...and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.
At one time he [Cornelius Vanderbilt] personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.
It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
I don't punish myself. Life's too short.
Sports life is very short.
If life is a punishment, one should wish for an end; if life is a test, one should wish it to be short.
Empty night, Harry. Didn't your little adventure in the lake teach you a damned thing?" I scowled some more. "Like what?" "Like life is short," he [Thomas] said. "Like you don't know when it's going to end. Like some things, left unsaid, can't ever b...
The art of reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a gr...
There’s nothing like a good murder to remind you that life is short. So are midgets. This guy was obviously not a midget, and that’s why he moved to the top of my suspect list (I arranged my suspects by height, rather than organized them alphabet...
Life is too short to spend your precious time trying to convince a person who wants to live in gloom and doom otherwise. Give lifting that person your best shot, but don't hang around long enough for his/her bad attitude to pull you down. Instead, su...
But words mattered, more so in Newark than many other places. In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.
A poetry professor had once defined romance to me as "bringing two people together when every force in the universe is working to keep them apart.
The light of artistic creation is also blinding. The artist can’t see the suffering he causes to those around him. And the’ll never understand the purity of his goal, how the heat of his invention won’t melt the ice in his heart. He must be rut...
Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you...
In East Orange, initiations were completed by murdering someone, for no other reason than to prove to a tremendously cold, tremendously tight brotherhood that you possessed the hardness required to watch their backs.
Her son seemed to be belatedly rebelling against all his celebrated accomplishments- as well as the responsibilities inherent in them, the obligations to own his talents.In that rebellion, she saw a young man who was confused and upset that his life ...
Life's too short to not be around nice people.
Youth is marked by a breathtaking novelty that diminishes with each year of age - until life becomes a delusive struggle to break routines, escape the ordinary, and rediscover the joy of discovery.
Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.
Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener.
[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.
