Them Quotes (page 421)
When I was a kid, I wanted to be as good an actor as Patrick, as cool as Frakes, and as funny as Brent. From time to time, one of them would say something to me that made me feel like I'd taken a step in that direction, and it always meant the world to me. I loved it when Brent would joke around with me, because it made me feel like I was the peer I so desperately wanted to be, instead of the clueless teenager I knew I was.
Wil Wheaton
He walked around all the useless things in the courtyard and touched them with his hands; for some reason, he wished that these would remember him, and love him. But he didn't believe they would. From childhood memories he knew how strange and sad it is after a long absence to see a familiar place again, for these unmoving objects have no memory and do not recognize the stirrings of a stranger's heart.
Andrei Platonov
It was the kind of promise a father makes easily and sincerely, knowing at the same time that it will be impossible to keep. The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart. A game of baseball can't really make a summer day last forever. A home run can't really heal all the broken places in our world, or in a single human heart. And there was no way that Mr. Feld could keep his promise never to leave Ethan again. All parents leave...
Michael Chabon
Oh, to be sure, there is much we do not understand. The years pass in their hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.
George R. R. Martin
Pornography, in my opinion, has been much misunderstood, for it doesn't develop sex fiends and send them roaming alleyways - it is an anodyne for the sexually oppressed and unrequited, for what is the aim of pornography if not to stimulate masturbation? And surely masturbation is the pleasanter alternative for men "on the muscle," as they say in horse-breeding circles.
Truman Capote
Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is a lot like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists - and cartoonists are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts.
Jonathan Franzen