Carefulness Quotes (page 109)
Collectivism doesn't work because it's based on a faulty economic premise. There is no such thing as a person's fair share of wealth. The gross national product is not a pizza that must be carefully divided because if I get too many slices, you have to eat the box. The economy is expandable and, in any practical sense, limitless.
P. J. O'Rourke
but the flower continued her beauty preparations in the shelter of her green chamber, selecting her colors with greatest care and dressing quite deliberately, adjusting her petals one by one. She had no desire to emerge all rumpled, like the poppies. She wished to appear only with full radiance of her beauty. Oh yes, she was quite vain!
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Paul's face grew serious. 'I think whenever a people has enormous resources, it is easy for them to call themselves democratic. I think of myself more as a physician than an American. We belong to the nation of those who care for the sick. Americans are lazy democrats, and it is my belief, as someone who shares the same nationality as [a Russian doctor], I think the rich can always call themselves democratic, but the sick people are not among the rich [...] I'm very proud to be an American. I...
Tracy Kidder
No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of "little girls"—not simply "young girls." Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and "sex kittens." Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when...
Vladimir Nabokov
~Do you like him much?
~I told you I like him a little. Where is the use of caring for him so very much? He is full of faults.
~Is he?
~All boys are.
~More than girls?
~Very likely. Wise people say it is folly to think anyboy perfect, and as to likes and diskiles, we should be friendly to all, and worship none.
Charlotte Bronte
We used to talk about death, she said. We don’t anymore. Why is that?
I don’t know.
It’s because it’s here. There’s nothing left to talk about.
I wouldn’t leave you.
I don’t care. It’s meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I’ve taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot.
Death is not a lover.
O yes he is.
Please don’t do this.
I’m sorry.
I can’t do it alone.
Cormac McCarthy