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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a99f453 | I wonder what it's like to be dead. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 20b5725 | The thunder of false modesty was deafening. | modesty thunder | Sebastian Faulks | |
| 05d24fd | It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 2959c25 | They're so attached to their patterns that they've forgotten rule number one of human behavior: there are no patterns. People just do things. There's no such things as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 95a2551 | I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven't got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel I'm close to it. Some days, I'm so close I can almost smell it. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 84c52e4 | Jefferson appeared to his enemies as an American version of Candide; Hamilton as an American Machiavelli. | american-revolution thomas-jefferson | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| 8cc29c0 | A man got to have a code. - Omar Little | man | Michael Lewis | |
| f262a40 | The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. "Confirmation" | Michael Lewis | ||
| e920762 | Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not. | Michael Lewis | ||
| f5a7cc7 | The Piranha didn't talk like a person. He said things like "If you fuckin' buy this bond in a fuckin' trade, you're fuckin' fucked." And "If you don't pay fuckin' attention to the fuckin' two-year, you get your fuckin' face ripped off." Noun, verb, adjective: fucker, fuck, fucking. No part of speech was spared. His world was filled with copulating inanimate objects and people getting their faces ripped off." | bond-trading human-piranha salomon-brothers wall-street | Michael Lewis | |
| d446d05 | What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant. | motivation objectivity | Michael Lewis | |
| 71d6e98 | The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 51700ba | The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 671f4e2 | a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there. | travel | Michael Lewis | |
| f9fe15f | A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term. For instance, you might pay $200,000 a year to buy a ten-year credit default swap on $100 million in General Electric bonds. The most you could lose was $2 million: $200,000 a year for ten years. The most you could make was $100 million, if General El.. | credit-default-swap wall-street | Michael Lewis | |
| 3abe7c1 | The desire to avoid loss ran deep, and expressed itself most clearly when the gamble came with the possibility of both loss and gain. That is, when it was like most gambles in life. To get most people to flip a coin for a hundred bucks, you had to offer them far better than even odds. If they were going to lose $100 if the coin landed on heads, they would need to win $200 if it landed on tails. To get them to flip a coin for ten thousand bu.. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 31abcb4 | Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time. | sports | Michael Lewis | |
| 267febf | Every form of strength is also a weakness. Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. | Michael Lewis | ||
| ded0ea7 | Amos was not merely an optimist. He himself to be an optimist because he had decided pessimism was stupid. "When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice," Amos liked to say. "Once when you worry about it and the second time when it happens." | Michael Lewis | ||
| 9489b8d | Charlie Ledley--curiously uncertain Charlie Ledley--was odd in his belief that the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 5c0ae9c | Ignorance allows people to disregard the consequences of their actions. And sometimes it leads to consequences even they did not intend. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 18109f4 | if another person got on that elevator to travel eight feet upward, I couldn't have been responsible for what I did. I had been pushed to the limit. The next time it happens, I swore to myself, I'm going to reach out and pinch that One Floorer and say, "You get out there and walk! You won't come close to burning a fraction of the three thousand calories you ate at lunch, but maybe by the time you reach the landing, you'll pass out from exha.. | Laurie Notaro | ||
| 9b0baff | It's a well-known fact that black sheep should never have lambs. You know what you get when you take a black sheep and give it a lamb? You get a thing called "supervised visitation" that's what." | Laurie Notaro | ||
| c1b7b4e | I'm not big on meeting new people, especially new people I'm never going to see again. There's all kinds of uninteresting, insincere banter, I have to pretend to be a nice person, and because 96 percent of the world's population are dim bulbs, odds are excellent that I'll be stuck in the middle of a Spontaneous Freak Encounter. | Laurie Notaro | ||
| a85b8e3 | Sometimes I think everyone's an attorney. | Michael Crichton | ||
| d77c7d4 | All heart surgeons are bastards, and Conway is no exception. | Michael Crichton | ||
| d72e81c | They had an inner fire of passion to drive them, rather than a desire for wealth. That's why I believe most successful people achieve their greatness because they have something to express inside. Denis Waitley | Janet Bray Attwood | ||
