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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 41bc28e | The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief? | happiness relief | Sebastian Faulks | |
| 95c0997 | And in that history you're trying to connect to something that once was yours - to something purer, better, something that you lost or something, maybe, that you never knew but that you feel you knew. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 8895711 | The first symptom of the trouble appeared when Madison studied Hamilton's proposal for the funding of the domestic debt. On the one hand, Hamilton's recommendation looked straightforward: All citizens who owned government securities should be reimbursed at par--that is, the full value of the government's original promise. But many original holders of the securities, mainly veterans of the American Revolution who had received them as pay for.. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| 0bed93a | For Madison, on the other hand, "a Public Debt is a Public curse," and "in a Representative Government greater than in any other."26" | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| a4190fe | I am not a Federalist," he declared in 1789, "because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever.... If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| 09b0d80 | Like the classic it has become, the Farewell Address has demonstrated the capacity to assume different shapes in different eras, to change color, if you will, in varying shades of light. | interpretation | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| 572a446 | In a very real sense, we are complicitous in their achievement, since we are the audience for which they were performing; knowing we would be watching helped to keep them on their best behavior. | history witnessing | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| 0cea967 | permitting the continuance and expansion of slavery as the price to pay for nationhood. This decision meant that tragedy was also built into the American founding, and the only question we can ask is whether it was a Greek tragedy, meaning inevitable and unavoidable, or a Shakespearean tragedy, meaning that it could have gone the other way, and the failure was a function of the racial prejudices the founders harbored in their heads and hear.. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| 57d1bb1 | It took him (Washington) more than a year to gain control over his own aggressive instincts. | maturation discipline self-control | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| ad36bb0 | In addition, the most reliable and recent studies of African tribal culture demonstrated that slavery was a long-standing custom among the Africans themselves, so enslaved Africans in America were simply experiencing a condition here that they would otherwise experience, probably in more oppressive fashion, in their mother country. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| f839521 | The old adage applied: if God were in the details, Colonel Washington would have been there to greet him upon arrival. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| 3ee5140 | Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like slavery, and therefore too true to be good. | slavery | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| b5f30f1 | Before dawn, the air smelled of lemons. | nature | Luanne Rice | |
| 0419d0b | People who don't like doing things together probably...well probably shouldn't get married. | Luanne Rice | ||
| 99dec46 | The tree had become our unspoken symbol of that important Christmas when we had all dug deep and fought for one another--for our survival. For our family. For our happiness. And in the process, discovering the true meaning of Christmas. | veterans holiday ptsd | Mary Alice Monroe | |
| 8ac5804 | This dog had shown more courage than I. This great, powerful, beautiful dog was willing to take a chance on me - a broken, depressed, lonely Marine. | veterans holiday ptsd | Mary Alice Monroe | |
| b8c8bca | All stories come to an end. That moment when we sigh and close the book, perhaps sit back in our chair and rest our palm over the cover, is met with quixotic emotions. On the one hand, we're satisfied if the author successfully tied up loose ends, turned a memorable phrase and rewarded the hero's moral choice with his heart's desire. Yet we're also saddened that the adventure is over. Sometimes when we see that we only have a few pages left.. | Mary Alice Monroe | ||
| a656537 | Sometimes people get angry and do things they shouldn't. Things they regret. | regret | Mary Alice Monroe | |
| 2b60851 | A woman does not need to live among many people to be content. She needs but one true companion, one soul mate with whom to share this long journey we call life. | Mary Alice Monroe | ||
| fc49831 | You ever work with a UN stabilization force?" Ash asked. Harvath shook his head. "Then trust me. As the old saying goes, you can't spell unprofessional, unethical, or unaccountable without the UN. The cholera outbreak the old blue helmets caused in Haiti? Over ten thousand dead, and it has spread to the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The rapes and sex crimes they have committed in Mali and everywhere else? The stories of their depravity and b.. | Brad Thor | ||
