You don’t change the world by telling it what to do, sitting at home, and telling it what you believe. You believe by throwing yourself into it. Making a leap, getting involved, then waiting, taking some one person’s place for a while, one suffer...
The attempt of to reform chemical nomenclature is premature. One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms; and his string of sulphates, sulphites, and sulphures, may have served no end than to have retarded the progress of scien...
Because it’s not true that suffering purifies people; that we become better, wiser, more understanding in the process. We become cold and indifferent. When, for the first time in our lives, we properly understand our fate, we become almost calm. Ca...
I know essentially you're some kind of enchantress. Maybe you're still serving your apprenticeship, but you're an enchantress all right. Probably I'd get used to you in time. Right now, it's only my demonic will that's keeping me playing it mighty co...
I never expect appreciation. I always set a deadline for the things I have to do to be a successful person, when I complete them, I give myself a piece of candy, a glass of tea and some free time to enjoy- that is how I honor my hardworking and appre...
The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again. Everything was...
I was impressed with Jack [Kerouac]’s commitment to serious writing at the expense of everything else in his life. At a time when the middle class was burgeoning with new homes, two-tone American cars, and black-and-white TVs, when American happine...
There comes a time in some relationships when no matter how sincere the attempt to reconcile the differences or how strong the wish to recreate a part of the past once shared, the struggle becomes so painful that nothing else is felt and the world an...
One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any ...
Whatever comes," she said, "cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the t...
One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!" And a little later you added: "You know-- one loves the sunet, when one is so sad..." "Were you so sad, then?" I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?" But the little prince made ...
… our 'Physick' and 'Anatomy' have embraced such infinite varieties of being, have laid open such new worlds in time and space, have grappled, not unsuccessfully, with such complex problems, that the eyes of and of might be dazzled by the sight of ...
Some prevailing signs of social climbers are their: - ticking cunning ambition - times of deceit - hand of wickedness - gloves of bigotry - hidden bunch of schemes - cup of pride - sip of prejudice - odour of greed - grit of hatred Their favorite hun...
You just mingled saliva with the most beautiful boy ever to tread the hallways of Saint Pock's. Saliva. There's DNA in saliva. You're like carrying his cells in your mouth like one of those weird frogs that incubates its eggs in its cheeks
For a long time, I tried to make my ilfe work, to make our family work. I got tired, though. Five children wears you out until the only thing left inside you, the only thing you've got to give, is a memory of what you thought you'd be.
If she loved him the way she said she did, she wanted him whole. Maybe this was what love meant after all: sacrifice and selflessness. It did not mean hearts and flowers and a happy ending, but the knowledge that another's well-being is more importan...
If Amber kept up her act forever, it would only be a matter of time before the broken pieces of her real self were too small to ever be put back together. I didn’t know what happened to people once they were unfixable. I only hoped I never had to f...
I want to write. I've already told my mother: That's what I want to do-write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. [...] She's against it, it's not worthy, it's not real work, it's nonsense. Later she said, A chi...
We arrived and we thought, 'This is our time. This is our generation. We have a responsibility.' " @garyjkemp of Spandau Ballet in "Mad World: An Oral History of the New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s
What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time.
Stop!" Narcissus got to his feet. "This is not right! This person is obviously not awesome, so he must be..." He struggled for the right words. It had probably been a long time since he'd talked about anything other than himself. "He must be tricking...
