Book Quotes - page 90
Today, after eighteen years of defeat, the book of your domination is again opened, and your first act awakens every unhappy memory, and threatens to destroy the confidence which your professions of patriotism inspired. You turned down a leaf of the history that recorded your last act of power in 1861, and you have now signalized your return to power by beginning a second chapter at the same page, not this time by a heroic act that declares war on the battlefield, but you say, if all the legislative powers of the government do not consent to let you tear certain laws out of the statute-book, you will not shoot our government to death as you tried to do in the first chapter, but you declare that if we do not consent against our will, if you cannot coerce an independent branch of this government, against its will, to allow you to tear from the statute-books some laws put there by "there by the will of the people, you will starve the government to death.
James A. Garfield
I bumped into a woman I hadn't seen for nearly three years. The first thing she said to me? "You've lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw you!"
"Well," I said, slightly nonplussed, "the last time you saw me I'd just had a baby."
What I felt like saying was, "I've produced my third child and my sixth novel since I last saw you. Aren't either of those things more important, more interesting, than my size?" But no - my waist looked smaller! Forget the kid and the book: finally, something to celebrate!
J. K. Rowling
What I admire in the ancient philosophers is their desire to make their lives conform to their writings, a trait which we notice in Plato, Theophrastus and many others. Practical morality was so truly their philosophy's essence that many, such as Xenocrates, Polemon, and Speusippus, were placed at the head of schools although they had written nothing at all. Socrates was none the less the foremost philosopher of his age, although he had not composed a single book or studied any other science than ethics.
Nicolas Chamfort
Consider the most famous pure dystopian tale of modern times, 1984, by George Orwell (1903-1950), published in 1948 (the same year in which Walden Two was published). I consider it an abominably poor book. It made a big hit (in my opinion) only because it rode the tidal wave of cold war sentiment in the United States.
Isaac Asimov
Go vegan because you want to change something in yourself or in the world and then do more. Eating a certain way isn't enough; we have to do something about the world we live in. Anyone who wants to be vegan or cares about the earth or the life on earth should read a book called Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization.
Andy Hurley
Yes, a private investigator like my Wilbraham Rice. The public have taken very strongly to Wilbraham Rice. He bites his nails and eats a lot of bananas. I don't know why I made him bite his nails to start with - it's really rather disgusting - but there it is. He started by biting his nails, and now he has to do it in every single book. So monotonous.
Agatha Christie
Do you know anyone who's never watched TV, never seen a movie, never read a book? Of course not. So let me ask you one more question. Do you know someone, maybe even in your own family, who's never played a video game? I bet you do. How can this be? If we want to consider ourselves a true mass medium, if we want to grow as an industry, this has to change.
Reggie Fils-Aimé
-What did you do today?
-Went to the grocery store and Xeroxed a box of English muffins, two pounds of ground veal and an apple. In flagrant violation of the Copyright Act.
-You had your nap, I remember that-
-I had my nap.
-Lunch, I remember that, there was lunch, slept with Susie after lunch, then your nap, woke up, right?, went Xeroxing, right?, read a book not a whole book but part of a book-
-Talked to Happy on the telephone saw the seven o'clock news did not wash dishes want to clean up some of this mess?
-If one does nothing but listen to the new music, everything else drifts, frays. Did Odysseus feel this way when he and Diomedes decided to steal Athene's statue from the Trojans, so that they would become dejected and lose the war? I don't think so, but who is to know what effect the new music of that remote time had on its hearers?
-Or how it compares to the new music of this time?
-One can only conjecture.
Donald Barthelme
My deranged mother has written another book. This one is called The Bough and is even worse that the others. I refer not to its quality-it exhibits the usual "coruscating wit” and "penetrating social observation”-but to the extent to which it utilizes, as a kind of mulch pile, the lives of her children.
Donald Barthelme
