Workings Quotes (page 308)
I finished my soup and bread and helped myself to a handful of cookies from the cookie jar, glancing at Morelli, wondering at his lean body. He’d eaten two bowls of soup, half a loaf of bread slathered in butter, and seven cookies. I’d counted.
He saw me staring and raised his eyebrows in silent question.
“I suppose you work out,” I said, mores statement than question.
“I run when I can. Do some weights.” He grinned. “Morelli men have good metabolisms.”
Life was a bitch.
Janet Evanovich
Now obviously, in peacetime a one-legged catcher, like a one-armed outfielder (such as the Mundys had roaming right), would have been at the most a curiosity somewhere down in the dingiest town in the minors - precisely where Hot had played during the many years that the nations of the world lived in harmony. But it is one of life's grisly ironies that what is catastrophe for most of mankind, invariably works to the advantage of a few who live on the fringes of the human community. On the...
Philip Roth
It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make things great; I wish that they would try a little more to make great men; that they would set less value on the work and more upon the workman; that they would never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when every man belonging to it is individually weak; and that no form or combination of social polity has yet been devised to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled...
Alexis de Tocqueville
With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed--he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.
Graham Greene
Chaos can be one means of arriving at a definable possibility, but if we look back at the works of Blake's youth chaos must be understood as something impossible, as a poetic violence and not as a calculated order. The chaos of the mind cannot constitute a reply to the providence of the universe. All it can be is an awakening in the night, where all that can be heard is anguished poetry let loose.
Georges Bataille
The world of the grotesque is the darkness within us. Well before Freud and Jung shined a light on the workings of the subconscious, this correlation between darkness and our subconscious, these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people. It wasn’t a metaphor, even. If you trace it back further, it wasn’t even a correlation. Until Edison invented the electric light, most of the world was totally covered in darkness. The physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed...
Haruki Murakami