Pointed Quotes (page 113)
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I knew it,’ she says. ‘I knew I had met you before. I knew it the first time I saw your photograph. It’s as if we had to meet again at some point in this life. I talked to my friends about it, but they thought I was crazy, that thousands of people must say the same thing about thousands of other people every day. I thought they must be right, but life… life brought you to me. You came to find me, didn’t you?
Paulo Coelho
[from "On Keeping a Notebook"]: It is a good idea to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about…I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not…Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.
Joan Didion
Samuel became even more interested in politics than his father had been, served the Republican Party tirelessly as a king-maker, caused that party to nominate men who would whirl like dervishes, bawl fluent Babylonian, and order the militia to fire into crowds whenever a poor man seemed on the point of suggesting that he and a Rosewater were equal in the eyes of the law.
Kurt Vonnegut
In my first meeting with Vladimir Putin in the spring of 2001, he complained that Russia was burdened by Soviet-era debt. At that point, oil ws selling for $26 per barrel. By the time I saw Putin at the APEC summit in Sydney in September 2007 oil had reached $71--on its way to $137 in the summer of 2008. He leaned back in his chair and asked how were Russia's mortgage-backed securities doing.
George W. Bush
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.
Flannery O'Connor
There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present as his own assembley--perhaps heavily paranoid voices whisper, 'his time's assembley'--and there ought to be a punchline to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead and being scattered. His cards have been laid down, Celtic style, in the order suggested by Mr. A.E. Waite, laid out and read, but they are the cards of a tanker and feeb: they point only to a long and scuffling...
Thomas Pynchon
Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point that out. The conspicious consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spirtual error, or even bad manners.
Barbara Kingsolver
A group of ancient Roman women were, with vanity, showing their jewels one to another. Among them was Cornelia, the mother of two boys. One of the women said to her, "And where are your jewels?" to which Cornelia responded, pointing to her sons, "These are my jewels." Under her tutelage, and walking after the virtues of her life, they grew to become...two of the most persuasive and effective reformers in Roman history. For as long as they are remembered and spoken of...their mother will be...
Gordon B. Hinckley
