“If you let the news spoil your appetite, there wouldn’t be a day you could eat.”
“Ideas shouldn’t matter more than people.” He”
“the darkest desire of humankind—to hold absolute power, to control, to command obedience, to eliminate all voices of disagreement and dissent—had found its full expression.”
“In this brave new digital world, reality is plastic, and your identity is whatever you wish it to be. As is your future: Wish it, build it, live it.”
“Why do some people—so many—need to control others, tell them what to do, use them if they can, destroy those who won’t be used?” She sensed that the question wasn’t rhetorical, that he cared what she would say. “Why Hitler, why Stalin, why Emory Wayne Udell? I don’t know. Demonic influence or just miswired brains? In the end, does it matter which? Maybe what matters is that some of us aren’t broken by it all, that we can take it to the Emory Udells and the William Overtons and the Bertold Shennecks, take it to them and stop them before they can do everything they dream about.” North”
“what might have looked like courage proved to be a deficit of common sense and an excess of self-importance, too strong a faith in his genius and superiority—not courage at all, but the rash actions of an ordinary narcissist incapable of imagining that he might fail.”
“When you acted on principle tempered by compassion, there was sooner or later always someone with a saw. He”
“though some wicked master of a form of origami akin to quantum mechanics spent the night folding the evils of the world into places that had once been less afflicted by them.”
“If someone had killed Hamlet in the first act, a lot more people would’ve been alive at the end.”
“It’s a beautiful, terrible, world, isn’t it?”
“the more infantile the students, the more seriously they take themselves. They are generally a humorless lot.” In”
“Travis talked of what they could do with their day, as if his mother would be there for all of it, including dinner and a game of glowing Frisbee in the dusk. He suggested names for the pony, spoke about saddling it for the first time as if Jane would see him take his inaugural ride days from now. She let him talk, joined him in the pony naming, because he knew that for all their talk, she would be leaving; this was only heartfelt wishing, while there was still time to wish away the day that must be and hope to conjure in its place the day that ought to be.”
“As the last of the debris fell behind her and the crash of thunder rolled away through the city, as she came to the east end of the park, the once-dark sky paled, abruptly glaucous, and cataracts of rain fell hard, fat droplets hissing through the trees and grass, snapping off the pavement, plinking the metal hoods on trash cans, carrying with them the faint bleachy odor of ozone, a form of oxygen created by lightning’s alchemy.”
“as might a dung beetle stripped of its exoskeleton. Having set out to change the world and rule it through mass murder and slavery, he had seemed to act with courage when, at enormous personal risk, he broke laws and trashed two thousand years of philosophical consensus as to the equal value of each human life. But what might have looked like courage proved to be a deficit of common sense and an excess of self-importance, too strong a faith in his genius and superiority—not courage at all, but the rash actions of an ordinary narcissist incapable of imagining that he might fail.”
“Roots like an oak tree, Barney.” He”
“Wealth had not corrupted him. What he’d chosen to do with his wealth corrupted him. First he insulated himself from ordinary human experience, and then deemed himself superior to the masses, excused himself from all constraints not only of morality but also of tradition, and subsequently felt justified in casting off his conscience as a worthless artifact of primitive and superstitious minds. He had made of himself a malignancy in the human community.”
“Not long ago, ninety percent of homicides were committed by people who knew their victims. Now as many as thirty percent involved people who didn’t know each other. Once a crime of intimacy, homicide was becoming as random as death by lightning.”
“Jane wondered...When the girl was not cleaning her suite, which wouldn't take much time, and when she was not making her meals, and when she was not exercising, and when she was not being owned by some visitor, how often did she sit staring into space, alone and silent and still, as if she were a doll abandoned by a child who had moved on from childish things and no longer lover her?”
“The Silent Corner: Those who are truly off the grid and cannot be tracked by any technology, yet are able to move about freely and use the Internet, are said to be in the silent corner.”
“in this dangerous time when shadows cast shadows of their own, when darkness often passed for light, the just and the unjust wore the same face. Weaving”
“This was a world that didn’t reward flight. Whenever you fled from anything, you inevitably fled into its equivalent. She”
“Among computer gurus, there was a word for people who thought they were off the grid but weren’t. The word was fools. Only the tiniest fraction of those who believed they were off the grid—including dedicated end-of-the-world preppers—were in fact off it. Those who were truly untrackable, like Jane, and yet remained able by various means to use the Internet undetected were said to be “in the silent corner.” She”
“Jane wondered...When the girl was not cleaning her suite, which wouldn't take much time, and when she was not making her meals, and when she was not exercising, and when she was not being owned by some visitor, how often did she sit staring into space, alone and silent and still, as if she were a doll abandoned by a child who had moved on from childish things and no longer loved her?”
“But she knew that even in the current politically charged atmosphere, when people were encouraged to distrust or even openly disrespect law enforcement, the FBI was one of the few—perhaps the only—federal agencies for which most Americans still had respect.”
“Each ribosome had more than fifty different components. If you broke down a slew of them into their separate parts and thoroughly mixed them up in a suspending fluid, then Brownian movement—caused by encounters with molecules of the suspending medium—kept knocking them against one another until the fifty-some parts assembled into whole ribosomes.”
“Minute by minute, life was a continuous rolling of the dice, and that was as much gambling as she could handle.”
“Children were the world as it was meant to be - and they were a light within the world. But for every light, there seemed to be someone bent on extinguishing it.”
“¡La poesía no es de quien la escribe, sino de quien la usa!”
“The Greek knows how to live with his rags: they don’t utterly degrade and befoul him as in other countries I have visited.”
“When you teach her always to think about other people, to put herself in their shoes, to know that everyone—her friends, neighbors, and sister and brother—is important, you’ll give her the gift of friendship and living to the fullest as a caring, social being. If you teach your daughter to be good rather than simply happy, she will become both. Teaching your daughter humility is a wonderful gift. And it can be taught only by example.”
“El error de los hombres superiores es gastar los años de su juventud en hacerse dignos de la estimación de los demás.”
“I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ‘Tis all barren—and so it is; and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers. I declare, said I, clapping my hands chearily together, that was I in a desart, I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affections—If I could not do better, I would fasten them upon some sweet myrtle, or seek some melancholy cypress to connect myself to—I would court their shade, and greet them kindly for their protection—I would cut my name upon them, and swear they were the loveliest trees throughout the desert: if their leaves wither’d, I would teach myself to mourn, and when they rejoiced, I would rejoice along with them.”
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