| 0f77dea | The whole experience reminded me of my own 'old lady' phase that I went through in high school while I was reading Somerset Maugham... The embroidered sweaters, the costume jewelry... I remember genuinely WANTING to be old then, to act as if the business of my life was already all but over, and that I was preternaturally wise because of it... God, the stupid things you'll do to try and meet boys... | Chris Ware | ||
| 16a61cf | The hard things break. The soft things bend. The stubborn ones batter themselves against all that is immovable. The flexible adapt to what is before them. Of course, we are all hard and soft, stubborn and flexible, and so we all break until we learn to bend and are battered until we accept what is before us. This brings to mind the Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh, the stubborn, hard king who sought to ask the Immortal One the secret of life. He .. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 9bd815b | we may spend much of our time unaware and unenlightened, yet the presence of Truth and God, like a deep and ancient friend, can shape our entire lives. So the inner task becomes how do we make a lasting friendship with the Unities that are larger than us? How do we keep their light in our heart when no stars appear in sight? | Mark Nepo | ||
| b5f38f2 | Being a Pilgrim To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim. We all start out as pilgrims, wanting to journey and hoping to be transformed by the journey. But, just as it is impossible when listening to an orchestra to hear the whole of the symphony for very long before we are drawn to hear only the piano or the violi.. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 10b7dca | Now, where were we? Read me back the last line." " 'Read me back the last line,' " read back the corporal who could take shorthand. "Not my last line, stupid!" the colonel shouted. "Somebody else's." " 'Read me back the last line,' " read back the corporal. "That's my last line again!" shrieked the colonel, turning purple with anger. "Oh, no, sir," corrected the corporal. "That's my last line. I read it to you just a moment ago. Don't you r.. | Joseph Heller | ||
| 8426b10 | Consciously, sir, consciously," Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. "I hate them consciously." | Joseph Heller | ||
| df05e2c | everyone knew that sin was evil, and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively marvellous. Consequently, it followed logically that telling lies and defecting from duty could not be sins. The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalisation, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice.. | Joseph Heller | ||
| 0eed41c | Be thankful you're healthy." "Be bitter you're not going to stay that way." "Be glad you're even alive." "Be furious you're going to die." | Joseph Heller | ||
| 088fe35 | They were four clean-cut kids who were having lots of fun, and they were driving Yossarian nuts. He could not make them understand that he was a crotchety old fogey of twenty-eight, that he belonged to another generation, another era, another world, that having a good time bored him and was not worth the effort, and that they bored him, too. He could not make them shut up; they were worse than women. They had not brains enough to be introve.. | Joseph Heller | ||
| f333c08 | Only a fraction of his countrymen would give up their lives to win it (the war), and it was not his ambition to be among them. To die or not to die, that was the question, and Clevinger grew limp trying to answer it. History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though.. | Joseph Heller | ||
| f8c4354 | You know, that might be the answer - to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail. | Joseph Heller | ||
| 20d0770 | How do you feel Yossarian?" "Fine. No, I'm very frightened." "That's good," said Major Danby. "It proves you're still alive. It won't be fun." Yossarian started out. "Yes it will." | Joseph Heller | ||
| f666c6d | The chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that telling lies and defecting from duty were sins. On the other hand, everyone knew that sin was evil and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively marvelous. Consequently, it followed logically that telling lies and defecting from duty could not be sins. The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of prote.. | rationalization sin | Joseph Heller | |
| 95ebbf4 | He wanted to write urgent love letters to her all day long and crowd the endless pages with desperate, uninhibited confessions of his humble worship and need with careful instructions for administering artificial respiration. He wanted to pour out to her in torrents of self-pity all his unbearable loneliness and despair and warn her never to leave the boric acid or the aspirin in reach of the children or to cross a street against the traffi.. | Joseph Heller | ||
| 0fe7c2b | Hungry Joe was crazy, and no one knew it better than Yossarian, who did everything he could to help him. Hungry Joe just wouldn't listen to Yossarian. Hungry Joe just wouldn't listen because he thought Yossarian was crazy | funny | Joseph Heller | |
| fc441c5 | I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to revel ourselves but to hide. I was as sure then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Iranian fiction I could gain access to a real understanding of political and social events. (p289) | how-fiction-informs-reality purpose | Azar Nafisi | |
| 4e72d86 | It was one of those rare nights when I was kept awake not by my nightmares and anxieties but by something exciting and exhilarating. Most nights I lay awake waiting for some unexpected disaster...I think I somehow felt that as long as I was conscious, nothing bad could happen... | Azar Nafisi |