2,092 quotes found
“Painters--and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong some...”
“If you can not call out bigotry, corruption, racism, sexism, xenophobia, islamophobia, ageism, agnosticism, imperialism, antiblackism, antisemitism, authoritarianism, terrorism, egoism, and totalit...”
“We loved—and were fated to sorrow. But from our striving and from our sorrow we fashioned The Oldest Story in the World.”
“Lauren realizes right then that the prospect of being single—of recent events leading to a divorce and her being a single mother with child support checks and the like—scares her to death. Dating i...”
“The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.The rarest of these specialists,...”
“It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
“He looked in her eyes as if trying to tell her he loved her without words. She looked back at him as if to say, I know.”
“Over the years Amy’s family has become a cascade of domestic abuse: her father beat on her brother, who grew big and furious and beat on her mother, who had no one but Amy to vent her anger on. Bas...”
“He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so.”
“This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself behind my leaks. “I know,” I said. “You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said. “I know,” I said. There in the coc...”
“What is the secret of life?’ I asked.‘I forget,’ said Sandra.‘Protein,’ the bartender declared. ‘They found something out about protein.‘‘Yeah,’ said Sandra, ‘that’s it.”
“He gave me the key, which I later discovered would open practically every door in the hotel. I thanked him, and I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share an irony with...”
“How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
“Fear hadn’t come to him yet. Pain hadn’t come where pain would come. There was only the feeling of having done something perfect at last—the taste of a drink from a cold, pure spring.”
“If a cat spoke, it would say things like 'Hey, I don’t see the problem here.”
“If "RACE" becomes the norm, then harmony will not prevail.”
“Sometimes Alton Darwin would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to Athena. 'Drugs were food,' he said. 'I was in the food business. Just because people o...”
“On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” And Vanity comes along and asks the question, “Is it popular?” But Conscience asks the q...”
“The Mafia’s involvement with gay bars is ironic on so many levels. Macho guys ruled gangland but supported a subculture for nelly queens. Most mobsters were evil sociopaths motivated only by financ...”
“For just a second, Lauren wonders if she’s going insane. But insane people don’t think they’re insane, everybody knows that. But...since that fact of insanity is common knowledge, doesn’t that mean...”
