Worldly Quotes (page 249)
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There are people in this world who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders them ridiculous. And the more horrible the death the more ridiculous they seem. It's no use trying to invest the end with a little dignity? you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to discover anything tragic in their going.
Henry Miller
Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called "Rushdie," and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averros, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.
Salman Rushdie
Look at me," he said, glancing
down at his legs. "A wretched old man in a red monkey suit. A convicted murderer about
to be gassed like an animal. And look at you. A fine young man with a beautiful
education and a bright future. Where in the world did I go wrong? What happened to me?
I've spent my
life hating people, and look what I have to show for it. You, you don't hate anybody. And
look where you're headed. We have the same blood. Why am I here?
John Grisham
Once these two had been joined together in love, or something like love; they had made two babies, and yet, only fifteen years later, the last tie between them was broken now. All lost, all gone. Nothing lasted, nothing. Even this forty-million-year world that the Oversoul had preserved as if in ice, even it would melt before the fire. Permanence was always an illusion, and love was just the disguise that lovers wore to hide the death of their union from each other for a while.
Orson Scott Card
Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who, before anything has reared its ugly head, have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies. The habit fitted snugly into my well-established world of make-believe.
Quentin Crisp
The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.
It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.
Carl Sagan
