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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 741c186 | Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point-by-point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That's libertarians for you--anarchists who want police protection from their slaves. | libertarianism libertarians police privilege | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 51b8b83 | I say only this!" Arkady said, staring at her bug-eyed. "We have come to Mars for good. We are going to make not only our homes and our food, but also our water and the very air we breathe--all on a planet that has none of these things. We can do this because we have technology to manipulate matter right down to the molecular level. This is an extraordinary ability, think of it! And yet some of us here can accept transforming the entire phy.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| bcb7760 | So sure, a leftward flurry of legislation got LBJed through Congress in 2143, but there was no guarantee of permanence to anything they did, and the pushback was ferocious as always, because people are crazy and history never ends, and good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 7ba2667 | They were going their separate ways, splintered by their beliefs, and even after two separate years of enforced togetherness they were, like any other human group, no more than a collection of strangers. The die was cast. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 8b4b5c1 | Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it. But it is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than risking it all on a new plan that might not work-- no matter how destructive your short-term plan might be for the following generations. Let them deal with it, you know. And really, to give them their due, by the time people learned the syste.. | institutions | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| e6f41aa | The real locals were like fish in water, unaware and unimpressed. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| fef24f7 | You died to teach me that I was wrong -- that though we had saved her we had killed her too, that that feeling we had had, striding through them as if through worthless dogs, was a poison that would never stop spreading in men who had guns. Until all the people like Butterfly, who lived in peace without guns, were dead, murdered by us. And then only men with guns would be left, and they would murder each other too, as fast as they could in .. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 0ab07c4 | My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity's great spirit. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2921bc8 | Tell the truth,' Nels said. 'Decide to tell the truth before it's too late. | David Guterson | ||
| f0abc57 | H]e had this view of things - that most human activity was utter folly, his own included, and that his existence in the world made others nervous. | David Guterson | ||
| 01e4be3 | I don't feel anything either way. No feeling about it comes to me - it's not something I have a choice about. Isn't a feeling like that supposed to happen? I can't make a feeling like that up, can I? Maybe God just chooses certain people, and the rest of us - we can't feel Him. | David Guterson | ||
| 8775b29 | He had watched her, after all, mourn her husband's death and it had been for her in part the discovery that grief could attach itself with permanence - something Ishmael had already discovered. It attached itself and then it burrowed inside and made a nest and stayed. It ate whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it. | David Guterson | ||
| 57ad643 | The trick was to live here without hating yourself because all around you was hatred. The trick was to refuse to allow your pain to prevent you from living honorably. | David Guterson | ||
| 7a4522a | my religion is home and all that attends it. | David Guterson | ||
| e3d2b95 | The bottom line was that he didn't want to die. As far as he was concerned, death was the problem. The basic human problem. Everyone's problem. He wasn't any different from anyone else, but there was no consolation in that. | dying existential-crisis | David Guterson | |
| 85f4aee | I'd rather know I can trust you. So before you read what's in that thing, tell me a story that squares with its details and exonerate yourself in my eyes. Tell me the story you should have told the sheriff right off the bat, when it wasn't too late, when the truth might still have given you your freedom. When the truth might have done you some good. | David Guterson | ||
| 376ead2 | I can't tell you what to do, Ishmael. I've tried to understand what it's been like for you - having gone to war, having lost your arm, not having married or had children. I've tried to make sense of it all, believe me, I have - how it must feel to be you. But I must confess that, no matter how I try, I can't really understand you. There are other boys, after all, who went to war and came back home and pushed on with their lives. They found .. | David Guterson | ||
| 5831e6e | You've been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you're someone else. Your you is just a fragile fabrication. Every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy. | David Guterson | ||
| a37d633 | There were guys who prayed at Tarawa,' said Ishmael. 'They still got killed, Mother. Just like the guys who didn't pray. It didn't matter either way. | David Guterson | ||
| f781ae1 | To acclimate students to misery under the rubric that so doing prepares them for life is a cynical notion--and a horrifying one. | David Guterson | ||
| 9c3a47b | today and in a good winter mood, someone not subject to seasonal affective disorder, someone with a generous | David Guterson | ||
| 29f6dda | An argument ensued about abundance, leisure, work, nature, and what a second girl kept calling 'the American way.' When I asked her what she meant by 'the American way,' she said, 'Basically the destruction of everything--the world, your happiness, your soul, everything. The complete package. Evil and war. That's who we are, Mr. Countryman.' | the-american-way | David Guterson | |
