Inability Quotes - page 12
She's such a bitch,” Tina says, which I find a little contradictory, but overall quite true. "She's got to be in charge of everything.”
I sit next to her. "Well, I guess. But in business, that's leadership.”
Tina stares at me for a second. "I can't believe you consider that a positive trait. How about her inability to accept other points of view? Is it good leadership to be narrow, too?”
"Focus,” I say. "They call that focus.”
Tina stares at me. "Her paranoia?”
"Business savvy.”
"Compulsive need to have everything just how she wants it?”
"Organizational skills.”
"Aggressiveness?”
"Aggressiveness,” I say, "is already a good thing.”
"Jesus Christ,” Tina says, her eyebrow ring glinting in the morning sun. "Sometimes I worry about this country.
Max Barry
This congeniality is another illusion. I loathe Gogol's moralistic slant, I am depressed and puzzled by his utter inability to describe young women, I deplore his obsession with religion. Verbal inventiveness is not really a bond between authors, it is merely a garland. He would have been appalled by my novels and denounced as vicious the innocent, and rather superficial, little sketch of his life that I produced twenty-five years ago. Much more successful, because based on longer and deeper research, was the life of Chernyshevski (in my novel The Gift), whose works I found risible, but whose fate moved me more strongly than did Gogol's. What Chernyshevski would have thought of it is another question-- but at least the plain truth of documents is on my side. That, and only that, is what I would ask of my biographer-- plain facts, no symbol-searching, no jumping at attractive but preposterous conclusions, no Marxist bunkum, no Freudian rot.
Vladimir Nabokov
Since it is always the same person whose mind thinks, wills, and judges, the autonomous nature of these activities has created great difficulties. Reason's inability to move the will, plus the fact that thinking can only "understand” what is past what neither remove it nor "rejuvenate it” ... have led to the various doctrines asserting the mind's impotence and the force of the irrational, in brief to Hume's famous dictum that "Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” that is, to a rather simple-minded reversal of the Platonic notion of reason's uncontested rulership in the household of the soul. What is so remarkable in all these theories and doctrines is their implicit monism, the claim that behind the obvious multiplicity of the world's appearances and, even more pertinently to our context, behind the obvious plurality of man's faculties and abilities, there must exist a oneness - the old hen pan, "the all is one” - either a single source or a single ruler.
Hannah Arendt