1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
4943
4944
4945
4946
4947
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 19fd51e | Champs-de-Mars, the day of celebration: a crowd of people in Sunday clothes. Women with parasols, pet dogs on leads. Stickyfingered children pawing at their mothers; people who have bought coconuts and don't know what to make of them. Then the glint of light on bayonets, people clutching hands, whirling children off their feet, pushing and calling out in alarm as they are separated from their families. Some mistake, there must be some mista.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 1bf24d7 | With France as she is, poor and unarmed, war means defeat. Defeat means either a military dictator who will salvage what he can and set up a new tyranny, or it means a total collapse and the return of absolute monarchy. It could mean both, one after the other. After ten years not a single one of our achievements will remain, and to your son liberty will be an old man's daydream. This is what will happen, Danton. No one can sincerely maintai.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 44f68c1 | Since I believe that I have been a devil for many centuries and have risen in rank and been demoted, it could be asked why, with such a history, I still learned a good deal while in Russia. It is because a newly gained sophistication fades once a venture comes to an end. So we develop many new qualities of mind, but soon lose them. | Norman Mailer | ||
| c454d80 | Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree. | Norman Mailer | ||
| bda560e | Then the Warden said, "Do you have anything you'd like to say?" and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, "Let's do it." That was it. The most pronounced amount of courage, Vern decided, he'd ever seen, no quaver, no throatiness, right down the line." | Norman Mailer | ||
| 3f46cf2 | How many different photographs do we have of Norman Mailer? Suppose we had only five painted portraits of him, like the five Joshua Reynolds did of Dr. Johnson? Would Mailer's greatness seem more singular? Would Dr. Johnson's uniqueness suffer from various replications of his likeness in photographs? | Carl Rollyson | ||
| 1f133e3 | It was getting to be the best conversation she ever had. She had always thought the only way to have conversations like that was in your head. Then | Norman Mailer | ||
| a915660 | I know everything about love but Love itself. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 796315d | About a week after they had come back, a load of mail came to the island. They were the first letters the men had received in several weeks, and for a night it relieved the changeless pattern of their lives. One of the infrequent rations of beer was given out the same night, and the men finished their three cans quickly, and sat about without saying very much. The beer had been far too inadequate to make them drunk; it made them only moody .. | war | Norman Mailer | |
| 1c16646 | It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng, and his security. If such a nonentity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd. --Norman Mailer | Stephen King | ||
| 6568220 | Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification--patriotism! | Norman Mailer | ||
| c04caf0 | Politics at national level can still be comprehended by politics-as-property provided one remembers that moral integrity (or the public impression of such) in a high politician is also property, since it brings power and/or emoluments to him. Indeed a very high politician--which is to say a statesman or leader--has no political substance unless he is the servant of ideological institutions or interests and the available moral passions of th.. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 0274f50 | Craft protects one from facing endless expanding realities--the terror, let us say, of losing your novel in the depths of philosophical insights you are not ready to live with. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 3c45a57 | I live by the law of averages," said Alois. "I prefer to think of the ongoing possibility of profit rather than of the intermittent perils that surround all activity." | Norman Mailer | ||
| eabbd7d | You men are a bunch of god-damned women. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 261d3b9 | If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes watered. The only way you generate the proper attitude of awe and obedience is through immense and disproportionate power. | Norman Mailer | ||
| fe4ab59 | Back when I could get away with it, I subscribed to Norman Mailer's view that exercise without excitement, without competition or danger or purpose, didn't strengthen the body but simply wore it out. Swimming laps always seemed to me especially pointless. But I can't get away with that attitude now. If I don't swim, I will be a pear-shaped pillar of suet. | William Finnegan | ||
| 2bb3a15 | I will now make an apology, although I will do my best not to repeat it. (Good readers do not read fiction, after all, to put up with the author's regrets.) | Norman Mailer | ||
