Quotes from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“Outside, there was that predawn kind of clarity, where the momentum of living has not quite captured the day. The air was not filled with conversation or thought bubbles or laughter or sidelong glances. Everyone was sleeping, all of their ideas and hopes and hidden agendas entangled in the dream world, leaving this world clear and crisp and cold as a bottle of milk in the fridge. ”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“I had trouble listening to adults who didn't really mean anything that they said; it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“I would not know what to say to you, except this: there was never a map that got it all right, and truth and beauty were never married to one another for long.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“Do you ever get the feeling like you already know the entire contents of the universe somewhere inside of your head, as if you were born with a complete map of this world already grafted onto the folds of your cerebellum and you are just spending your entire life figuring out how to access this map?”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“Adults were pack rats of old, useless emotions.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“Dr. Clair looked at Layton. The mancala pieces were still in her hand.

If Angela Ashforth ever says anything like that to you again, you tell her that just because she's insecure about being a little girl in a society that puts an inordinate amount of pressure on little girls to live up to certain physical, emotional and ideological standards -- many of which are improper, unhealthy and self-perpetuating -- doesn't mean she has to take her misplaced self-loathing out on a nice boy like you. You may be inherently a part of the problem but that doesn't mean you aren't a nice boy with nice manners and it certainly doesn't mean you have AIDS."

I'm not sure I can remember all that," Layton said.

Well then, tell Angela that her mother is a white trash drunk from Butte.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“I do love the sound of ripping corn husks. The violence of the noise, the sustained popping and shoring of the silky organic threads, made me think of someone tearing up an expensive and potentially Italian set of trousers in a fit of madness that this person just might regret later. ”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“I was only twelve, but through the slow, inevitable burn of a thousand sunrises and sunsets, a thousand maps traced and retraced, I had already absorbed the valuable precept that everything crumbled into itself eventually, and to cultivate a crankiness about this was just a waste of time.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“Did the true, umbilical love that bound people together for the length of their lives require a certain intellectual dislocution in order to push past our insistent rationalization and enter the rough, uneven space inside our hearts?”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“I suddenly missed the curious shelving patterns of my room, those old planks from the barn groaning under the weight of the notebooks. Shelving is an intimate thing, like the fingerprint of a room.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“Изведнъж се замислих как възрастните можеха да задържат чувствата си дълго след като събитието е отминало, много след като са изпратили писмо с извинения и всички останали са продължили нататък. Възрастните бяха събирачи на стари ненужни чувства.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“What happened to all the historical detritus in the world? Some of it made it into drawers of museums, okay, but what about all those old postcards, the photoplates, the maps on napkins, the private journals with little latches on them? Did they burn in house fires? Were they sold at yard sales for 75¢? Or did they all just crumble into themselves like everything else in this world, the secret little stories contained within their pages disappearing, disappearing, and now gone forever.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“The sun was crouched on its haunches over the Pioneers. The mountains were both purple and brown, the angle of light hitting the moiré of pine and fir and bleeding out a smoky mirage that made the valley seem to tremble. It was a sight. We both looked.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“One cannot spend one's entire life running into bathrooms when danger calls!”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“A novel is a tricky thing to map.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“A text is evolutionary by its very nature.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“. . . the mountains sighed with the weight of the heavens on their backs.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“Whenever I smelled the same perfume on other women, no matter where I was, I was instantly transported back to that feeling of discovery. The sensation of fingertips against old paper, whose surface was powdery and fragile, like the membrane of a moth’s wing.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“Доктор Клер беше от майките, които ще те научат на Менделеевата таблица, докато тикат лъжица с каша в бебешката ти уста, но - в ерата на глобалния тероризъм и отвличания на деца - няма да попитат кой те търси по телефона.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“Навън ме посрещна обичайната за миговете преди зазоряване кристална чистота, когато инерцията на живота все още не е завладяла деня. Въздухът не беше изпълнен с разговори, мисли, смях и намръщени погледи. Хората спяха и всичките им идеи, надежди и тайни помисли бяха омотани в света на сънищата, а този тук беше останал чист, свеж и хладен като бутилка мляко от хладилника.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“Колко много снимки в целия свят запечатваха последвалия миг, не успявах да уловят онова, предизвикало фотографа да натисне копчето, а вместо това хващаха последвалите руини, смеха, реакцията, разплискалите се кръгове във водата.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“Doodles were fertile ground; they were the visual evidence of heavy cognitive lifting. Although this was not always true: Ricky Lepardo was a doodler and he was not a heavy cognitive lifter.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“I suppose he represented the worst of what rural life can do to a man: he was racist, uneducated, and badly in need of dental work.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“Може би смисълът на четенето на романи се криеше именно в балансирането на насладата от бягството от реалността със съзнанието за измислица, но аз така и не успявах да поддържам едновременно реалното и фантазното. Може би просто трябваше да си възрастен, за да осъществиш този изумително сложен акт на едновременно вярване и невярване.”
― Reif Larsen, quote from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

