...history is a selection process - it chooses moments and events, and even people - it hands them a situation that they shouldn't be able to overcome, and it's in those moments, in that fight, that people find out who they are.
And y'know what they decided the number one threat was? The destructive and disruptive capability of a small group. That's what they're worried about most...they're terrified of a small group with a committed goal.
We make a great bad guy, and they all say they hate us. But at the end of every day, people want to trust us. Because we're their government. And people trust their government.
History isn't written by the winners - it's written by everyone - it's a jigsaw of facts from contradictory sources. But every once in a while, you unearth that one original document that no one can argue with...
Is your life really so bad? This city is full of opportunities –” “Can you call it a city?” Marcus asked. “No gymnasium, no theatre, no forum? Where is the life a Roman man should lead?
Check-ups are, in my experience, a grave mistake; all they do is allow the quack of your choice to tell you that you have some sort of complaint that you were far happier not knowing about.
If you really love someone,' Claudia continued, 'you have to be prepared to accept them as they are. Maybe you hope that one day they get a wake-up call and make the changes for their own reasons.
How did you do that?” Mr. Poe asked. “Nice girls shouldn’t know how to do such things.” “My sister is a nice girl,” Klaus said, “and she knows how to do all sorts of things.
One of the most difficult things to think about in life is one's regrets. Something will happen to you, and you will do the wrong thing, and for years afterward you will wish you had done something different.
I had a dream. In the dream someone was critical of my newest novel The Snail's Castle. I said, "don't worry about it. If you don't like it, just throw it out the window." I awoke, grinning, with a wonderful feeling of freedom.
Even after she was gone, he passed her place each day: something white in a high window - not a face, but the white belly of a pigeon beating its wings against the pane in the boarded-up house.
All of my most significant moments somehow involved music. It's like my life was a John Hughes film and somebody had to put together the perfect soundtrack.
The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself. No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset.
We aren't the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved.
You have to make your own condensed notes. You learn from MAKING them. A lot of thinking goes into deciding what to include and exclude. You develop your own system of abbreviations and memory methods for the information.
I'm saying the American way is to overcome, to conquer, to come out on top. And we do it by spending and eating and screwing our women harder than anyone else. That's all I'm saying.
It's important for a man to know his limitations, and my limitations started at moving to Peckham and hanging around with yardies, postcode wannabes and those weird, skinny white kids who don't get the irony in Eminem.
Can you sacrifice people?' I asked. 'Take their magic that way?' 'Yes,' he said. 'But there's a catch.' 'What's the catch?' 'You get hunted down even unto the ends of the Earth and summarily executed.
Could it have been anyone, or was it destiny? When I'm considering this I find it helpful to quote the wisdom of my father, who once told me, "Who knows why the fuck anything happens?
My first [wife] was an angel; My second a silly woman; My third a Roman Senator; My fourth a pretty little thing; My fifth — all woman!
I mean what else is there for a woman to do if she doesn't want to go from the parental to the marital home with nothing in between? 'An educated woman,'Millie amended. 'An educated woman,' Ursula agreed.
