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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1c47f99 | If there's one thing that distinguishes the human species, it is a pathological need to stay connected. The fact your people will interrupt sex to answer your communicators is a scandal across the entire Common Confederation. | John Scalzi | ||
| 5ad3bf0 | A fourth part of his brain was saying, This is the part where you run and scream a lot. He was listening to the fourth part. | John Scalzi | ||
| 6f8fb9b | Now if you'll excuse me, gentlemen, I need to play Russian roulette with our planet's future with the bullet you've so thoughtfully provided. I hope you don't mind if I don't see you out. | John Scalzi | ||
| 7ee6219 | Imagine that Dungeons and Dragons and an '80s video arcade made hot, sweet love, and their child was raised in Azeroth. If you're not already experiencing a nerdgasm at the thought, I don't want to know you." --John Scalzi, New York Times bestselling author of Old Man's War" | Ernest Cline | ||
| 3b30f22 | I come by my alarmism honestly. I have learned this custom over the years as I have settled into being a true New Yorker. This is how we welcome foreigners to our shores. Because we are so often frightened by living here, we are annoyed and offended when visitors fail to show the proper signs of terror. So we try to scare the living daylights out of them. | irony new-yorker xenophobia | David Rakoff | |
| 2e15b19 | The overriding sense of Tokyo...is that it is a city devoted to the new, sped up in a subtle but profound way: a postmodern science-fiction story set ten minutes in the future. | tokyo | David Rakoff | |
| 341421e | I think what it means is that central to living A life that is good is a life that's forgiving. | David Rakoff | ||
| 624ae67 | There is much in our culture to affront the eye of the fervent terrorist postulant, things out there that do us no favors, to be sure. If, for example, it came to light that the dangerously thin, affectless, value-deficient, higher aspiration-free, amateur-porn chanteuse Paris Hilton was actually a covert agent from some secret Taliban madrassa whose mission was to portray the ultimate capitalist-whore puppet of a doomed society with nothin.. | paris-hilton terrorism | David Rakoff | |
| 6e70887 | There will be peaks of great joy from which to crow and vales of tears out of which to climb. When and why they will happen, no one can say, but they will happen. To all of us. We will all go back and forth from one to the other countless times during a lifetime. This is not some call to bipartisanship between inimical sides. The Happy and the Sad are the same population. | David Rakoff | ||
| a966756 | Susan adored her and worshiped her style, / Loved her pronouncements of "perfect" and "vile," / Loved the sheer whim, the madcap willy-nillyness / And how deeply seriously Nonnie took her own silliness" | David Rakoff | ||
| 0c2d575 | We have become an army of multiply chemically sensitive, high-maintenance princesses trying to make our way through a world full of irksome peas. | David Rakoff | ||
| f931c9a | My exuberance isn't entirely food related. I have been so relieved to find that the city in and of itself is not enough to unlock the sadness or fear of my younger self. To the contrary, I have been unable to wipe the smile from my face since I arrived, giddy with a sense of survival. It's not even clear to me that that old misery is still even housed in my body anymore. I had been avoiding a monster behind a door for thirteen years, only t.. | David Rakoff | ||
| 0f8123e | Details can change or go missing entirely, particularly in moments of physical peril. A kind of amnesia goes hand in hand with sickness, and a good thing, too. | David Rakoff | ||
| 1bdc29f | What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss over them with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories. Procedural and depopulated. It's as if a neutron bomb went off and all you're left with are hospital corridors, where you're scanning the walls for familiar photographs. | David Rakoff | ||
| 441d4f6 | With no small remorse, she thought, "He and his mess Better not come near this fabulous dress"." | David Rakoff | ||
| 622745b | The collective delusion here is overwhelming narcissism posing as altruism. | David Rakoff | ||
| ae7b3df | it's like a mini Bourbon Street with less culture and more disgusting hookers. | Tucker Max | ||
| 7052f1e | Did you hear the nonsensical prattle spewing from her pie-hole? | Tucker Max | ||
| a39edee | We were still looking upon war in the light of Victorian and previous wars," Morton wrote later, adding that he and his brother had failed to appreciate that the "nature and method of war had changed for all time in August 1914 and that no war in the future would exclude anybody, civilians, men, women or children." | Erik Larson | ||
| ffd4cba | Families learned of the deaths of kin mostly by telegram, but some knew or sensed their loss even when no telegram brought the news. Husbands and wives had promised to write letters or send cables to announce their safe arrival, but these were never sent. Passengers who had arranged to stay with friends in England and Ireland never showed up. The worst were those situations where a passenger was expected to be on a different ship but for on.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 4f2a2da | Within the fair's buildings visitors encountered devices and concepts new to them and to the world. They heard live music played by an orchestra in New York and transmitted to the fair by long-distance telephone. They saw the first moving pictures on Edison's Kinetoscope, and they watched, stunned, as lightning chattered from Nikola Tesla's body. They saw even more ungodly things--the first zipper; the first-ever all-electric kitchen, which.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 0c7f567 | B]eing broke didn't disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time. | Erik Larson | ||
| a8c6b46 | It had swept him, he said, "into a dream from which I did not recover for months." | Erik Larson | ||
| 5174727 | through the hull--the rush of water past a prow, the thrum of propellers. | Erik Larson | ||
