Wrong Quotes (page 53)
Carmelia Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano Jos had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.
Philip Roth
We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.
Wendell Berry
Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has ever made--that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day....Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane.
Thomas Pynchon
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting...
Arthur Schopenhauer
It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so? I don't know? not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and? sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.
J. D. Salinger
You think wars get started because some duke gets shot, or someone cuts off one’s ear, or someone’s sited their missiles in the wrong place. It’s not like that. That’s just well, just reasons, which haven’t got anything to do with it. What really causes wars is two sides that can’t stand the sight of one another and the pressure builds up and up and then anything will cause it. Anything at all.
Terry Prachett
Lovely and unremarkable, the clutterof mugs and books, the almost-empty FigNewtons box, thick dishes in a bigtin tray, the knife still standing in the butter, change like the color of river waterin the delicate shift to day. Thin fogveils the hedges, where a neighbor dogmakes rounds. 'Go to bed. It doesn't matterabout the washing-up. Take this book along.'Whatever it was we said that night is gone, framed like a photograph nobody took. Stretched out on a camp cot with the book, I think that...
Marilyn Hacker