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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4ec4a2b | In spite of his physical efforts, he understands that he is afraid to go on reading the typescript. Why this fear should have taken hold of him is something he cannot account for. It's only words, he tells himself, and since when have words had the power to frighten a man half to death? | Paul Auster | ||
| a8b00d9 | It was the best thing that could have happened to him, it was the worst thing that could have happened to him. | Paul Auster | ||
| be42104 | lm 'kn 'stTy` ltfkyr fy swh.tbd' kl lyl@ bl'lm nfsh fy jsmy,tqT` l'nfs nfsh,lHj@ lshdyd@ l~ 'n tlmsny mr@ 'khr~,wqbl 'n 'drk m yHdth,'sh`r blhjwm dkhl jldy,wk'n l'nsj@ lty tj`lny mtmsk `l~ wshk lnfjr.kn dhlk hw lHrmn fy 'kthr 'shklh lmfjy'@ wlmTlq@.kn jsm kyty jz mn jsmy,wdwn 'n ykwn bjwry,'sh`r b'nny lm '`d 'n.'sh`r b'nny mjdw`. | Paul Auster | ||
| 364062d | One of the odd things about being himself ... was that there seemed to be several of him, that he wasn't just one person but a collection of contradictory selves, and each time he was with a different person, he himself was different as well. | Paul Auster | ||
| 5d30b64 | Solo de la constancia nacen las grandes cosas | Paul Auster | ||
| 6247140 | Perhaps when we shrink down to almost nothing, we will at last find one another. Life is, after all, very difficult. Most of us die here simply because we forget to breathe. | Paul Auster | ||
| 388ac77 | Et ce monde etrange continue de tourner. | français hope keep-going mélancolie poetry traduction vers | Paul Auster | |
| 7a801e4 | That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that don't happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered. | silence | Paul Auster | |
| e67357d | knowing now that the job of writing was as much about removing words as adding them, | Paul Auster | ||
| 0059c7d | What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook? | Paul Auster | ||
| f7da39b | l Huzn yuSyb lwldyn '`Zm mn lHzn lnWb` mn l`jz; dhW `lyhm 'n ytqbWlwh, Ht~ lw fq dhlk qdrthm | Paul Auster | ||
| a4c333f | Memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our life in the present. If a man is to be truly present among his surroundings, he must be thinking not of himself, but of what he sees. He must forget himself in order to be there. And from that forgetfulness arises the power of memory. It is a way of living one's life so that nothing is ever lost. | Paul Auster | ||
| f21453d | in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return. | Joseph A. Tainter | ||
| 84be10b | Many people have a stereotype of what it means to be poor. And it may be somebody they see on the street corner with a sign: "Will work for food." And what they don't think about is that person who's struggling every day. Could be the person who waited on us, took our bank deposit, works in retail, but who is barely above the poverty line." | Robert D. Putnam | ||
| 4045f78 | Contemporary discussion of inequality in America often conflates two related but distinct issues: * Equality of income and wealth. The distribution of income and wealth among adults in today's America--framed by the Occupy movement as the 1 percent versus the 99 percent--has generated much partisan debate during the past several years. Historically, however, most Americans have not been greatly worried about that sort of inequality: we tend.. | Robert D. Putnam | ||
| d6a2820 | The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas," John Maynard Keynes famously observed, "but in escaping from the old ones." | Philip K. Howard | ||
| 2c369c1 | Mindless rules, not accountable officials, are the enemy of freedom. | Philip K. Howard | ||
| 72a3e7f | General George Patton and others lamented that the Second World War had broken out in 1939 over saving the free peoples of Eastern Europe from totalitarianism--only to end, through the broken 1945 Yalta accords, ensuring their enslavement by an erstwhile Soviet ally whose military we had supplied lavishly. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 5cc0bb2 | Democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war--and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 4dfd64a | The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, can escape that terrible knowledge. Our freedom is not entirely our own; in some sense it is mortgaged from those who paid the ultimate price for its continuance. My own life of security, freedom, opportunity, and relative affluence certainly has been made possible because a grandfather fought a.. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 4e9c57f | Mexica warriors were predicated on birth and status. In a cyclical pattern of cause and effect, such greater innate advantages gave aristocrats predominance on the battlefield in taking captives, which in turn provided proof of their martial excellence--and | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 696f2ae | The Price of Neglect A PUBLIC THAT'S illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself confused during wartime. Without standards of historical comparison, people prove ill-equipped to make informed judgments when the dogs of war are unleashed. Neither U.S. politicians nor most citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American cas.. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 85ea57f | Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief, that wars are not necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The allied coalition lost few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait during the Gulf War of 1991, yet doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Bill Clinton stopped a Balkan holocaust through air strikes, without sacrificing American soldiers. His supporters.. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| df895db | Prewar education, reputation, influence, and rank matter little when the enemy is gaining ground and very few know how to turn him back. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 81a313a | In some sense, winning against impossible odds--when most others cannot or would not try--is the only mark of a great general. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| f27ad00 | When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, more than 70 percent of the American people backed the invasion of Iraq, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 6107867 | The United States is often criticized as interventionist, but in fact America's traditional propensity has been more isolationist--willing to act forcefully in the world when absolutely necessary, but preferring to be unencumbered. