20 quotes found
“Simple is never that simple.”
“Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.”
“The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedythat is every man's tragedy.”
“You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.”
“He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything.”
“A man who's discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror of self-reflection.”
“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cann...”
“That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most a...”
“This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die--the argument with them drops away and peopl...”
“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 b...”
“Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to s...”
“And since we dont just forget things because they dont matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings a...”
“Simple was never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming...”
“Within five minutes of leaving the reunion, I'd undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinnamon-lined chambers microscopically studded...”
“You fight your superficiality, you shallowness, as as to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untank-like as you can be, sans cannon and ...”
“Writting turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get ir right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't co...”
“Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? ...”
“What are you? Do you know? What you are is you're always trying to smooth everything over. What you are is always trying to be moderate. What you are is never telling the truth if you think it's go...”
“Memories particularly of when they werent being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and youre-going-to-be-late, ...”
“The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's...”
