Particularly Quotes (page 18)
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Some things are governed by common sense. Putting buttons on the front of a shirt is a matter of logic, since it would be very difficult to button them up at the side, and impossible if they were at the back.
“Other things, however, become fixed because more and more people believe that’s the way they should be. I’ll give you two examples. Have you ever wondered why the keys on a typewriter are arranged in that particular order?
Paulo Coelho
It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray in which only New York afternoons indulge. A breeze was crying down the streets, whisking along battered newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were pricking out all the windows- it was so desolate that one was sorry for the tops of sky-scrapers lost up there in the dark green and gray heaven.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
...the particular phraseology of the Constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the Constitution is void; and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument.
John Marshall
The color of one's creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in time of space with a fatal objection from a mob that hates that particular tone. And the more brilliant, the more unusual the man, the nearer he is to the stake. Stranger always rhymes with danger. The meek prophet, the enchanter in his cave, the indignant artist, the nonconforming little schoolboy, all share in the same sacred danger. And this being so, let us bless them, let us bless the freak;...
Vladimir Nabokov
In this particular tub, two knees jut uplike icebergs, while minute brown hairs riseon arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soapnavigates the tidal slosh of seasbreaking on legendary beaches; in faithwe shall board our imagined ship and wildly sailamong sacred islands of the mad till deathshatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.
Sylvia Plath
There had been a popular joke on Freedom, started by a man named Calder. Looking down from space, he had said, the dominant life forms on Earth were obviously the cereals and other grasses. They occupied all the most desirable and fertile land; and they had tamed insects and animals to care for them. In particular, they had domesticated the bipeds to nurture and cultivate them and to save and plant their seed. Now, watching the farmers, Alex could easily imagine that they were worshiping and...
Larry Niven
Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.
Charles Dickens
Her thoughts ran away to her girlhood with its passionate longing for adventure and she remembered the arms of men that had held her when adventure was a possible thing for her. Particularly she remembered one who had for a time been her lover and who in the moment of his passion had cried out to her more than a hundred times, saying the same words madly over and over: "You dear! You dear! You lovely dear!" The words, she thought, expressed something she would have liked to have achieved in...
Sherwood Anderson
I don’t think I pity her. She doesn’t strike me as a girl that suggests compassion. I think I envy her... I don’t know whether she is a gifted being, but she is a clever girl, with a strong will and a high temper. She has no idea of being bored...Very pretty indeed; but I don’t insist upon that. It’s her general air of being someone in particular that strikes me.
Henry James
Resolution number one: Obviously will lose twenty pounds. Number two: Always put last night's panties in the laundry basket. Equally important, will find sensible boyfriend to go out with and not continue to form romantic attachments to any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobic's, peeping toms, megalomaniacs, emotional fuckwits or perverts. And especially will not fantasize about a particular person who embodies all these things
Helen Fielding
On page 605, Blumenthal says that 'I made friends with Hitchens's friends the novelists Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.' True in its way. I particularly remember the occasion when he called me up and invited me to dinner with Dick Morris, but only on condition that I brought Rushdie (who was staying in my house) along with me. No Rushdie: no invitation. So I never did get to meet Dick Morris.
Christopher Hitchens