Pyrrhic victor.
‘Another such victory and I am undone.’
"It is so hard to leave — until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world."
"She walks in. A nod and a loving smirk to the waiter and he wordlessly brings her order. The same order every time, though she’s not a woman for consistency. In fact, nothing scares her more. But, in this, slight stability, she can meet the inherent need for home, for belonging, while holding it at arms length."
"When I see these democratic elites pretending to condemn the murderer, it seems absurd. You are the people who sustain the gun policy."
"When we consider that each of us has only one life to live, isn’t it rather tragic to find men and women, with brains capable of comprehending the stars and the planets, talking about the weather; men and women, with hands capable of creating works of art, using those hands only for routine tasks; men and women, capable of independent thought, using their minds as a bowling-alley for popular ideas; men and women, capable of greatness, wallowing in mediocrity; men and women, capable of self-expression, slowly dying a mental death while they babble the confused monotone of the mob?"
"It is doubtful, of course, that things happened that way, but what we don’t know, we don’t know."
– The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
"14. a foreigner : Foreigners aroused both curiosity and suspicion in Soviet Russia, representing both the glamour of ‘abroad’ and the possibility of espionage."
– Notes from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita
"Girl on her own, how many times home."
– Leon Dwyer
"It is advisable that politicians, including Romney, should abandon … short-sighted China-bashing tricks and adopt at least a little bit of statesmanship on China-U.S. ties."
"But the next day everything was as it had always been, for the townsmen did not like to remember evil and did not worry about the future; in their blood was the conviction that real life consists of calm periods and that it would be mad and vain to spoil them by looking for some other, firmer and more lasting life that did not exist."
– Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina
"Don’t say ‘cut’ unless I’m dead."
– Buster Keaton
"We don’t want to believe that our faith is contingent in who we hang out with. But there you go."
– This American Life #421 Last Man Standing