| 51a5677 | No one wanted the job. What had seemed one of the least challenging tasks facing Franklin D. Roosevelt as newly elected president had, by June 1933, become one of the most intransigent. As ambas-sadorial posts went, Berlin should have been a plum--not London or Paris, surely, but still one of the great capitals of Europe, and at the center of a country going through revolutionary change under the leadership of its newly appointed chancellor.. | Erik Larson | ||
| de94a46 | No realm was too petty: The Ministry of Posts ruled that henceforth when trying to spell a word over the telephone a caller could no longer say "D as in David," because "David" was a Jewish name. The caller had to use "Dora." "Samuel" became "Siegfried." And so forth. "There has been nothing in social history more implacable, more heartless and more devastating than the present policy in Germany against the Jews," Consul General Messersmith.. | Erik Larson | ||
| e8d85ea | At present," he said, "I am responsible for conveying my associates to a place called Chicago. I understand it is somewhere in the hinterland." | Erik Larson | ||
| aaacc68 | As the firm grew, so did the city. It got bigger, taller, and richer; but it also grew dirtier, darker, and more dangerous. A miasma of cinder-flecked smoke blackened its streets and at times reduced visibility to the distance of a single block, especially in winter, when coal furnaces were in full roar. | Erik Larson | ||
| e093e19 | She had a brief affair with a novelist, W. L. River, whose Death of a Young Man had been published several years earlier. He called her Motsie and pledged himself to her in letters composed of stupendously long run-on sentences, in one case seventy-four lines of single-spaced typewriting. At the time this passed for experimental prose. "I want nothing from life except you," he wrote. "I want to be with you forever, to work and write for yo.. | Erik Larson | ||
| ecda8b7 | Nowhere have I had such lovely friends as in Germany," she wrote. "Looking back on it all is like seeing someone you love go mad--and do horrible things." | Erik Larson | ||
| 372bc8e | On deck, he encountered another young man, Thomas Sumner, of Atherton, England, who also had a camera. (Sumner bore no relation to Cunard's New York manager, Charles Sumner.) Both hoped to take photographs of the harbor. The day was cool and gray--"rather dull," as Sumner put it--and this caused the two to wonder what exposures to use. They fell to talking about photography." | Erik Larson | ||
| ec6c4d3 | The bells on the streetcars ring, buses clatter by honking their horns, stuffed full with people and more people; taxis and fancy private automobiles hum over the glassy asphalt," he wrote. "The fragrance of heavy perfume floats by. Harlots smile from the artful pastels of fashionable women's faces; so-called men stroll to and fro, monocles glinting; fake and precious stones sparkle." Berlin was, he wrote, a "stone desert" filled with sin a.. | Erik Larson | ||
| d129af3 | One can evade a danger that one recognizes,' wrote historian Friedrich Zipfel, 'but a police working in the dark becomes uncanny. Nowhere does one feel safe from it. While not omnipresent, it could appear, search arrest. The worried citizen no longer knows whom he ought to trust. | Erik Larson | ||
| ffcbecd | He saw Hitler's stature within Germany grow to that of a god. Women cried as he passed near; souvenir hunters dug up parcels of earth from the ground on which he stepped. At the September 1936 party rally in Nuremberg, which Dodd did not attend, Hitler launched his audience into near hysteria. "That you have found me ... among so many millions is the miracle of our time!" he cried. "And that I have found you, that is Germany's fortune!" | Erik Larson | ||
| f795112 | Wilson was outraged but chose not to see the declaration itself as sufficient justification for war. What he did not yet know was that there was a second, very secret message appended to the telegram Bernstorff had received and that both telegrams had been intercepted and relayed to Blinker Hall's intelligence division in the Old Admiralty Building in London, which by now oversaw a second, and singularly sensitive, component of Room 40's op.. | Erik Larson | ||
| d05f291 | After experiencing life in Nazi Germany, Thomas Wolfe wrote, "Here was an entire nation ... infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations." | Erik Larson | ||
| 66e0bbd | A common story had begun to circulate: One man telephones another and in the course of their conversation happens to ask, "How is Uncle Adolf?" Soon afterward the secret police appear at his door and insist that he prove that he really does have an Uncle Adolf and that the question was not in fact a coded reference to Hitler. Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surger.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 827ae31 | There began to appear before my romantic eyes...a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape. | germany history hitler war world-war-ii | Erik Larson | |
| 14e8d50 | General Electric rather miraculously came back with a bid of $554,000. But Westinghouse, whose AC system was inherently cheaper and more efficient, bid $399,000. The exposition went with Westinghouse, and helped change the history of electricity. | Erik Larson | ||
| 58db325 | Chicago shrugged the sniping off. Big was big. Success today would dispel at last the eastern perception that Chicago was nothing more than a greedy, hog-slaughtering backwater; failure would bring humiliation from which the city would not soon recover, given how heartily its leading men had boasted that Chicago would prevail. It was this big talk, not the persistent southwesterly breeze, that had prompted New York editor Charles Anderson D.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 08551c5 | MARTHA'S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always had. | Erik Larson | ||
| 7fb6de0 | THE DATE WAS APRIL 14, 1912, a sinister day in maritime history, but of course the man in suite 63-65, shelter deck C, did not yet know it. | Erik Larson | ||
| addd972 | There are no heroes here, at least not of the Schindler's List variety, but there are glimmers of heroism and people who behave with unexpected grace. | Erik Larson | ||
| 9700526 | As before, Dodd believed Hitler was "perfectly sincere" about wanting peace. Now, however, the ambassador had realized, as had Messersmith before him, that Hitler's real purpose was to buy time to allow Germany to rearm. Hitler wanted peace only to prepare for war. "In the back of his mind," Dodd wrote, "is the old German idea of dominating Europe through warfare." | Erik Larson |