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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ef23914 | if you're not just a little bit afraid of letting down one or both of your parents, then you must've had shitty parents. I'm not talking about paralyzing fear--paralyzing fear also means shitty parents--I'm talking about a sliver of worry, a shard of concern. Take my parents, for example. I couldn't care less what my pop thought. He was a shitty parent. | Penny Reid | ||
| 244776b | If she doesn't learn to weld here, she'll just learn it on the streets. | Penny Reid | ||
| 49bf866 | You can't tell me that I don't know you. I see you. I see you better than you see yourself. And everything about you is beautiful. | Penny Reid | ||
| 3fdfb29 | Bullshit was the adult version of Santa Claus. For reasons I'll never comprehend, the general population seemed to enjoy wallowing, spouting, and believing in bullshit. | Penny Reid | ||
| 00a54ae | Old things have soul. Then to me she'd add on a whisper, 'And young things have spirit. | Penny Reid | ||
| a1e6c35 | Janie makes me a better person." She gave mea small smile before she turned to the front of the chapel. "You make yourself a better person. Janie is just a reminder of why it's worth it." | Penny Reid | ||
| 31d09c1 | You're wicked smart. And cool. And drama free, which is a huge deal. Drama free is at the top of my list these days. You can be intimidating." "Me? But I'm a Hufflepuff." | Penny Reid | ||
| 3c1a362 | He wanted me. I wanted him. This was a frightening and thrilling prospect, because when I pushed him, he pushed back. | Penny Reid | ||
| f302fe0 | You'll make me cry." His eyes widened a little, moved between mine. "I wouldn't." "You would. I've seen it, I see how you treat girls." His hand at my waist tightened. "I wouldn't do that to you. You're not - I know you're not like that. We wouldn't be that." "I don't trust you." He sighed, but not with impatience. "I know." He nodded. "But you will." | Penny Reid | ||
| 9700abd | Who thinks, I'm going to cheat on my girlfriend, but I've got too much of a social conscience to leave my condom wrapper on the floor--heaven forbid I litter. | Penny Reid | ||
| 712f259 | You should have me there as your representative to make sure he doesn't try to zap you with his sexy ray." "Zap me with his sexy ray?" "You know what I'm talking about. I barely saw him and I'm feeling the effects. He's like an...electromagnetic pulse of sexy or something. So does his friend, Eric. They shouldn't be allowed in public." "That's not how electromagnets work." "Whatever. You get my point." | Penny Reid | ||
| 5d7113f | She told me I should be proud of my healthy shape and healthy body and love it and treasure it because it was mine. No one, she said, could tell me what to think of my body. If I let another person's opinion matter I was giving him or her control over me, and I had complete control over my own self-image. | Penny Reid | ||
| 7147086 | Men should come with manuals, subtitles, and reset buttons. | Penny Reid | ||
| 9013b2c | to those who swear our young are on the road to perdition take comfort in this- every generation has felt somewhat the same for two or three thousand years and the still the world goes on. | Karen Hesse | ||
| 09bc4cb | I have a hunger, for more than food. I have a hunger bigger than Joyce City. I want tongues to tie, and eyes to shine at me like they do at Mad Dog Craddock. Course they never will, not with my hands all scarred up, looking like the earth itself, all parched and rough and cracking, but if I played right enough, maybe they would see past my hands. Maybe they could feel at ease with me again, and maybe then, I could feel at east with myself. | Karen Hesse | ||
| cb37f6f | Singing when no one else is around is always good. I especially like belters. Good, loud singing is probably better medicine than half the stuff they sell in pill bottles, and it's cheaper, too. I also think people should never turn down an opportunity to hold a baby. There's something about the feel of a new baby in your arms that just fixes you. | Erin McKean | ||
| 4915e7a | Help me to see new ways of being as I release old ways of seeing. | Iyanla Vanzant | ||
| 0f7f7e6 | Forgiveness is not forgetting; it is simply denying your pain the right to control your life. | Iyanla Vanzant | ||
| 095fe11 | The greatest gift of surrender was that it helped me to realize that it is arrogant of me not to forgive myself when God forgives me. | Iyanla Vanzant | ||
| bca9009 | COMPARISON IS AN ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST THE SELF | Iyanla Vanzant | ||
| 540860b | Once you become willing to let it all go, God will open a new space in your heart and rewire your brain to know, receive, and express love in healthy ways. I forgive myself for believing that what I made up about who they were is the truth I had to live with for years of my life. | Iyanla Vanzant | ||
| ef3e461 | Elizabeth [Alexander] is right, of course. It's a stirring fact that our slave ancestors left behind not documents of property but an incredible amount of cultural wealth. It is a tragedy that we are only able to imagine their individual contributions to that collective wealth- and the worlds they might have made had they been free. | Henry Louis Gates Jr. | ||
| 3eb2623 | Using the voice is a physical act, one that first announces the existence of the body of residence and then trumpets its arrival in a public space. | persona | Elizabeth Alexander | |
| 377078c | People keep saying, "God is in the details". He isn't in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure, and incompetence." | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| ba9523c | One also, in our milieu, simply didn't meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did--this was in the days of crew-cuts and short-legged pants--they, too, often really did sport crew-cuts and trousers that mysteriously ended several inches short of the instep. Why was that? It obviously wasn't poverty. A colleague of my father's had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had .. | trousers world-war-ii | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 2acd456 | Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by i.. | africa american-imperialism anti-americanism britain british-empire caribbean imperialism iraq-war morality politics slave-trade united-states | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 0ec95dd | Adlai Stevenson