Search quotes

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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
9645412	Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.			Norman Mailer
bae7ed6	We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.		society	Norman Mailer
ae2c4fd	I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad--that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad--and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good--for that, must I suffer eternal punishment? "..		punishment reward hell	Norman Mailer
14ccea8	Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart			Norman Mailer
d0b1101	I guess all that's left is to love the fire.			Norman Mailer
4509f37	Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon			Norman Mailer
6fdea38	You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved.			Norman Mailer
41d61f8	The more things you own, the more things you need to keep you comfortable.			Norman Mailer
a28a488	Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207		mailer	Norman Mailer
8bc52ce	Yeah, fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.			Norman Mailer
e637fd7	No heart is so hard as the timid heart.			Norman Mailer
033fa7c	I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind			Norman Mailer
bb7faa1	Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.		stephen-rojack norman-mailer	Norman Mailer
aeada86	Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful. In any case, good or bad, it reminds us that life is like a gladiators' arena for the soul and so we can feel strengthened by those who endure, and fee..			Norman Mailer
3060a54	Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind.			Norman Mailer
d886275	That was how the tears went down Cherry's face...a teaspoon full of ten years' sorrow.			Norman Mailer
0f9d2dc	I won't stay in with married men any more said the wise girl they're too agreeable, it's a little too much like curling up with the good book. You mean a good book Oh, dear, did I say the good book sighed the witch.		sex reading witches bible the-good-book affairs witch cheating good-book	Norman Mailer
36b54c2	Let every writer tell his own lies That's freedom of the press.		lying lies truth freedom-of-the-press the-news news	Norman Mailer
009a72c	You've seen too many movies. If you're holding a gun and you shoot a defenseless man, then you're a poor creature, a dastardly person. That's a perfectly ridiculous idea, you realize. The fact that you're holding the gun and the other man is not is no accident. It's a product of everything you've achieved, it assumes that if you're . . . you're aware enough, you have the gun when you need it.			Norman Mailer
c41d80a	Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.			Norman Mailer
425c1e6	There are many churches in my name and in the name of my apostles. The greatest and holiest is named after Peter; it is a place of great splendor in Rome. Nowhere can be found more gold.		jesus gospel rome	Norman Mailer
82e8b92	Roth was feeling a gentle warmth as he thought of his son. He was remembering the way his son used to awaken him on Sunday mornings. His wife would put the baby in bed with him, and the child would straddle his stomach and pull feebly at the hairs on Roth's chest, cooing with delight. It gave him a pang of joy to think of it, and then, back of it, a realization that he had never enjoyed his child as much when he had lived with him. He had b..			Norman Mailer
010d3eb	Red had a deep loathing of the night before them. He had been through so much combat, had felt so many kinds of terror, and had seen so many men killed that he no longer had any illusions about the inviolability of his own flesh. He knew he could be killed; it was something he had accepted long ago, and he had grown a shell about that knowledge so that he rarely thought of anything further ahead than the next few minutes...		wwii	Norman Mailer
1542435	No, but why is Croft that way? Oh there are The Answers. He is that way because of the-corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because he is having problems of adjustment. It is because he is a Texan. It is because he has renounced God. He is that way because he was born that way, or because the Devil has claimed him for one of his own, or because the only woman he ever loved was untrue to him.			Norman Mailer
8b92c04	I cannot bear that chirpy Bobby Kennedy, always building his beaver's nest with a few more facts. He needs to look into the abyss.		bobby-kennedy chirpy beaver	Norman Mailer
62b8763	We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.			Norman Mailer
2b9ff69	The jeep would round the bend, be hit by a dozen bullets at once, and that would be the end of his petty history of unfocused groping and unimportant dissatisfactions.			Norman Mailer
898f119	Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away		poems poetry writing pins ennui pin sadism sadist pride	Norman Mailer
dc0f240	Characters in novels sometimes radiate more energy, therefore, when we don't enter their mind. It is one of the techniques a novelist acquires instinctively--don't go into your protagonist's thoughts until you have something to say about his or her inner life that is more interesting than the reader's suppositions.			Norman Mailer
66e90b6	Men who work at Time have a life expectancy which is not long said the young man from Newsweek		time time-magazine	Norman Mailer
64d1ad8	The book was sloppily written in many parts (the words came too quickly and too easily) and there was hardly a noun in any sentence that was not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly available adjective -- scalding coffee and tremulous fear are the sorts of thing you will find throughout. Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing.			Norman Mailer
d61b51e	Everything was damp and rife and hot as though the jungle were an immense collection of oily rags growing hotter and hotter under the dark stifling vaults of a huge warehouse. Heat licked at everything, and the foliage, responding, grew to prodigious sizes. In the depths, in the heat and the moisture, it was never silent. The birds cawed, the small animals and occasional snakes rustled and squealed, and beneath it all was a hush, almost pal..			Norman Mailer
d2fbcd9	The best they could? I don't think so." He paused as if to edit his woes and select the most telling ones. "Did you notice how they treated the officers? They slept in staterooms when we were jammed in the hold like pigs. It's to make them feel superior, a chosen group. That's the same device Hitler uses when he makes the Germans think they're superior." Roth felt as if he were on the edge of something profound."			Norman Mailer
7dafe5d	The feeling of joy came up in me again the way the lyric of a song might remind a man on the edge of insanity that soon he will be insane again and there is a world there more interesting than his own.			Norman Mailer
23b10cf	The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.			Norman Mailer
40338c1	and dread came back like a hoot from a bully on the street outside.			Norman Mailer
fd65350	Every time I move I squash something said Loathesome.		self-deprecation self-esteem	Norman Mailer
4bc803f	I could not begin to mourn Deborah or my mind would ride off with me. There was nothing so delicate in all the world as one's last touch of control.			Norman Mailer
1a13536	I wonder, said the Lord I wonder if I know the answer any more.		jesus god lord jesus-christ	Norman Mailer
3d04bf2	So long as you use a knife, there's some love left.		love stabbing stab	Norman Mailer
cdc81b8	In the South of Spain, one could look to vice as quickly as to virtue for a sense of tradition.		norman pablo-picasso picasso	Norman Mailer
b82540c	I HATE EVERYTHING WHICH IS NOT IN MYSELF			Norman Mailer
b3b6ef8	And they were always young, Air Corps pilots and ensigns, and good-looking girls in fur coats, and always the government secretary or two, the working girl as a carry-over from the fraternity parties when she was always the girl who could be made because in some mysterious way the women of the lower classes could be depended upon to copulate like jack rabbits. And they all knew they were going to die soon with a sentimental and unstated Eng..			Norman Mailer
7a0aecf	City Point is so beautiful, she says. In the night they cannot see the garbage that litters the beach, the seaweed and driftwood, the condoms that wallow sluggishly on the foam's edge, discarded on the shore like the minuscule loathsome animals of the sea. Yeah, it's something, he says slowly.			Norman Mailer

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