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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d17b1e5 | Remember this study when you are in a negotiation--make your initial request far too high. You have to start somewhere, and your initial decision or calculation greatly influences all the choices that follow, cascading out, each tethered to the anchors set before. Many of the choices you make every day are reruns of past decisions; as if traveling channels dug into a dirt road by a wagon train of selections, you follow the path created by y.. | David McRaney | ||
| 0aa283e | So the next time you get ready to launch into one hundred reasons why your cell phone or TV or car is better than someone else's, hesitate. Because you're not trying to change the other person's mind--you're trying to prop up your own. | David McRaney | ||
| 443588a | In the background, while you crochet and golf and browse cat videos, science is fighting against your stupidity. No other human enterprise is fighting as hard, or at least not fighting and winning. | David McRaney | ||
| 18f3bfb | All brains are bards, all selves audiences to the tales of who they are. | David McRaney | ||
| 4fa31c4 | who's an ex-diplomat of all people to complain if the wrapping is prettier than what's inside? | John le Carré | ||
| 14b9237 | They might have you, and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company. | materialism | John le Carré | |
| c08c699 | Merridew might not have been the slenderest of men or the tallest. But he had grip, he had cunning and like many fat men he had unexpected resources of indignation which he was able to turn on like a flood when they were needed. | John le Carré | ||
| ec5f061 | You'll just have to take our word for it.' 'Your Service's word?' 'For the time being, yes.' 'On the strength of what? Aren't you supposed to be the gentlemen who lie for the good of their country?' 'That's diplomats. We're not gentlemen.' 'So you lie to save your hides.' 'That's politicians. Different game entirely. | John le Carré | ||
| 32f0f37 | Promise to build a chap a house, he won't believe you. Threaten to burn his place down, he'll do what you tell him. Fact of life. | John le Carré | ||
| f9cdf49 | I wished I could make them throw everything over for a flawed and impossible passion, only to see the objective it turn against them, proving there is no reward for love except the experience of loving and nothing to be learned by it except humility. | John le Carré | ||
| 163732b | If a decade of diplomatic life had taught Toby one thing, it was to treat every crisis as normal and soluble. | John le Carré | ||
| fb722e4 | Thus we do disagreeable things, but we are defensive. That, I think, is still fair. We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night. Is that too romantic? Of course, we occasionally do very wicked things"; he grinned like a schoolboy. "And in weighing up the moralities, we rather go in for dishonest comparisons; after all, you can't compare the ideals of one side with the methods .. | John le Carré | ||
| 90790a6 | And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackness, that his life has consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it. | life order | John le Carré | |
| f88fda8 | He knew what it was then that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England: it was the caring about little things--the faith in ordinary life; the simplicity that made you break up a bit of bread into a paper bag, walk down to the beach, and throw it to the gulls. It was this respect for triviality which he had never been allowed to possess; whether it was bread for the seagulls or love,.. | John le Carré | ||
| f8c840e | There was only now [ ... ] There was no tomorrow because tomorrow was the excuse. There was now or there was nowhere. | John le Carré | ||
| fa7cd39 | This is a war," Leamas replied. "It's graphic and unpleasant because it's fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it's nothing, nothing at all besides other wars--the last or the next." | John le Carré | ||
| 815858f | The novel's merit, then--or its offence, depending where you stood--was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible. The bad dream turned out to be one that a lot of people in the world were sharing, since it asked the same old question that we are asking ourselves fifty years later: How far can we go in the rightful defence of our Western values without abandoning them along the way? My fictional chief of the British Service--I cal.. | John le Carré | ||
| 665bee0 | All right, Pendel had lied to him, if lying was the word. He had told Osnard what he wanted to hear and gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain it for him, including making it up. Some people lied because lying gave them a kick, made them feel braver or cleverer than all the lowly conformists who went on their bellies and told the truth. Not Pendel. Pendel lied to conform. To say the right things at all times, even if the right things were .. | John le Carré | ||
| 6ac17a6 | There are moments that are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur. | John le Carré | ||
| 5a7dae8 | There's no such thing as a decision. There never was. There's whether you've had a good day or a bad day, there's going forward because there's nothing behind and running because if you stand still any longer you'll fall over. There's movement or there's stagnation, there's the past that drives you and the regimental chaplain who preaches that only the obedient are free and the women who say you have no feelings, but they can't live without.. | John le Carré | ||
| f7fc05d | Everything in the world is true if you invent it hard enough and love the person it's for! | John le Carré | ||
