When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist because you've crushed anyone's desire to do the right thing with all these incentives.
Miles Raymond: [while tasting wine] It tastes like the back of a fucking L.A. school bus. Now they probably didn't de-stem, hoping for some semblance of concentration, crushed it up with leaves and mice, and then wound up with this rancid tar and tur...
Wally Weaver: You see, at the time I was misquoted. I never said 'The Super-man exists and he is American', what I said was '*God* exists and he is American'. Now if you begin to feel an intense and crushing feeling of religious terror at the concept...
[Shaw shoots Magneto's mother, which enrages him enough crush metal all around him] Sebastian Shaw: Outstanding, Erik. So we unlock your gift with anger. Anger and pain. You and me... we're going to have a lot of fun together.
She knew the way of things. She knew if you weren't always stepping lightly as a bird the whole world came apart to crush you. Like a house of cards. Like a bottle against stones. Like a wrist pinned hard beneath a hand with the hot breath smell of w...
My first crush use to think I hate her cuz never find time to chat with her , is only Hi and hellow that all , but not knowing that deep down in my soul and heart she is the first and last I want , but hey is fine now , she end up with some fox who l...
When you're 11 or 12 years old, you can get so swept up in a book that you start to believe that the fantasy is reality. I think when you have a giant crush when you're in fifth grade, it becomes your whole world. It's like being underwater; everythi...
And indeed it was, the arrow still protruding from its wet, grayish skin, humping its body along with incredible speed. A flick of its tail caught the edge of a statue, sending it flying into the dry ornamental pool, where it shattered into dust. “...
They're brainless girls, otherwise they wouldn't be seen dead here. They're pretty, with ugly, appealing smiles and conversations we can't hear. They breathe smoke and blow it out, and words drop from their mouths and get crushed to the floor. Or the...
How memories lie to us. How time coats the ordinary with gold. How it breaks the heart to go back and attempt to re-live them. How crushed we are when we discover that the gold was merely gold-plating thinly coated over lead, chalk and peeling paint.
Dreams deny her the freedom she truly seeks. Darkness consumes. Leg muscles burn. She runs away, even while lost in the paradise of sleep. Gravity is a crushing force bearing down on her chest, shattering wings and refusing her flight. A whisper in h...
He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fea...
Sometimes, the Lord just takes blessed people because they've filled their purpose early. Everyone plays their own song. They sing their story to the world and leave behind a melody of memories. Sometimes... their song is cut short and ends too early...
Outside, it feels like there is less standing between the Creator and us. There is a lingering visceral connection we can hear and see and smell, reminders of the bond between Creator and creation, like the mountain sage crushed up in the pocket of t...
They lay on their heathery beds and listened to all the sounds of the night. They heard the little grunt of a hedgehog going by. They saw the flicker of bats overhead. They smelt the drifting scent of honeysuckle, and the delicious smell of wild thym...
The inaugural morning at Merston High was officially over. It was no longer a mysterious place in Melody's imagination, filled with endless possibilities and hooks on which to hang hopes for a better tomorrow. It was completely - boringly - normal. L...
It is a terrible error to let any natural impulse, physical or mental, stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be done with it; or fulfil it, and get it out of the system; but do not allow it to remain there and putrefy. The suppression of the norma...
Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, ble...
Don't try to justify yourself on the ground that somebody must do this kind of work. Let "somebody," not yourself, take the responsibility ... Many a man has dwarfed his manhood, cramped his intellect, crushed his aspiration, blunted his finer sensib...
I was the nicest person you'd ever want to know," Alex recalls, "but the world wasn't that way. The problem was that if you were just a nice person, you'd get crushed. I refused to live a life where people could do that stuff to me.
The sea was endless, even the man made structures that interfered with the currents hardly prevented it from ceasing its function. For the first time in my life, I didn't feel trapped in some form of bubble, it was the first time that I felt like I c...