but eff that. My friend is coming over and I just had tacos. Furthermore, I have to make the damn things. So we’re having a roast. You serve company a good roast. Not freaking tacos.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Raid
“You know, there's reason why certain expressions never go away and endure the test of time. It's because they're as real todaynasnthey were a hundred years ago.”
― Elle Casey, quote from Don't Make Me Beautiful
“Lectures IV and V - The Religion Of Healthy Mindedness If we were to ask the question: "What is human life's chief concern?" one of the answers we should receive would be: "It is happiness." How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.”
― William James, quote from The Varieties of Religious Experience
“I was fourteen then. He was eighteen. Everything is biographical, Lucien Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Divisadero
“Ideas come easily to me, enacting them comes harder. I usually let things go. Perhaps it's an escape hatch, my way of allowing myself to double back and ease out the side door on a lot of my schemes. Irresolute about my social life, obsessive in my work.”
― Kathy Reichs, quote from Déjà Dead
First Step 2 Forever
Walking
Keeping Promise Rock
The Year of Secret A...
Prisoner of Tehran
Dark Taste of Raptur...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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