| 529bbb4 | When I think about John William now, I think about someone who followed through, and then I'm glad not to have followed through, to still be breathing, to still be here with people, to still be walking in the mountains, and to still be uncertain--even with all this cash on hand--in a way I seem to have no choice about. I'm a hypocrite, of course, and I live with that, but I live. | David Guterson | ||
| acc6966 | The place felt sinister, though. Your imagination can get the better of you where a road ends against a forest. | David Guterson | ||
| 7d6266c | The trick was to live here without hating yourself because all around you was hatred. | David Guterson | ||
| 7a5dda4 | They were taken from Anacortes on a train to a transit camp--the horse stables at the Puyallup fairgrounds. They lived in the horse stalls and slept on canvas army cots; at nine p.m. they were confined to their stalls; at ten p.m. they were made to turn out their lights, one bare bulb for each family. The cold in the stalls worked into their bones, and when it rained that night they moved their cots because of the leaks in the roof. The nex.. | David Guterson | ||
| 2c8e971 | No one [Islanders] trod easily upon the emotions of another where the sea licked everywhere against an endless shoreline. And this was excellent and poor at the same time-excellent because it meant most people took care, poor because it meant an inbreeding of the spirit, too much held in, regret and silent brooding, a world whose inhabitants walked in trepidation, in fear of opening up...They could not speak freely because they were cornere.. | David Guterson | ||
| 40c2957 | Ethan and I drove around Silicon Valley today looking at various company parking lots to see whose workers are working on a Sunday. He says that's the surest way to tell which company to invest in. "If the techies aren't grinding, the stock ain't climbing." | Douglas Coupland | ||
| a5aadf7 | After playing Halo 2 for 3 hours, I went out and mowed down a Red Cross blood bank, raped anything with a pulse, and trashed the local mall. Then I toasted the gods of destruction with a goblet of blood stolen from a Girl Guide's body. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| ef34118 | The best thing about being young is being stupid. Or rather, the best thing about being young is being too stupid to know how stupid you really are. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 57b0f14 | I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one," writes Douglas Coupland. "I know because it hurts." | John Ortberg | ||
| f61054f | How many of us have a love so true it spans eternity? A purity of need so clear it can remain strong in the face of all that the world throws at us? This is Karen Ann McNeil, the woman who fell to Earth, the woman for whom the people in her life never gave up waiting. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| ff4a5b2 | Rick, I'm holding a do-I-give-a-shit-ometer in my hand, and the needle's not moving. Shut up. | swearing | Douglas Coupland | |
| 51bf9d8 | Chronotropic Drugs: Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect. | time | Douglas Coupland | |
| ce48bb4 | A rich man is always simply a rich man, but a rich woman is only a poor woman who just happens to have money. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 62acf07 | This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people. || A thousands years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no .. | collective-action environment future humans nature | Douglas Coupland | |
| b6c79f6 | Worrying about money is one of the worst worries. It's like having locked-in syndrome, except you're still moving around and doing things. Your head burns. If other people are not having money problems, it pisses you off because it reminds you that you're limited in the ways you can express your agency in the world, and they aren't. Worrying about money is anger-inducing because it makes you think about time: how many dollars per hour, how .. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 892a8ee | Fun fact: The United Nations building in New York City is the only place in all of North America where smoking is still permitted indoors. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| ff2b22e | the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, "really aren't surrealistic, because they're just random, and there's no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images." -- | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 7897d5d | In quel preciso momento, Karla e entrata nella stanza. Ha spento la televisione, ha guardato Todd fisso negli occhi e ha detto: "Todd, tu esisti non soltanto come membro di una famiglia o di una compagnia o di una nazione, ma come membro di una ... sei un essere umano. Sei parte dell' . Attualmente la nostra specie ha problemi profondi e stiamo cercando di sognare un modo per uscirne e stiamo usando i computer per cavarcela. La costruzione.. | life | Douglas Coupland | |
| a0cdce3 | But in that one little window of time, many lasting decisions were made. First, any love for my father that might have remained either in my mother's heart or my own - vaporized. Second, we knew for sure that Dad was unfixably nuts. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 83651de | we lost money at church bingos and ate catfish deep-fried in lard. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 20c28a0 | I am by now completely convinced that my downfall in life is going to be my inability to achieve computer nirvana like a true hacker or hackette. I think this lacking is the most unmodern facet of my personality--the career equivalent of having six fingers, or a vestigial tail. | Douglas Coupland | ||
| 7c40540 | Ho chiesto a Kaitlin qualcosa sull'ironia ed e saltato fuori che solo il venti per cento degli esseri umani possiede il senso dell'ironia - il che significa che l'ottanta per cento del pianeta prende tutto seriamente. Non riesco a immaginare qualcosa di peggio. Okay, forse si, ci riesco, ma immaginate di leggere il giornale del mattino credendo che sia tutto vero, in qualche misura. | Douglas Coupland |