Hard Quotes (page 128)
On a ruinous wall I came upon a poster dating from the previous year and announcing that ‘six handsome bulls’ would be killed in the arena on such and such a date. How forlorn its faded colours looked. Where were the handsome bulls and the handsome bull-fighters now? It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays - for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists.
George Orwell
I want to be liked... No, I want to be more than just liked... I want people to say, "that Charlie Brown is a great guy!" And when people are at parties, I want them to look for me, and when I finally arrive, I want them to say, "here comes good ol' Charlie Brown... Now everything will be all right!" I want to be a special person... I want to be needed... It's kind of hard to explain... Do you understand? I mean, do you know what I'm talking about?"Sure, I understand perfectly..."Well?"Forget...
Charles M. Schulz
So you're thinking you'd rather not hand me a pistol?'
'They're dangerous. And illegal. And Chekov is qa writer you can trust.'
'But this is not a story. We're talking about the real word.'
Tamaru narrowed his eyes and looked hard at Aomame. Then, slowly opening his mouth, he said 'Who knows?
Haruki Murakami
The wisdom of the journeyman is to work one day at a time and he always said that any job even if it took years was made up out of a day's work. Nothing more. Nothing less. That was hard for me to learn. I always wanted to be finished. In the concept of a day's work is rythme and pace and wholeness.
Cormac McCarthy
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work - that is correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area. Furthermore, it must satisfy certain esthetic criteria - that is, in relation to how much it...
John von Neumann
The good folks mostly win, courage usually triumphs over fear, the family dog hardly ever contracts rabies: these are things I knew at twenty-five, and things I still know now, at the age of 25 x 2. But I know something else as well: there's a place in most of us where the rain is pretty much constant, the shadows are always long, and the woods are full of monsters. It is good to have a voice in which the terrors of such a place can be articulated and its geography partially described,...
Stephen King
Homer Wells, listening to Big Dot Taft, felt like her voice – dulled. Wally was away, Candy was away, and the anatomy of a rabbit was, after Clara, no challenge; the migrants, whom he’d so eagerly anticipated, were just plain hard workers; life was just a job. He had grown up without noticing when? Was there nothing remarkable in the transition?
John Irving