Than Quotes (page 639)
It's your duty to use what influence you have, unless you want to drift through life like a fish belly-up on the stream"I wish I could believe that life really is something more than a stream that carries us along, belly-up"Alright, if it's a stream, you're still free to be in this part of it or that part, aren't you? The water will divide again and again. If you bump, and tussle, and fight, and make use of whatever advantages you might have-"Oh, that's fine, I'm sure, when you have...
Arthur Golden
I am the happiest man in the world and here's why: I walk down a street and I see a woman, not tall but well-proportioned, very dark-haired, very neat in her dress, wearing a dark skirt with deep pleats that swing with the rhythm of her rather quick steps; her stockings, of dark color, are carefully, impeccably smooth; her face is not smiling, this woman walks down the street without trying to please, as if she were unconscious of what she represented: a good carnal image of woman, a physical...
Francois Truffaut
For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health wasted. 'You never know what'll set the memory off,' he told us. 'A baby's face. A bell on a cat's collar. Anything.'They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for...
Jeffrey Eugenides
Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of...
Arthur C. Clarke
Sussman had the ability to seize facts and lock them in his memory, where they remained poised for instants recall. More than any other editor at the Post, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed. On a deadline, he would pump these facts into a story in a constant infusion, working up a body of significant information to support what otherwise seemed like the weakest of revelations....
Carl Bernstein
Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw on their walks, the...
Boris Pasternak
depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship [...] feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibrating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news [...] Grim situations were Katz's niche the way murky water was a carp's [...] he might well have started making music again, had it not been for the accident of success. He flopped around on the ground,...
Jonathan Franzen