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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bde2420 | My love for you is like diarrhea," Sunglasses said. "I just can't hold it in." | Harlan Coben | ||
| a64b251 | I always read everything when I was a kid-and I do mean everything, from Nancy Drew to Dickens to my dad's John D. MacDonald-but then I went to regular school and the English teachers started telling me to read 'real' books, so I tried. And you know, I kinda went off reading for a while. I had already been reading literary novels and the classics mixed in with whatever else, but-" She waved a hand. "So I went back to reading whatever I want.. | reading truth | Barbara O'Neal | |
| fd5c948 | It was to have been a quiet evening at home. Home is the Busted Flush, 52-foot barge-type houseboat, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale. | John D. MacDonald | ||
| 67dbe32 | It is one thing to look at a mistreated boat and another to look at a tomb. The silence of the bay seemed more intense. And I could see the glint of the carrion flies. | death | John D. MacDonald | |
| ca671a3 | Love is love, David. Commitment is commitment. Integrity and consideration and communication, honesty and genuine care, compassion, support... those are the things that make a worthwhile relationship, whether that's two people, or three people, or ten people. | Jade West | ||
| ffe18c4 | For the myths of the East, the myths of the West, the myths of men, and the myths of women--these have so saturated our consciousness that truthful contact between nations and lovers can only be the result of heroic effort. | David Henry Hwang | ||
| 96e6f9e | was too young to know if my heart misbehaved itself in any way, | Christy Brown | ||
| 6d7b4ac | Literary censorship should not be necessary within the parameters of the law because it's simply a reflection of prevailing social prejudices! Writing should challenge and change prevailing ideas - churning the guts and ruffling feathers of friends, family and society. Antagonizing is a product of open writing. Expecting less is resignation and stagnation that slides the art into the status-quo. | Jack Tar | ||
| 27faf96 | Religion poisons everything. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 75bb0e0 | But there is a reason why religions insist so much on strange events in the sky, as well as on less quantifiable phenomena such as dreams and visions. All of these things cater to our inborn stupidity, and our willingness to be persuaded against all the evidence that we are indeed the center of the universe and that everything is arranged with us in mind. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| cfee841 | All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens--a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins--is talking out of the back of his neck. | Terry Eagleton | ||
| 862380a | The friends of Galtieri, Saddam Hussein, Mullah Omar and Milosevic make unconvincing defenders of humanitarian values, and it can be seen that their inept and sometimes inane arguments lack either the principles or the seriousness that are required in such debates. | pacifism leftism | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 7db9867 | Yet isn't it all--all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga--exactly like that? And isn't some of it a little bit more serious? For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her 'greatness' (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with whi.. | lies sex politics ambition 2008 expediency hillary-clinton iowa iowa-caucuses new-hampshire new-hampshire-primary self-promotion united-states-elections-2008 bill-clinton iraq iraq-war united-states greatness | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 369255d | The arrogance and brutality of empire are not repealed when they temporarily get deployed in a just cause. | war arrogance brutality war-on-terror imperialism united-states | Michael Kazin | |
| f6a0672 | It would be nice to think that the menacing aspects of North Korea were for display also, that the bombs and reactors were Potemkin showcases or bargaining chips. On the plane from Beijing I met a group of unsmiling Texan types wearing baseball caps. They were the 'in-country' team from the International Atomic Energy Agency, there to inspect and neutralize North Korea's plutonium rods. Not a nice job, but, as they say, someone has to do it.. | baseball-caps beijing bombs iaea north-korea-and-wmd nyongbyon plutonium nuclear-weapons texas north-korea china | Christopher Hitchens | |
| ec86f7a | It's difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words "Thou shalt not." But who cannot summon the confidence to say: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature--why w.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 52258ed | I began the project of judging Mother Teresa's reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| caa8cff | Our near absolute dominion over nature has, however, confronted us with one brilliant and ironic and inescapable insight. The decryption of DNA is not only useful in putting a merciful but overdue end to theories of creationism and racism but also enlightening in instructing us that we are ourselves animals. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 14b5182 | It has been said that alcohol is a good servant and a bad master. Nice try. The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 814e66d | The human species is an animal species without very much variation within it, and it is idle and futile to imagine that a voyage to Tibet, say, will discover an entirely different harmony with nature or eternity. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| c09d809 | Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers,-and that the aspiration for a civilized life - that "universal eligibility to be noble," as Saul Bellow's Augie March so imperishably phrases it - is proper and common to all." | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 03d18ac | With alcoholic ritual, the whole point is generosity. If you open a bottle of wine, for heaven's sake have the grace to throw away the damn cork. