Series Quotes (page 13)
Unk shook his head vaguely. He could think of no apt condensation of his adventures for the obviously ritual mood. Something great was plainly expected of him. He was not up to greatness. He exhaled noisily, letting the congregation know that he was sorry to fail them with his colorlessness. ‘I was a victim of a series of accidents,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘As are we all,’ he said. The cheering and dancing began again.
Kurt Vonnegut
Fire, ice, asteroids and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, only factions. Without community, there can be no consensus to resist the greedy, the envious, the power-mad narcissists who seize control and turn the institutions of civilization into a series of doom machines.
Dean Koontz
We mostly understand ourselves through an endless series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others. The so-called facts of our individual worlds are highly coloured and arbitrary, facts that fit whatever reality we have chosen to believe in. . . . It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions, is to understand ourselves as fully as we can.
Jeanette Winterson
But, my dear, so few things are fulfilled: what are most lives but a series of incompleted episodes? 'We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task...' It is wanting to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.
Truman Capote
The Aussies have spent so much time basking in the glory of the last generation that they have forgotten to plan for this one. It's just like the West Indies again; once their great names from the 1970s and 80s retired, the whole thing fell apart. The way things are going, the next Ashes series cannot come too quickly for England. What a shame that we have to wait until 2013 to play this lot again.
Geoffrey Boycott
A few weeks later, I’m in a fluorescent-lit classroom in Chelsea awaiting the start of the official Mensa test. I’m sitting next to a guy who’s doing a series of elaborate neck stretches, like we’re about to engage in a vigorous rugby match. He’s neatly laid out four types of gum on his Formica desk: Juicy Fruit, Wrigley Spearmint, Big Red, and Eclipse. I hate this guy. I hope to God he’s not a genius.
A. J. Jacobs