Worldly Quotes (page 540)
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How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another's heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? Even if the world's rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend's difficult and...
Orhan Pamuk
I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.[...]The wind of my life was blowing me away.[...]I take the blue envelope...and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.
James Baldwin
That, precisely, is the deadliness of second-handers. They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They're concerned only with people. They don't ask: 'Is this true?' They ask: 'Is this what others think is true?' Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. You don't think through another's...
Ayn Rand
At almost every meeting since then, Big Bob has made me cry. I never went back to the doctor. I never chewed the valerian root. This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. If I didn't say anything, people in a group assumed the worst. They cried harder, I cried harder. Look up into the stars and you're gone. Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I'd ever felt. I wasn't host to cancer or blood parasites; I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded...
Chuck Palahniuk
A favorite liberal taunt is to accuse conservatives of clinging to an idealized past. Poor, right-wing Americans vaguely sense the world is changing and now they’re lashing out. What about the idealized past liberals cling to? They all act as if they were civil rights foot soldiers constantly getting beat up by 500-pound southern sheriffs, while every twenty-year-old Republican today is treated as if he is on Team Bull Connor. At best, the struggle for civil rights was an intra-Democratic...
Ann Coulter
The reporters who came to the press conference in theoffice of the John Galt Line were young men who hadbeen trained to think that their job consisted ofconcealing from the world the nature of its events. It was their daily duty to serve as audience for somepublic figure who made utterances about the public good, in phrases carefully chosen to convey no meaning. It was their daily job to sling words together in anycombination they pleased, so long as the words did notfall into a sequence...
Ayn Rand
You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the way you see a table square or a Montclair lip-read. Kids today...you kids today somehow don't know how to feel, much less love, to say nothing of respect. We're just bodies to you. We're just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you. I'm not saying something clich like you take us for granted so much as I'm saying you cannot...imagine...
David Foster Wallace
