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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2c88e56 | i could have told him to learn from Gatsby. from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flash and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 462bf8d | There was, really, nothing you could use as a blueprint for your life, except your past. There was no starting over. There was only picking up the pieces someone had left behind. | Jodi Picoult | ||
| 8e1e91d | Parents embraced "Sesame Street" for several reasons, among them that it assuaged their guilt over the fact that they could not or would not restrict their children's access to television. "Sesame Street" appeared to justify allowing a four- or five-year-old to sit transfixed in front of a television screen for unnatural periods of time. Parents were eager to hope that television could teach their children something other than which breakfa.. | Neil Postman | ||
| f5e2ed3 | The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reaso.. | commercials drama emotional-appeal falsities idiocy logic mcdonalds public-discourse television television-commercials | Neil Postman | |
| 52c6c43 | Preparations for the slaughter of mankind have always been made in the name of God or some supposed higher being which men have devised and created in their own imagination. | Jaroslav Hašek | ||
| 38e6c0a | Already, the brain consumed more than a quarter of the body's blood supply... an organ accounting for only a small percentage of body mass. If brains grew larger, and better, then perhaps they would consume more - perhaps so much that, like an infection, they would overrun their hosts and kill the bodies that transported them. Or perhaps, in their infinite cleverness, they would find a way to destroy themselves and each other. There were ti.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 0c9a5cf | There's one problem with all psychological knowledge - nobody can apply it to themselves. People can be incredibly astute about the shortcomings of their friends, spouses, children. But they have no insight into themselves at all. The same people who are coldly clear-eyed about the world around them have nothing but fantasies about themselves. Psychological knowledge doesn't work if you look in a mirror. This bizarre fact is, as far as I kn.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 109f724 | Animals die, friends die, and I shall die, but one thing never dies, and that is the reputation we leave behind at our death. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 83fcea0 | Safety is the last refuge of the scoundrel! | Michael Crichton | ||
| d3101ca | His management philosophy, tempered in his rain-dancing days, was always to give the project to whoever had the most to gain from success--or the most to lose from failure. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 4e81d6e | Like all trial attorneys, he knew the importance of not dressing too well. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 5f276a5 | Kids are more advanced these days. The teenage years now start at 11. | teenagers teens | Michael Crichton | |
| 816eb08 | Why is it that only in the very beginnings of a relationship are you aware of the heat coming from inside a person, of the number of inches you would have to move for your shoulders to brush as if it were an accident? | Jodi Picoult | ||
| efa1b00 | Not that I disclaim the fullest responsibility for his opinions and for those of all my characters, pleasant and unpleasant. They are all right from their several points of view; and their points of view are, for the dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the people who believe that there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually their own. | George Bernard Shaw | ||
| f409d6b | Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does. | George Bernard Shaw | ||
| b496d63 | MRS PEARCE. Mr Higgins: youre tempting the girl. It's not right. She should think of the future. HIGGINS. At her age! Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when you havnt any future to think of. | future-plans | George Bernard Shaw | |
| c9381e6 | Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. | humankind | George Bernard Shaw | |
| 399a66b | You don't get tired of muffins. But you don't find inspiration in them | George Bernard Shaw | ||
| fe10482 | the beauty and nobility, the august mission and destiny, of human handwriting. | penmanship | George Bernard Shaw | |
| 8d19d9b | O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long? | George Bernard Shaw | ||
| 6b793cb | The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers;.. | death-penalty justice punishment wrongdoing | George Bernard Shaw | |
| 67bcb3a | Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive? | Judith Butler | ||
| 5b909f6 | Pardon me, dear human self, capable of the most heinous degradation, capable of soaring. | Sena Jeter Naslund | ||
| 48eaa4b | He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all y.. | existential fate luck | Hunter S. Thompson | |
| 086cecb | Across the board... Not junkies or freaks, but people who were just as comfortable with drugs like weed, booze, or coke as we are - and we're not weird, are we? Hell no, we're just overworked professionals who need to relax now and then, have a bit of the whoop and the giggle, right? | morality past philosophy | Hunter S. Thompson | |
| 302a031 | There was no sense in blowing everything away for the sake of some violent ape I'd never even met. | Hunter S. Thompson | ||
| b23ea86 | There was also the fact that sending a penniless writer to get $135 worth of beer was -- as Khrushchev said of Nixon -- 'like sending a goat to tend the cabbage'. | Hunter S. Thompson | ||
| 100567f | Positivity is far more than a mental preference. It changes your brain, literally, and it changes the people around you. It's the nearest thing we have to magic. | Scott Adams | ||
| 0942b3b | I'm sorry I was short with him--but I don't like a man to approach me telling me it for my sake. "Maybe it was," said Wylie "It's poor technique." "I'd all for it," said Wylie. "I'm vain as a woman. If anybody pretends to be interested in me, I'll ask for more. I like advice." Stahr shook his head distastefully. Wylie kept on ribbing him--he was one of those to whom this privilege was permitted. "You fall for some kinds of flattery," he sai.. | incredulity normalcy personal restraint the-last-tycoon | F. Scott Fitzgerald | |
| e2e2e3e | The marketing department uses many advanced techniques to match products and buyers in a way that mximizes profits. For example, they give away keychains. | Scott Adams | ||
| 7520e67 | Never dismiss anyone's value until you know him. | value | Susan Cooper | |
| b9dd879 | More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless nights. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark? | Toni Morrison | ||
| 7b8ad39 | Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony - perhaps, sometimes, so he hoped - might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out window-panes. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 46c18fc | Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why. But look here, don't carry it inside and don't give it to nobody else. Try to understand it, but if you can't, just forget it and keep yourself strong, man. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 4038953 | Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devo.. | solitude | Toni Morrison | |
| 2721829 | She did not tell them to clean up their lives, or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek, or its glory-bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have is the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they could not have it. | Toni Morrison | ||
| a415c22 | Then summer came. A summer limp with the weight of blossomed things. Heavy sunflowers weeping over fences; iris curling and browning at the edges far away from their purple hearts; ears of corn letting their auburn hair wind down to their stalks. AND THE BOYS. The beautiful, beautiful boys who dotted the landscape like jewels, split the air with their shouts in the field, and thickened the river with their shining wet backs. EVEN THEIR FOOT.. | Toni Morrison | ||
| cd3db70 | No more running-from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this Earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D. Garner: it cost too much! | Toni Morrison | ||
| 1b3c997 | Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy's. | Toni Morrison | ||
| a084116 | People who die bad don't stay in the ground. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 8cd3ec7 | All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had never named him. Had called him "my parrot" all these years. "My parrot." "Love you. "Love you." Did the dogs get him? Or did he get the message - that she said, "My parrot" and he said, "Love you," and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him - and manage somehow to fly away on wings that had not soare.. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 0026097 | Shallow believers prefer a shallow God. | Toni Morrison | ||
| dce726b | I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it. | blackness race-and-racism-in-america | Toni Morrison | |
| e041b90 | She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen. | Toni Morrison |