Posts tagged quotes
Posts tagged quotes
Obama’s campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.
I’m like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.
(Source: wordsthat-speak, via lokattan)
Here’s the thing about sentimentality and fatally flawed wishful thinking: it’s virulently contagious. And that capacity we have for making unhappiness happen is powerful enough to take the apparent form of its own opposite.
“All this talk is absolutely useless,” she said. “When I began to read novels, and I began very young, I always had the feeling that the dialogue was ridiculous. For the simple reason that the slightest incident would have put an end to these conversations or cut them short. For instance, what if I had been in my cabin, or you had decided to go on deck instead of coming here to have a beer? Why place any importance on an exchange of words provoked by the most absurd coincidence?”
“The worst of it,” said Medrano, “is that it can be applied to every act in life, including love, which, until now, has seemed the most serious and fatal of our activities. To accept your point of view means that all our existence becomes trivial, to toss it to the dogs of pure absurdity.”
“Why not?” said Claudia. “Persio would say that what we call absurd is only our ignorance.”
I didn’t want to lose this man, this friend who had made it so easy to be a friend, to oblivion. He had made a place for himself in my memory, but I didn’t want to lose my place in his. Death is always about the loss of the self, even when it’s someone else’s death.
On the scale of things I wouldn’t take an emotional risk for, friendship comes higher than a sexual relationship. It is more mysterious, more dangerous to me than a sexual affair, which I can easily relegate to a game and walk away from with a shrug. I am perhaps a child of the sixties. Or something. Sex can be serious, but it doesn’t have to be. Friendship feels like a much weightier matter, but something I haven’t ever quite got the knack of. Whenever I have most felt the dizzying vertigo of betrayal (or of betraying), it has been in the context of friendship.
There are no secrets to becoming strong. It’s all about hard work. Beer and women will be the ruin of you.
‘If the girl had been worth having she’d have waited for you?’ No, sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.
In neighbouring genres, Nazis are a perennial in supernatural action. Zombie Nazis. Fucking Zombie Nazis, which is good a model of actual monsters being turned into nice, safe fiction as is currently popular. The scary thing about monsters is that they’re people
I only make this obvious point because when I was Minister of Science and Innovation in the last Labour government, I was told by one think-tank that there was a lot of ‘hidden innovation’ in our service industries. Leaving aside the question of how they knew about it if it was hidden, I asked for some examples, and was told solemnly, after some hesitation, that tax avoidance was an area where we are very innovative.
