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17878d8 She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do. John Steinbeck
fc54b28 The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation. culture media Neil Postman
d89b343 Those who boggle at strong language are cowards, because it is real life which is shocking them, and weaklings like that are the very people who cause most harm to culture and character. They would like to see the nation grow up into a group of over-sensitive little people--masturbators of false culture... Jaroslav Hašek
2a1b93c In his blackest hours, Stone doubted the utility of all thought, and all intelligence. There were times he envied the laboratory rats he worked with; their brains were so simple. Certainly, they did not have the intelligence to destroy themselves; that was a peculiar invention of man. Michael Crichton
c8f977e But where will this mania for entertainment end? What will people do when they get tired of television? When they get tired of movies? We already know the answer--they go into participatory activities: sports, theme parks, amusement rides, roller coasters. Structured fun, planned thrills. And what will they do when they tire of theme parks and planned thrills? Sooner or later, the artifice becomes too noticeable. They begin to realize that .. hyperreality Michael Crichton
14ac049 The minute we look, we cease being afraid. Michael Crichton
c5344f8 In reality, time doesn't pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren't separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations. And since the past isn't a location, you can't travel to it. passing-of-time science time time-travel Michael Crichton
cf2d014 What is it about nature that is so terrifying to the modern mind? Why is it so intolerable? Because nature is fundamentally indifferent. It's unforgiving, uninterested. If you live or die, succeed or fail, feel pleasure or pain, it doesn't care. That's intolerable to us. How can we live in a world so indifferent to us. So we redefine nature. We call it Mother Nature when it's not a parent in any real sense of the term. Michael Crichton
5027b9a Consider cotton prices," Malcolm said. "There are good records of cotton prices going back more than a hundred years. When you study fluctuations in cotton prices, you find that the graph of price fluctuations in the course of a day looks basically like the graph for a week, which looks basically like the graph for a year, or for ten years. And that's how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doin.. ian-malcolm jurassic-park mandelbrot Michael Crichton
ebb4927 Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet--or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves. Michael Crichton
c7206fa Saintliness is also a temptation. temptation Jean Anouilh
0cb18fc Vous me degoutez tous avec votre bonheur ! Avec votre vie qu'il faut aimer coute que coute... Moi, je veux tout, tout de suite, et que ce soit entier, ou alors je refuse! Je ne veux pas etre modeste , moi, et de me contenter d'un petit morceau, si j'ai ete bien sage. ANOUILH Jean
39c68f3 If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. sex social-constructs Judith Butler
a9febd1 Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this. For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a pe.. Claudia Rankine
203d3f7 The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing. violence Judith Butler
a5c35a5 I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes. Hunter S. Thompson
aeecbad Art value always goes up once the artist's associated with fucked-up things such as cutting off his own ear like Van Gogh, or marrying his teenage cousin like Poe, or having his minions murder a celebrity like Manson, or shooting his postsuicide ashes out of a huge cannon like Hunter S. Thompson, or being dressed up as a little girl by his mother like Hemingway, or wearing a dress made of raw meat like Lady Gaga, or having unspeakable thing.. Matthew Quick
a18a958 I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless journey. It was the tension between the.. fear Hunter S. Thompson
88e6b5a So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. Hunter S. Thompson
376b4af You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways--but it doesn't hurt as much when you're right. truth Hunter S. Thompson
6bc1111 One of the things you learn, after years of dealing with drug people, is that everything is serious. You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug--especially when it's waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eyes. Hunter S. Thompson
a7b663d One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task. Scott Adams
65cae44 The surest way to identify those who won't succeed at weight loss is that they tend to say things like "My goal is to lose ten pounds." Weight targets often work in the short run. But if you need willpower to keep the weight off, you're doomed in the long run. The only way to succeed in the long run is by using a system that bypasses your need for willpower." Scott Adams
a12fb26 The Success Formula: Every Skill You Acquire Doubles Your Odds of Success Scott Adams
8056626 Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality? Scott Adams
d2c0a39 Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational. Scott Adams
e02b432 What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him. Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never re.. Julian Barnes
b060c6c But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting. Julian Barnes
82b430d Someone once said that his favourite times in history were when things were collapsing, because that meant something new was being born. Does this make any sense if we apply it to our individual lives? To die when something new is being born - even if that something new is our very own self? Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappointments, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of .. Julian Barnes
5762981 The narrower their lives, the wider their hips. Toni Morrison
ff7705d they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling; they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly Toni Morrison
f856dca Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed," she said, "and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks." blacks luck race-relations racism whites Toni Morrison
f1ab175 Much handled things are always soft(27). Toni Morrison
fdf562a Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. To have something as wonderful as that would take a long, long time. Toni Morrison
6b71dd5 They will blow it, she thought. Each will cling to a sad little story of hurt and sorrow--some long-ago trouble and pain life dumped on their pure and innocent selves. And each one will rewrite that story forever, knowing the plot, guessing the theme, inventing its meaning and dismissing its origin. Toni Morrison
54b5eb8 A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath. So they believe. Toni Morrison
3dd8501 So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know. Toni Morrison
8b6aba2 I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that. women Toni Morrison
28b7029 In a way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art f.. boredom-to-brilliance curiosity idleness recklessness Toni Morrison
50b8180 No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little. Barbara W. Tuchman
ef7a4a0 It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others. Sinclair Lewis
09cb444 The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It's the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups, who have let the demogogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest." 14" Sinclair Lewis
fa94579 Too much of anything isn't good for anyone. Ray Bradbury
12c8672 If you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the sieve. read sand sieve Ray Bradbury