Yearly Quotes (page 98)
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At ten, she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house. At fifteen, appearances were mending; she began to curl her hair and long for balls; her complexion improved, her features were softened by plumpness and colour, her eyes gained more animation, and her figure more consequence. Her love of dirt gave away to inclination for finery, and she grew clean as she grew smart. To...
Jane Austen
You don’t know anything, apart from what you read in the paper.”
“You seem to be the only person in the world that the papers get bang to rights. If they say you’ve slept with a fifteen-year-old, you have. If they say you’ve fallen over drunk in the street, you have. They don’t need to invent stuff for you.”
This was actually quite an acute observation. She was right: not once have I been the victim of misrepresentation or distortion. If you think about it, that was one of the most...
Nick Hornby
philosophyI studied philosophy for four years. But I'd trade everything I learned for this passage... quoted in the Britannica:'But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into...
A. J. Jacobs
I should like to ask you: Does your childhood seem far off? Do the days when you sat at your mother’s knee seem days of very long ago?”
Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of kind smoothings and preparings of the way…
Charles Dickens
Man, I didnt know anything like that was going to happen! Honest, Tex, he was on something. Holy cow! I really kid, I been doing this stuff for a year now and I never saw nobody pull a gun before! God Almighty! What if he hadnt missed!' -- Lem
'He didn't.' -- Tex
'What?' -- Lem
'I said he didn't miss. He shot me and it hurts like hell.' -- Tex
S. E. Hinton
All these years I had been sustained by an illusion-happiness through victory- and now that illusion was burned to ashes. I was no more happier, no more fullfilled, for all my achievements. Finally I saw through the clouds I saw that I had never learned how to enjoy life, only how to achieve. All my life i had been busy seeking happiness, but never finding it or sustaining it.
Dan Millman
I am not one of your repentant sinners, Kenneth. I have lived my life—God, what a life!—and as I have lived I shall die, unflinching and unchanged. Dare one to presume that a few hours spent in whining prayers shall atone for years of reckless dissoluteness? 'Tis a doctrine of cravens, who, having lacked in life the strength to live as conscience bade them, lack in death the courage to stand by that life's deeds. I am no such traitor to myself.
Rafael Sabatini
perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffet seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American's yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit...
Barack Obama
The preferred medications were those that forestalled corruption. We know 'as a result of more than three thousand years of experience that Myrrh and Aloes preserve corpses.' (Lange, 1689) Are not these deteriorations of the bodies of the same nature as those that accompany the diseases of the humors?
Michel Foucault