There are photographs of people you don't recognize and photographs of you in ways you don't wish to be remembered, but they each contain elements of places or times you do not wish to forget.
I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.
And you shouldn't choose to care about someone. There shouldn't be a time and a place for it. Either you do or you don't. Don't try.” He looks off. “There can be falseness in trying to do something that should come naturally to people.
The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
If you will look about you (which most people won't do)," says Sergeant Cuff, "you will see that the nature of a man's tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man's business.
For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature.
We live in bad times. People do harm to those they don’t understand. There is nothing worse than a closed mind and the blind trust that you are the only person to be right.
We were in Paris. We were in love. We were with other people at the time and wouldn’t even meet for two years.
Their own life together was like a subtle watercolor sketch, invisible to other people. They gave the world what it required of them and for the rest of the time were content to be forgotten.
People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.
Over time, I have come to believe that there is a killer and a saint in all of us. But...I choose to focus on the future and the *potential* in people.
Look around you at the people you spend the most time with and realize that your life can’t rise any higher than your friendships.
The Sabbath, I said, is not only an idea. It is also something you keep. With other people. You can’t just extract lessons from it.
If this is truly the time that will decide, we have no business refusing people who feel the way we do. No right to decide that they must huddle in their homes waiting to see if they are still slaves or not when the summer ends.
Most of the time, if you treat people right, you don't have to be afraid of them.
Too many people are missing their destiny a year at a time because they're too scared to think in decades!" (p. 127)
A long time ago people believed that the world is flat and the moon is made of green cheese. Some still do, to this day. The man on the moon is looking down and laughing.
Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.
Only the TV sounds are real, they are the actual events. All the people around here experience the same things at the same time, except for some loner, who switches to the educational channel.
Charley thought of her father. He'd always told her she should never make assumptions about other people's time or their money, and that's the way she tried to live.
I believe there are two kinds of people in this world. The ones who do everything right, expecting the perfect outcome every time, and those who know better.
