Popular quotes in last 24 hours

You cannot write if you do not read, the blind man said. You cannot eat if you do not chew. And you cannot play if you do not-he grabbed for the boy's hand-listen.

the waiter came, bringing the second course, pollo con ajillo, chicken with garlic. they would both stink frightfully when they were through, miss shaw thought; she would have to remember to buy some...

Only assholes put a nickname on their business card.

We lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent-namely ideology. This was a country where...

It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.

As life goes on, you will join other bands, some through friendship, some through romance, some through neighborhoods, school, an army. Maybe you will all dress the same, or laugh at your own private...

Isn't that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?

I've always kept the pleasurable habit of college times, stressing tickets and notes. Much of my notes of pride and prejudice, the heiress, the hill of the howling winds, Madame Bovary and Tom Jones...

Used to be - in the old days - the media image roughly corresponded to reality. But now it's all reversed. The media image is the reality, and by comparison day-to-day life seems to lack excitement....

Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy. There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that...

The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and...

Alcohol provokes stupidity; opium provokes wisdom.

The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.

Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

It's all right for you, you and Danton. I have to go and stutter for two hours at the Jacobins and probably be knocked down again by maddened violin makers and trampled by all sorts of...

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth...

What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is liveable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some.

In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging around modern museums with both eyes together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by...

The strategic center of the rebellion was not a place – not New York, Philadelphia, not the Hudson corridor – but the Continental Army itself.

Some genealogies claimed to be able to trace the Maclean ancestry even further back, going as far as Julius Caesar, and, in some cases, admittedly more tendentiously, to the ancient Celtic god of the...

War is now a form of TV entertainment

I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the...

He did not use these things anymore, and yet, the thought of letting them go made him sad. He felt they represented times in his life he could not recall without their presence. They represented...

A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.

Remember, the enemy's gate is down.

Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children... It was a fleeting statement, one I didn't think she'd hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us,...

... an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.

Talking to a reporter these days was like a deadly chess match; you had to think several steps ahead; you had to imagine all the possible ways a reporter might distort your statement. The atmosphere...

Sitting in his office, he made a nice mathematical model, and it never occurred to him that what he saw as defects were actually necessities. Look: when I was working on missiles, we dealt with...

Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn't true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and as misguided, as the child who jumps off...

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of...

And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.

there is a great choice that awaits us every day: whether we go around carving holes in others because we have been so painfully carved ourselves, or whether we let spirit play its song through our...