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“So I've been thinking. Do you believe there's a hell?"
"Sure. Doesn't everybody?"
"Well, what if this is hell, but we just don't know it?"
"That's crazy. Hell is like lakes of fire, and there are devils with horns and pitchforks. here's none of those around here."
"But what if hell's not really like that?" Grace asked.
"Everyone says it's that way," I said.
"I don't think Jesus every talked about fire and brimstone."
"Then why do they teach us that at church?"
"To scare us."
"Why would they want to scare us?"
"I don't know. I just don't think God wants us to do good things because we're scared. I think he wants us to do good things because we're good.”
― Richard Paul Evans, quote from Grace

“When I went into the Army, I made up my mind that I was putting myself at the Army's disposal. I believe in the war. That doesn't mean I believe in the Army. I don't believe in any army. You don't expect justice out of an army, if you're a sensible, grown-up human being, you only expect victory. And if it comes to that, our Army is probably the most just one that ever existed. . . . I expected the Army to be corrupt, inefficient, cruel, wasteful, and it turned out to be all those things, just like all armies, only much less so than I thought before I got into it. It is much less corrupt, for example, than the German Army. Good for us. The victory we win will not be as good as it might be, if it were a different kind of army, but it will be the best kind of victory we can expect in this day and age, and I'm thankful for it.”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions

“Now I thought, surely I am possessed of the devil: at other times, again, I thought I should be bereft of my wits; for instead of lauding and magnifying God the Lord, with others, if I have but heard Him spoken of, presently some most horrible blasphemous thought or other would bolt out of my heart against Him; so that whether I did think that God was, or again did think there was no such thing, no love, nor peace, nor gracious disposition could I feel within me.”
― John Bunyan, quote from Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

“As a librarian, saving lives and worlds isn't in my purview, although if I could put those on my resume with a straight face, I would. Saving minds, however … perhaps it's not as farfetched. A mind can be lost without its owner's death. A mind that no longer questions only fulfills the rudimentary aspects of its function. A mind without wonder is a mere engine, a walking parasympathetic nervous system, seeing without observing, reacting without thinking, a forgotten ghost in a passive machine.”
― Josh Hanagarne, quote from The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family

“The history of black workers in the United States illustrates the point. As already noted, from the late nineteenth-century on through the middle of the twentieth century, the labor force participation rate of American blacks was slightly higher than that of American whites. In other words, blacks were just as employable at the wages they received as whites were at their very different wages. The minimum wage law changed that. Before federal minimum wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930. But then followed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938—all of which imposed government-mandated minimum wages, either on a particular sector or more broadly. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which promoted unionization, also tended to price black workers out of jobs, in addition to union rules that kept blacks from jobs by barring them from union membership. The National Industrial Recovery Act raised wage rates in the Southern textile industry by 70 percent in just five months and its impact nationwide was estimated to have cost blacks half a million jobs. While this Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was upheld by the High Court and became the major force establishing a national minimum wage. As already noted, the inflation of the 1940s largely nullified the effect of the Fair Labor Standards Act, until it was amended in 1950 to raise minimum wages to a level that would have some actual effect on current wages. By 1954, black unemployment rates were double those of whites and have continued to be at that level or higher. Those particularly hard hit by the resulting unemployment have been black teenage males. Even though 1949—the year before a series of minimum wage escalations began—was a recession year, black teenage male unemployment that year was lower than it was to be at any time during the later boom years of the 1960s. The wide gap between the unemployment rates of black and white teenagers dates from the escalation of the minimum wage and the spread of its coverage in the 1950s. The usual explanations of high unemployment among black teenagers—inexperience, less education, lack of skills, racism—cannot explain their rising unemployment, since all these things were worse during the earlier period when black teenage unemployment was much lower. Taking the more normal year of 1948 as a basis for comparison, black male teenage unemployment then was less than half of what it would be at any time during the decade of the 1960s and less than one-third of what it would be in the 1970s. Unemployment among 16 and 17-year-old black males was no higher than among white males of the same age in 1948. It was only after a series of minimum wage escalations began that black male teenage unemployment not only skyrocketed but became more than double the unemployment rates among white male teenagers. In the early twenty-first century, the unemployment rate for black teenagers exceeded 30 percent. After the American economy turned down in the wake of the housing and financial crises, unemployment among black teenagers reached 40 percent.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy

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