“You won't further the cause of human rights by walking away with your morals intact. Change is about getting your hand dirty.”
“The halls are full of kids, scrawny ones and fat ones, cool ones and uncool ones, freaks and jocks, cheerleaders and dogs, burnouts and nerds. It’s like Berlin, divided, except there are more walls in this city, and they’re better guarded.”
“That's the thing with the dead, they get to say nothing, forever.”
“She was a real quiet woman. But maybe we just weren't listening.”
“But there’s this thing in her voice, like what my mom called “doublespeak.” Saying one thing and meaning another. Aunt Nora told me it was leftover from English rule. She said, “That’s the only good thing to ever come of colonialism, Kevin. The Irish can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip.”
“Tis a child that dreams there’s something better ’round the corner. It’s a grown man who knows it’s right there in front of him.”
“Any story worth telling is worth exaggerating.”
“Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.”
“All it takes to make a new person is one night with some skank you hardly know. I mean, there I am, screwing her, and now there’s somebody like you or me on the way. It’s so fucking bizarre. You screw up one time and nine months later, bam! A new person.”
“I wanna fuck all the time, I've never wanted a baby.”
“Mom always used to say that stupid people have more nerve than brains.”
“Jon’s brought a couple of bottles of Phillips peppermint schnapps to Van Cleve Park. The label says Enjoy in Moderation. Not much chance of that in this crowd.”
“The sound of music is like water finding a path.”
“Scratch her arm? “No, she’s picking at her skin. It's a symptom," Reginald said. "One in the OCD family. It's called Dermatillomania or Excoriation. Often due to stress or anxiety, or depression." Or an STD.”
“The precept: “Judge not, that ye be not judged” . . . is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.
There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.
The moral principle to adopt in this issue, is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”
“[L]earn how to distinguish the king from royalty; the king is but a man; royalty is the gift of God. Whenever you hesitate as to whom you ought to serve, abandon the exterior, the material for the invisible principle, for the invisible principle is everything.”
“A swishing is often heard in the Carpathians, the sound as of a thousand mill wheels turning in the water. It is the dead men gnawing at the dead man, in the abyss without issue, which no man has ever seen, fearing to pass near it. It happens not seldom in the world that the earth shakes from one end to the other: learned people say it is because somewhere by the sea there is a mountain out of which flames burst and burning rivers flow. But the old men who live in Hungary and the land of Galicia know better and say that the earth shakes because there is a dead man grown great and huge in it who wants to rise.”
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