Than Quotes (page 514)
Making decisions was the painful part for me, the part I agonized over. But once the decision was made, I simply followed through—usually with relief that the choice was made. Sometimes the relief was tainted by despair, like my decision to come to Forks. But it was still better than wrestling with the alternatives.
Stephenie Meyer
I repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all "direct" persons and men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are at ease and you know that is the chief thing.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Every day is like a kid's drawing, offered to you with a strange mix of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.
Michael Chabon
Who says great literatue has to be written by men? Who says great literature has to be about scary, creepy stuff like adulterers being punished and black slaves breaking loose and giant whales eating people? Why can't literature just be stories about women? Refined, respectable women have just as much to say as ignorant black slaves or bloodthirsty Indians or mad white whaling captains. Why do we have to pretend those people's lives matter more than our own?
A. Whitney Brown
Morning, Peter,” she calls
from the back, in her exaggerated German accent. Mawning, Pedder.
She’s been in the States more than fifteen years now, but her
accent has gotten heavier. Uta is a member of what seems to be a
growing body of defiantly unassimilated expatriates. She on one
hand disdains her country of origin (Darling, the word “lugubrious”
comes to mind) but on the other seems to grow more German (more
not-American) with every passing year.
...
Because Uta is German, utterly German,...
Michael Cunningham
I dislike his talk; it goes against my grain to hear him speak so contemptuously of cobblers. They made as good soldiers as the finer folk, anyway. Adolf Bethke was a cobbler, for that matter,--and he knew a sight more about war than a good many majors. It was the man that counted with us, not his occupation.
Erich Maria Remarque