Popular quotes in last 24 hours

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...

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.

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...

Only assholes put a nickname on their business card.

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

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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....

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...

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...

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

He was not accustomed to busying himself with introspection or self-analysis. In this way he was like most people who are rarely alone. His mind did not swing into action until some external force...

War is now a form of TV entertainment

Ends are for yesterday, not tomorrows.

You gotta try harder to be kind, man. We're all trapped on this earth together.

There becomes little doubt as to why power chooses to support power. Rwanda becomes invisible once again. We have nothing America wants.

Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.

treasure is crisis, because what you get in the end is yourself.

That's us, he said. Those five nuts right there.Which one is me? I asked.The little deformed one, Zoe suggested.Oh, shut up.