| 886ac53 | Guns have their own silence. It is the silence of the dead to come. | John le Carré | ||
| 934f63c | What that judge did is immoral. Here in Panama when we bribe somebody we expect loyalty. | John le Carré | ||
| 4e5f6b0 | Arthur Braithwaite, known to Louisa and the children as God. And all right, strictly speaking Braithwaite did not exist. Why should he? Not every god has to exist in order to do his job. | John le Carré | ||
| e5507af | The classified cat watches from the kitchen window. | John le Carré | ||
| 7571fb8 | America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war. --John Le Carre | Henry A. Giroux | ||
| a17929e | Afterwards Smiley always thought of that interview as a fan dance; a calculated progression of disclosures, each revealing different parts of a mysterious entity. Finally Steed-Asprey, who seemed to be Chairman, removed the last veil, and the truth stood before him in all its dazzling nakedness. He was being offered a post in what, for want of a better name, Steed-Asprey blushingly described as the Secret Service. | secret-service spy | John le Carré | |
| 817741b | Les mauvaises langues ont l'habitude de voir leurs cobayes tout en noir ou tout en blanc et de leur attribuer des defauts ou des mobiles que le style stenographique de la conversation peut aisement suggerer. | John le Carré | ||
| 3d5292f | Il savait qu'un etre intelligent pouvait etre neutralise par la stupidite de ses superieurs, et des semaines d'un travail patient, acharne - vingt-quatre heures sur vingt-quatre - annihilees par ce genre de personnages. (chapitre 6) | John le Carré | ||
| 5a2fc43 | si les Americains s'etaient donne autant de mal pour le desarmement que pour envoyer un pauvre type sur la lune, ou coller des rayures roses dans le dentifrice, on l'aurait depuis longtemps, le desarmement. (...) le plus grand peche de l'Occident etait de croire qu'il pouvait foutre en l'air le systeme sovietique par une surenchere dans la course aux armements, parce que dans ce cas-la, on jouait avec le destin de l'humanite. Et qu'en metta.. | John le Carré | ||
| d4dc353 | The two bond over their mutual lack of family ties: Saul from his disownment, Miriam from the car accident that orphaned her as a college junior. Both want children. Miriam has inherited her parents' idea of procreative legitimacy, wants to compensate for her only-child-dom. She sees in Saul the househusband who will enable her parental ambitions without disabling her autonomy. In Miriam, Saul sees the means to a book-lined study and a life.. | Myla Goldberg | ||
| 4e6ef0b | At this time on a weekday morning, the library was refuge to the retired, the unemployed, and the unemployable. ... 'I'm not always this gabby,' the librarian said. 'It's just so nice to talk to someone who isn't constructing a conspiracy theory or watching videos of home accidents on YouTube. | Myla Goldberg | ||
| 30f5d75 | The day's dashed hopes had temporarily reduced her to the childish presumption that someone she loved should, in return for that love, be able to read her mind. | Myla Goldberg | ||
| aafd30e | Now I've changed things. I've left my own fingerprints on the world, no matter how small, and it's upset the equilibrium of us | fingerprints | Markus Zusak | |
| 941cc6c | He was into the skating culture now and I was into, well, I'm not sure what I was into. I was into roaming around on my own, and I enjoyed it. | on-my-own roaming-around skating-culture | Markus Zusak | |
| 2a79af5 | Don't think, I told myself. Think nothingness. But even nothingness was something. It was a thought. | Markus Zusak | ||
| 7aecf28 | I am all bluster- I am not violent. I am not malicious- I am a result. | Markus Zusak | ||
| 2908ef6 | Sin embargo, un dia conocio a un hombre despreciado por su patria a pesar de haber nacido en ella. Se hicieron buenos amigos y, cuando el hombre enfermo, la recolectora de palabras dejo caer una de sus lagrimas sobre el rostro del hombre. La lagrima estaba hecha de amistad --una sola palabra-- y al secarse se convirtio en una semilla. La siguiente vez que fue al bosque, la nina planto la semilla entre los otros arboles. La regaba cada dia. | Markus Zusak | ||
| 30000fd | Don't make me happy. Please, don't fill me up and let me think that something good can come of any of this. Look at my bruises. Look at this graze. Do you see the graze inside me? Do you see it growing before your very eyes, eroding me? I don't want to hope for anything anymore. I don't want to pray that Max is alive and safe. Or Alex Steiner. Because the world does not deserve them. | Markus Zusak | ||
| 1e88056 | I'd wanted to stay on that porch with him until the sun shone bright on both of us, but I didn't. I stood up and walked down the steps. I'd rather chase the sun than wait for it. | Markus Zusak | ||
| 7025db7 | E nao sou muito boa nessa historia de consolar, especialmente quando tenho as maos frias e a cama e quente. Carreguei-o com delicadeza pela rua destrocada, com sal nos olhos e o coracao mortalmente pesado. Observei por um instante o conteudo de sua alma, e vi um menino pintado de preto, gritando o nome de Jesse Owens ao cruzar uma fita de chegada imaginaria. Vi-o afundado ate os quadris em agua gelada, perseguindo um livro, e vi um garoto d.. | Markus Zusak | ||
| 138c49e | Living was living. The price was guilt and shame. | Markus Zusak | ||
| 2a68543 | The flyscreen door is torn at the edges. Fraying. I open it and knock on the wood. The sound rhymes with my heartbeat. | Markus Zusak | ||
| 11ae5ec | It's the person, Ma, not the place. If you left here, you'd have been the same anywhere else.'(...)'If I ever leave this place' - I swallow - 'I'll make sure I'm better here first. | Markus Zusak |