Say Quotes (page 457)
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My parents raised me that you never ask people about their reproductive plans. “You don’t know their situation,” my mom would say. I considered it such an impolite question that for years I didn’t even ask myself. Thirty-five turned into forty faster than McDonald’s food turns into cold nonfood.
Tina Fey
Here’s a free tip,” his father says: “The feds aren’t terribly impressed by infantile egoism. In fact, if Objectivism were at the center of human philosophical discourse rather than the fringes, we wouldn’t be here—the Big Zap would have arrived decades ago. But I’m going to be generous and let you write down the ghost of Ayn Rand as a brain fart. I won’t bring her up again if you don’t.
Cory Doctorow
With the years and convulsions of history, the word-as reductionist as the dictionary itself-has undergone absurd metamorphoses. In some countries, they prefer the word "destabilization." Poor" countries no longer exist, just "disadvantaged" or "underprivileged" ones. We say "brainwashing" instead of "propaganda." And now we refer to revolutions in fashion, music and electronics, where ink flows but not blood. The point is profit, not truth
Elie Wiesel
Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: 'I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.
Mark Twain
If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought,” he said, “the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.”
We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It rang so true, so real.
“In our privatest mind,” he said, “there is only chaos and blur. We invented logic to beat back our creatural selves. We assert or deny. We follow M with N.”
Our privatest mind, we thought. Did he really say that?
“The only laws that matter are...
Don DeLillo
We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head....
William Gass