Lester Burnham: I am sick and tired of being treated like I don't exist. You two do whatever you want, whenever you want to do it, and I don't complain. Carolyn Burnham: Oh, you don't complain? Then please, excuse me, I must be psychotic, then! If yo...
Genie: So, what'll it be, Master? Aladdin: You're gonna grant me any three wishes I want, right? Genie: [as William F. Buckley] Uh, almost. There are a few, uh, provisos, a, a couple of quid pro quos. Aladdin: Like? Genie: [normal] Uh, rule #1: I can...
Jake Sully: You have to leave, or you're gonna die! Moat: Are you certain of this? Jake Sully: Look, they sent me here, to learn your ways, so one day I could bring this message, and that you would believe it. Neytiri: What are you saying, Jake? You ...
[Susan is pretending to be a mobster] David Huxley: Constable, she's making all this up out of motion pictures she's seen! Susan Vance: Oh, I suppose I saw you with that red-headed skirt in a motion picture ? Constable Slocum: There you are doc - ano...
What, the Great War? in which your great-grandfather, who happened to be my grandfather, was gassed in the trenches not once, but twice? Which meant he and your great-grandmother were very poor, because he was too ill to work and died young? And mean...
My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens: men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life...
Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is cove...
The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means 'two,' and the word zweifel, which means 'doubt' - suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our l...
Would you like me to grovel with gratitude for bringing me here, High Lord?" "Ah. The Suriel told you nothing important, did it?" That smile of his sparked something bold in my chest. "He also said that you liked being brushed, and if I'm a clever gi...
God damn it, don’t you do this. You have no idea how badly I want you right now. I’d love nothing more than to bury myself inside you, and feel you lose yourself around me as you scream my name; the very idea of fucking the woman I love, , after ...
There is an underlying rhythm to all text. Sentences crashing fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language. As a conductor can influence the experience of the song by manipulating its rhyt...
A city finds its life through the humans who inhabit it. When they go, what is truly left? Just silent stones, witnesses to the history but mute in its telling, remaining thus while slowly turning to rubble. It saddens me that life’s moments are th...
At their core, Tiger Eyes, Forever..., and Sally J. Freeman are all books about teenage issues, but to an adult reader, the parents' story lines seem to almost overshadow their daughters. I'm bringing an entirely new set of experiences to these novel...
As I have earlier noted, the most important things in life and in business can’t be measured. The trite bromide 'If you can measure it, you can manage it' has been a hindrance in the building a great real-world organization, just as it has been a h...
People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life....
Money, dished out in quantities fitting the context, is a social lubricant here. It eases passage even as it maintains hierarchies. Fifty naira for the man who helps you back out from the parking spot, two hundred naira for the police officer who sto...
You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done. Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective cons...
It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, an...
No, I thought, growing more rebellious, life has its own laws and it is for me to defend myself against whatever comes along, without going snivelling to God about sin, my own or other people's. How would it profit a man if he got into a tight place,...
(fragment) 1 All elsewhere being World, how many times have I stood in the bright shadows of a wood, no track or trail leading in, out- as though ground cover renewed as I went through? I sometimes own the moments where I stand alone. Everything else...
Love is not first a feeling. Though the feelings come later and grow thick in the basic loam of love, they don't constitute the sum and substance of love. Love is doing whatever good God says you must do for another, to please God, whether (at first)...