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 8f1034f | As he grew older, which was mostly in my absence, my firstborn son, Alexander, became ever more humorous and courageous. There came a time, as the confrontation with the enemies of our civilization became more acute, when he sent off various applications to enlist in the armed forces. I didn't want to be involved in this decision either way, especially since I was being regularly taunted for not having 'sent' any of my children to fight in .. | fathers war humour courage morality civilisation iraq war-on-terror iraq-war sons enemies resistance | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 2d8f7a3 | Reading his autobiography many years later, I was astonished to find that Edward since boyhood had--not unlike Isaiah Berlin--often felt himself ungainly and ill-favored and awkward in bearing. He had always seemed to me quite the reverse: a touch dandyish perhaps but--as the saying goes--perfectly secure in his masculinity. On one occasion, after lunch in Georgetown, he took me with him to a renowned local tobacconist and asked to do somet.. | autobiography carol-blue georgetown-washington heterosexuality museum-of-modern-art pipes purses stanford edward-said manhattan masculinity self-confidence shyness smoking | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 2c31d73 | Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.. | ben-sonnenberg essays french-people grand-street-magazine in-search-of-lost-time john-ruskin marcel-proust revisionism snobbery terence-kilmartin english french paris | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 48f7b0c | The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban's annihilation of music and culture? The enslavement of women? | women music taliban jihad war-on-terror terrorism united-states islam islamism | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 8023e68 | Remember that it is 'free-thinking Jews,' not Jews as such, who are defined as the undesirables by T.S. Eliot in . | free-thought ts-eliot antisemitism jews | Christopher Hitchens | |
| f0ebb25 | It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one. | politics land-reform land-reform-in-zimbabwe prescience zimbabwe land | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 808f52c | The point of protesting about 'moral equivalence' is surely not to blur moral choices on 'our side'. Is it? | morality moral-equivalence | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 9fb6046 | A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term "we" or "us" without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that "we" are all agreed on "our" interests and identity. Populist authoritarians try to slip it past you; so do some kinds of literary critics ("our sensibilities are enraged...") Always ask who this "we" is; as often as .. | politics surveillance language populism | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 1d47ade | Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 8cf7e84 | You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 65cfbc5 | Very often, people embarking on such guesswork make the vulgar assumption that the lower the motives, the more likely they are to be authentic. | motives misunderstanding | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 61828b5 | What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. This is even more true when the "evidence" eventually offered is so shoddy and self-interested." | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 697fa8d | As the great Eugene Debs used to tell his socialist voters in the 1912 election campaign, he would not lead them into a Promised Land even if he could, because if they were trusting enough to be led in, they would be trusting enough to be led out again. He urged them, in other words, to do their own thinking. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 3ae798f | I was extremely shy of approaching my hero but he, as I found out, was sorely in need of company. By then almost completely blind, he was claustrated and even a little confused and this may help explain the rather shocking attitude that he took to the blunt trauma that was being inflicted in the streets and squares around him. ' ' he intoned to me when the topic first came up, as it had to: ' ' This couplet he claimed (I have never been abl.. | bawd edmund-blunden evelyn-waugh jorge-rafael-videla juan-peron lingustics jorge-luis-borges | Christopher Hitchens | |
| b1eba03 | I have had my mother's wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way of the Levant, and passing through Eastern and Central Europe before crossing to the British Isles. And all of this knowable by an analysis of the cells on the inside of my mouth. I almost prefer the more rambling and indirect and journalistic invest.. | history determinism british-isles central-europe eastern-europe genealogy genetics investigation levant mediterranean-sea national-geographic savanna sub-saharan-africa journalism ancestry | Christopher Hitchens | |
| ccc0f2b | It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 5961d05 | Have a lived life instead of a career. Put yourself in the safekeeping of good taste. Lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses. . . . If you don't like the style of others, cultivate your own. Get to know the tricks of reproduction, be a self-publisher even in conversation, and then the joy of working can fill your days. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 5875386 | I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in , and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism' was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Edward talked about English literature and quoted from it, he passed the test that I always privately apply: Do you truly this subject and could you bear to live for one moment if it was oblite.. | literature edward-said postmodernism literary-criticism | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 1610474 | In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed. | irony losers minorities outsiders oppression | Christopher Hitchens | |
| e04ba61 | And how easy it is to recognize the revenant shapes that the old unchanging enemies--racism, leader worship, superstition--assume when they reappear amongst us (often bodyguarded by their new apologists). | racism liberalism superstition | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 59a8c03 | Any critique of realism must begin with a sober assessment of the horrors of peace. | noninterventionism realpolitik sudan | Christopher Hitchens | |
| c4eeb7e | In whatever kind of a "race" life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist." | Christopher Hitchens |