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 4878bb5 | how does a state manage to achieve, all at once, the highest basket of gas, sales, and income taxes, yet rate nearly dead last in roads and highways, or school performance tests, and have the nation's greatest number of billionaires, and one-sixth of America's welfare recipients, and the largest percentage of any state population below the poverty line? | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 9268bc9 | With the demise of the inward-looking, stodgy yeomen, enormous wealth and poverty ensued. The Greek-speaking Hellenistic world could now use the Hellenic genius without ethical constraint. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| d36b2fb | it was the horror of the two world wars--Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima--that led to our own era's questioning of the tragic view of war. Such a reaction was certainly true and understandable in a Europe that nearly destroyed itself in two devastating industrial wars within a roughly twenty-year period. Yet out of such numbing losses we may have missed the lesson of the horror. The calamity of sixty million dead was not just because nationali.. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| e4e3e3e | To assert that military history suggested that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because sometimes good but naive men had done too little to deter them, was understandably seen as antithetical to a more enlightened understanding of human nature. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 0931bf7 | Military history reminds us that those who died on behalf of democratic freedom to stop totalitarian killing were a different sort than totalitarians who died fighting against it to perpetuate killing. The sacrifice of the former meant that generations yet born might have a greater likelihood of opportunity, security, and freedom; the latter fought for a cause that would have increased the suffering of future generations. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 24bc205 | Given the Western ability to produce deadly weapons, its propensity to create cheap, plentiful goods, and its tradition of seeing war in pragmatic rather than ritual terms as a mechanism to advance political ends, it is no surprise that Mesoamericans, African tribes, and native North Americans all joined European forces to help kill off Aztecs, Zulus, and Lakotas. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 2cd79ac | IT IS HARD to think of many democracies that were not born in some manner out of war, violence, or coercion--beginning with the first example of Cleisthenic Athens in 507 B.C., and including our own revolution in 1776. The best examples are those of the twentieth century, when many of the most successful present-day constitutional governments were epiphenomena of war, imposed by the victors or coalition partners, as we have seen in the case.. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 738d9a1 | We forget that even worse choices than those have confronted us in the past--like sending billions of dollars of aid to Joseph Stalin to stop Adolf Hitler, just a few years after the former had slaughtered or starved to death twenty million Soviets, invaded hapless Finland, carved up Poland with Hitler, and sent strategic materials daily to the Third Reich as it firebombed London. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| c6337fb | Military history is just as often the tangential story of an appeasement that fails to head off warmongering as it is of an aggressive chest-thumping that prompts conflict. The destructive military careers of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler all would have ended earlier had any of their numerous enemies united when the odds favored them, had any listened to a Demosthenes, a Cato the Younger, or a Churchill. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 6dcb304 | Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our remedies are so often exceptional, then it only earns transitory applause--and a more lasting contempt that we ourselves do not believe in the values we profess. | anti-americanism | Victor Davis Hanson | |
| dba5751 | In emblematic fashion, America stands as a protector of the global system of market capitalism and constitutional government, and of the often reckless modernist culture that threatens so much of tribal and indigenous custom and protocols. That we are therefore often to be hated by the authoritarian, the statist, and the tribalist--and periodically to be challenged by those who want to diminish our power, riches, or influence--is regrettabl.. | Victor Davis Hanson | ||
| 78387c0 | Youth is the only sexy tragedy. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| c035683 | A man is always a little shamefaced on his wedding day, like a fox caught in a baited trap, ensnared because his greed overcame his better judgment. The menfolk laughed at Charlie that spring day, and said he was caught for sure now. As the bride, I was praised and fussed over, as if I had won a prize or done something marvelous that no one ever did before, and I could not help feeling pleased and clever that I had managed to turn myself fr.. | marriage slavery | Sharyn McCrumb | |
| 239d28e | I wonder which is worse-the death, not knowing what comes after, or the wedding, when you think you know, but you're wrong. | frankie-silver hanging marriage | Sharyn McCrumb | |
| c9377c7 | Seasons didn't come behind the nicotine-stained walls of Mountain City's prison, so Harm always imagined it spring--the locust trees clustered with shaggy white blooms, the wet woods flecked with bloodroot, and wild roses and honeysuckle flashing white among the chestnuts on the mountainsides... | ballad-novel southern-fiction | Sharyn McCrumb | |
| d3a23e1 | Trees are normally very general and all-inclusive with their wisdom pearls. When a tree decides to talk to you, it's a very, very big deal, as if the world stops, as if you are scooped up and held in a snow globe, weightless and womb-like. I felt their vibrations in my feathers, in the flutter of my little black heart. | trees | Kira Jane Buxton | |
| 4354750 | Painting the feathers of a chicken does not make it a peacock. ~Jane Doe | Sarah Cass |