| bd56827 | She was one old lady who had the real heat of suspicion--it irritated her when the silver count was correct (as it always was) because paranoia that cannot be confirmed is more difficult to bear than a loss from outright theft. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 0a6df08 | Alois did not know (or care that much) whether men and women had souls, but he was in no doubt about dogs. They did, and you had to be loyal to the soul of a dog. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 996e944 | Either the century was entrenching itself more deeply into the absurd, or the absurd was delivering evidence that it was possessed of some of the nutritive mysteries of a marrow which would yet feed the armies of the absurd. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 5c96ebb | Was it an hour, or a week before the light of the moon rose in the interior of my body? A bird with luminous wings flew in front of that full moon, and its head was as radiant as a point of light. That bird must be the Khu--this sweet bird of the night--a creature of divine intelligence loaned to us just so much as the Ren or the Sekhem. Yes, the Khu was a light in your mind while you lived, but in death, it must return to heaven. For the K.. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 5a93534 | Arrayed against them as hard-core troops: an elite! the Freud-ridden embers of Marxism, good old American anxiety strata--the urban middle-class with their proliferated monumental adenoidal resentments, their secret slavish love for the oncoming hegemony of the computer and the suburb, yes, they and their children, by the sheer ironies, the sheer ineptitude, the kinks of history, were now being compressed into more and more militant stands,.. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 725b3df | I must purchase this eunuch from You," she said to Ptah-nem-hotep, Who smiled agreeably. "Are they not delightful?" He asked, and looked at the dark bodies of these five slaves with the same love I had seen my great-grandfather give to a team of matched horses or twin bulls, and indeed, since the slave wore nothing, one could see not only their plump and muscular haunches, but the shiny stump where their testicles had been and this gave the.. | eunuch gelding haunches horses slaves testicles | Norman Mailer | |
| aa488c8 | When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others. | Norman Mailer | ||
| a9d80bd | Angels often flee from people who scream too loudly--they know at such moments how close the man or woman is to us, and they feel outnumbered. For devils rush in to attend such outcries. | Norman Mailer | ||
| eeb4803 | Since the sum of her experience had told her that the majority of one's prayers to God were not answered, she prayed now directly to us, she called upon the Devil, she implored him. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 4836205 | Freaks can be a fount of information. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 0e73900 | but I am infinitely more sorrowful about the two victims' families than the fact Mr. Gilmore is no longer alive. | Norman Mailer | ||
| e424c35 | He had been certain that religion was there for a very good practical reason. It couldn't be simpler--you had to keep the weak and unruly in order. But a man of pride (such as himself) could do as he chose. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 3549475 | Think of how hot a fire must be to call out the will of iron that is in the ore. Iron is strong against every force except the one that made it into iron. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 394264f | Nothing could be better than the moment when a woman opened her legs for you. That first time! If you had an eye for the little differences, you knew twice as much about her as you could learn from her face. Alois Senior would attest to that. The female organ! Whoever designed this form had certainly been sly about the job. (This was about as close as Alois ever came to admiring the Creator.) | Norman Mailer | ||
| 8656df9 | The mark of a truly stupid man," he announced to Klara, "is that he takes his own occupation so seriously that he comes to believe it is superior to others." | Norman Mailer | ||
| 1ce3746 | And with it all, he was proud of himself. He had brought his mother to tears. "Let her cry for once. Not me. It is time for her to learn." | Norman Mailer | ||
| 83114d7 | All you need do is nod. I already know nine parts in ten of what he will say, but it is like fishing. Be patient, and you will get what you came for. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 0344fee | Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 5f8f481 | You, Lowell, beloved poet of many, what do you know of the dirt and the dark deliveries of the necessary? What do you know of dignity hard-achieved, and dignity lost through innocence, and dignity lost by sacrifice for a cause one cannot name. What do you know about getting fat against your will, and turning into a clown of an arriviste baron when you would rather be an eagle or a count, or rarest of all, some natural aristocrat from these .. | Norman Mailer | ||
| a68c63d | Let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings. | optimistic review | Norman Mailer | |
| 953b242 | No, just as Marlon Brando seemed to inhabit a role as though it were a natural extension of his mood, so Ali treated boxing. | Norman Mailer | ||
| db89611 | Langton, believing Anna's silence was due to distress about | Lynda La Plante | ||
| e2c0c8f | They drew three lessons from the Pequot War: (1) that the Englishmen's most solemn pledge would be broken whenever obligation conflicted with advantage; (2) that the English way of war had no limit of scruple or mercy; and (3) that weapons of Indian making were almost useless against weapons of European manufacture. These lessons the Indians took to heart. | Howard Zinn | ||
| 93133ac | The police force was dominantly Irish, and the official investigation of the riot indicated the police helped the rioters: "... it appears that charges of unprovoked and most brutal clubbing have been made against policemen, with the result that they were reprimanded or fined a day's pay and were yet retained upon the force." -- | Howard Zinn | ||
| 4cd59ff | I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare. | future hope | Howard Zinn | |
| 2b28e5b | All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government. . . ... | Howard Zinn |