There was nothing I could say in retaliation except something that would confuse her.
It's much easier to tame a wild tiger with your bare hands than to convince someone who believes in something, no matter wrong or right.
We can't impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.
It's not surprising, therefore, that the [Bisy] Backson thinks of progress in terms of fighting and overcoming. One of his little idiosyncrasies, you might say. Of course, real progress involves growing and developing, which involves changing inside,...
My master wishes to see you," said the mounted man. "When the planting's done," I said. "Lord Barton is unaccustomed to waiting." "Then he should rejoice, for he'll learn something new today." I went back to the garden. Soon the servant left.
Make yourself interesting to history. Master some aspect of life, and then find a different area and do something crazy. Become a painter, then round up a herd of cattle and slaughter them with your bare hands. Then collect their blood and paint a mu...
Apple juice looks so much like urine that the only way to tell them apart is to remember that I keep my pee in the fridge, and the apple juice in the toilet. Help yourself to something to drink. Just flush if you want a refill.
I’m only 33% patriotic, because I don’t bleed red, white, and blue. I only bleed red. But I pee white and my balls are blue, so doesn’t that count for something?
Working in a hotel is the anti-coffee shop, because instead of it being a place that’ll wake you up, it’s a place to sleep. And it’s a place to have sex, which is something Starbucks frowns upon (though I’ve never seen anyone frown during sex...
I tell people my name is “The Weather,” and that I understand how they don’t have anything else to talk about besides me. Of course they do have something else to talk about. They could always talk about the weather. But that’s boring and a l...
...some small part of her had reacted to the passion inside him. Despite his role as a titled gentleman, there seemed to be a facet inside him that society could not tame, something stimulating yet dangerous, like standing at the edge of a cliff and ...
We never know how bad we had it, until something better comes along and we get to experience it for a while before reverting back to what we had before. If you’re wondering, yes, I did get back together with an ex girlfriend.
Respect is something that should be earned, like eyebrows shaped like windshield wipers in a stormy arcade evening. I like my respect with lots of elbow room and melted cheese on top.
When someone looks at something they don’t understand and they say, “That could be a good thing, or that could be a bad thing,” they’re just highlighting the fact that they have no clue what they are talking about. Everything in the universe,...
Memories are strange things. Withough being something I can hold in my hand, they wield a beguiling power over me. Like a mirage in the noontime heat of summer, they dance before my inner eyes and beckon me to find water where there is not water.
Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn't live in it...
We come back to the same people to learn something about how we have changed. We want to be assured that we have changed. We so want our pictures to paint differently than they do.
As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something e...
When I was a boy, I passed a homeless man, drunk and begging on a street corner. My father, sensing my disgust, said something I never forgot, that I think of every time I see your face on the news or in the paper- "That man was once someone's little...
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought,...
It was my idea. It's the safest way, but it's strange pretending to be something different. It's like there's a glass wall between us. Like I can't touch him or ... reach him. I don't like the way it feels.