| 0585714 | Commissioner Harris at the far end stared along the mad pathway. This was his first child and it had already become a murderer. | michael-ondaatje rowland lewis patrick harris lion nun skin | Michael Ondaatje | |
| 5745634 | The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is as early as fifty-five for men and fifty for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than six hundred Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, writers, musicians, and on and on and on." | Michael Lewis | ||
| 42a19ce | The "consumer loan" piles that Wall Street firms, led by Goldman Sachs, asked AIG FP to insure went from being 2 percent subprime mortgages to being 95 percent subprime mortgages. In a matter of months, AIG FP, in effect, bought $50 billion in triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds by insuring them against default." -- | Michael Lewis | ||
| 78fa2e3 | With stagnant wages and booming consumption, the cash-strapped American masses had a virtually unlimited demand for loans but an uncertain ability to repay them. | Michael Lewis | ||
| fc24924 | People no longer are responsible for what happens in the market, because computers make all the decisions. | Michael Lewis | ||
| d3f0698 | When banking stops, credit stops, and when credit stops, trade stops, and when trade stops--well, the city of Chicago had only eight days of chlorine on hand for its water supply. Hospitals ran out of medicine. The entire modern world was premised on the ability to buy now and pay later. | Michael Lewis | ||
| b6516f1 | How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation? | Michael Lewis | ||
| bdbe8fc | Only someone who has Asperger's would read a subprime mortgage bond prospectus, | Michael Lewis | ||
| 9b4d61f | The creation of the mortgage bond market, a decade earlier, had extended Wall Street into a place it had never before been: the debts of ordinary Americans. | mortgage-bonds recession wall-street | Michael Lewis | |
| 97e35af | I'd thought it strange, after the financial crisis, in which Goldman had played such an important role, that the only Goldman Sachs employee who had been charged with any sort of crime was the employee who had taken something from Goldman Sachs. | Michael Lewis | ||
| f6467ff | The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became--though even to use words like "corrupt" and "sinister" made serious people uncomfortable, and so Brad avoided them." | Michael Lewis | ||
| 275eeef | not because he had the slightest interest in God but because he was curious about its internal contradictions. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 1c16036 | After the meeting, RBC conducted a study, never released publicly, in which they found that more than two hundred SEC staffers since 2007 had left their government jobs to work for high-frequency trading firms or the firms that lobbied Washington | Michael Lewis | ||
| 5c045ba | The politicians in Ireland speak Gaelic the way the Real Housewives of Orange County speak French. | Michael Lewis | ||
| f55fc65 | The markets were now run by technology, but the technologists were still treated like tools. Nobody bothered to explain the business to them, but they were forced to adapt to its demands and exposed to its failures--which was, perhaps, why there had been so many more conspicuous failures. | Michael Lewis | ||
| f008845 | We tried to trademark proximity, but you can't because it's a word, | Michael Lewis | ||
| 8961776 | Someone out there was using the fact that stock market orders arrived at different times at different exchanges to front-run orders from one market to another. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 9002324 | The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 13d6803 | There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, "It's impossible to know for sure." "What will the price of oil be in ten years?" was such a question. That didn't mean you gave up trying to find an answer; you just couched that answer in probabilistic terms." | Michael Lewis | ||
| d29556f | Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called hidden people--or, to put it more plainly, elves--in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour .. | Michael Lewis | ||
| f99b1ac | if you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 08993e9 | TWO THINGS STRIKE every Irish person when he comes to America, Irish friends tell me: the vastness of the country, and the seemingly endless desire of its people to talk about their personal problems. Two things strike an American when he comes to Ireland: how small it is, and how tight-lipped. An Irish person with a personal problem takes it into a hole with him, like a squirrel with a nut before winter. He tortures himself and sometimes h.. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 6440d4e | I'm now convinced that the worst thing a man can do with a telephone without breaking the law is to call someone he doesn't know and try to sell that person something he doesn't want. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 4652981 | For a lot of the players it was their first exposure to the Southern female - the most flagrant cheater in the mutual disarmament pact known as feminism. Lipstick! Hairdos! Submissiveness! | Michael Lewis |