once said to Richard Nixon: "If you stop telling lies about me I'll stop telling the truth about you." | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 33a41ac | Trotsky was so much an intellectual that in the final analysis, Marxism was not quite enough for him. | leon-trotsky marxism trotskyism | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 2d24d43 | The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self-consciousness and self-feeling of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| fb4fa86 | In The Future of an Illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death. This critique of wish-thinking is strong and unanswerable, | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| dedc406 | The neo-cons, or some of them, decided that they would back Clinton when he belatedly decided for Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic, and this even though they loathed Clinton, because the battle against religious and ethnic dictatorship in the Balkans took precedence. This, by the way, was partly a battle to save Muslims from Catholic and Christian Orthodox killers. That impressed me. The neo-cons also took the view, quite early on, that .. | balkans bertolt-brecht bill-clinton bosnia bosnian-war catholicism christianity dictatorship ethnicity halliburton islam jihad kosovo kosovo-war leftism liberalism neoconservatism persecution persecution-of-muslims politics religion revolution saddam-hussein slobodan-milosevic the-weekly-standard trent-lott war | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 87537a5 | There is a germ of religion in human nature so strong that whenever an order of men can persuade the people by flattery or terror that they have salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fraud, violence, or usurpation. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| ae2bee7 | At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive. | mysticism tautology | Christopher Hitchens | |
| ab49eaa | The conventional word that is employed to describe tyranny is "systematic." The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.) Thus, the ruled can always be found to be in the wrong." | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| edbe47c | The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as 'Fat Man and Little Boy.') And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It was in January 1968 that the U.S.S. strayed into North Korean waters, and was boarded and captured. One sailor was killed;.. | 1976 2000 2001 axe-murder-incident china chinese-people kim-il-sung kim-jong-il korean-demilitarized-zone korean-peninsula korean-war land-mines madeleine-albright mao-zedong north-korea nuclear-weapons ottawa-treaty politics pyongyang seoul sichuan south-korea taedong-river totalitarianism united-states united-states-and-wmd united-states-army uss-pueblo-ager-2 war washington-dc | Christopher Hitchens | |
| bdd556c | On the other hand, and as if by way of compensation, religion teaches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that god cares for them individually, and it claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in mind. This explains the supercilious expression on the faces of those who practice religion ostentatiously: pray excuse my modesty and humility but I happen to be busy on an errand for god. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 064eb99 | Arguments for atheism can be divided into two main categories: those that dispute the existence of god and those that demonstrate the ill effects of religion. It might be better if I broadened this somewhat, and said those that dispute the existence of an intervening god. Religion is, after all, more than the belief in a supreme being. It is the cult of that supreme being and the belief that his or her wishes have been made known or can be .. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 984c8f8 | During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Any.. | bill-clinton carol-blue chauvinism corruption democratic-party-us elections history impeachment impeachment-of-bill-clinton lies misogyny money new-democrats new-hampshire pathology politics presidents republican-party-us sexism trials united-states us-presidential-election-1992 us-presidents us-senate women | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 72aa5b2 | T]he hyphenation question is, and always has been and will be, different for English immigrants. One can be an Italian-American, a Greek-American, an Irish-American and so forth. (Jews for some reason prefer the words the other way around, as in 'American Jewish Congress' or 'American Jewish Committee.') And any of those groups can and does have a 'national day' parade on Fifth Avenue in New York. But there is no such thing as an 'English-A.. | united-states | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 589f875 | British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on uttering the words 'Special Relationship' to describe relations between Britain and America, lest the specialness itself vanish like a phantom at cock-crow. | britain diplomacy foreign-relations foreign-relations-of-the-us superstition uk-us-relations united-states washington | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 59ff8dd | Arab nationalism in its traditional form was the way in which secular Arab Christians like Edward had found and kept a place for themselves, while simultaneously avoiding the charge of being too 'Western.' It was very noticeable among the Palestinians that the most demonstrably 'extreme' nationalists--and Marxists--were often from Christian backgrounds. George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh used to be celebrated examples of this phenomenon, long.. | arab-nationalism arabs christianity christians edward-said george-habash hamas islamic-jihad marxists nationalism nationalists nayef-hawatmeh overcompensation palestinians secularists | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 74920fc | All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 14bc41f | The holy book in the longest continuous use--the Talmud--commands the observant one to thank his maker every day that he was not born a woman. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 694e2c6 | Generally it must be stated that realpolitik has been better at dividing than at ruling. Take it as a whole since Kissinger called on the Shah in 1972, and see what the harvest has been. | realpolitik | Christopher Hitchens |