“Man usually sees what he is looking for; seldom what he is looking at.”
“Despite all of the time he spent in Big Heart s, Wilson had never come to understand the social lives of Indians. He did not know that, in the Indian world, there is not much social difference between a rich Indian and a poor one. Generally speaking, Indian is Indian. A few who gain wealth and power as lawyers, businessmen, artists, or doctors may marry white people and keep only white friends, but generally Indians of different classes interact freely with one another. Most unemployed or working poor, some with good jobs and steady incomes, but all mixing together. Wilson also did not realize how tribal distinctions were much more important than economic ones. The rich and poor Spokanes may hang out together, but that doesn t necessarily mean the Spokanes are friendly with the Lakota or Navajo or any other tribe. The Sioux still distrust the Crow because they served as scouts for Custer. Hardly anybody likes the Pawnee. Most important, though, Wilson did not understand that the white people who pretend to be Indian are gently teased, ignored, plainly ridiculed, or beaten, depending on their degree of whiteness.”
“Yeah. She d manipulated the second most powerful vampire in town into taking her side against a psycho bitch-queen sorority girl. She d talked rationally about putting people s brains into computers. This was a normal day. No wonder she was screwed up.”
“Altering your perspective can provide you the luxury of seeing things for what they are, not what you wish them to be.”
“From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck, drag him a quarter of a million miles out, and say, Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
“The scene [Bruegel s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus ] is filled with a vast field, and a cow and a farmer plowing. In the left-hand corner is a tiny ocean the size of a palm, and there, I can barely make it out, the two legs of a man who fell headlong into the sea. This is called the Fall of Icarus. Compared to everyday life, the fall of an idealist who flew too high with candle-wax wings is an unremarkable tragedy.”
“The definition of Employment by an employer, and, that by an employee, are seldom the same.”
“<...> Gerai suprantu, kad kiekvienas žmogus turi individualius savo patyrimų aruodus ir neretas, ko sava akim nėra matęs, nelabai tam įtiki. Todėl nieko nepadarysi, jei į aikštės viduryje pastatytą skulptūrą kiekvienas žiūri tik iš savo pusės ir ne visados nori apeiti aplink, pažiūrėti iš visų pusių. <...>”
“If there’s one thing I have learned it’s that if you carry on as though nothing strange is happening, it usually stops being strange”
“Outside has everything. Whenever I think of a thing now like skis or fireworks or islands or elevators or yo-yos, I have to remember they re real, they re actually happening in Outside all together. It makes my head tired. And people too, firefighters teachers burglars babies saints soccer players and all sorts, they re all really in Outside. I m not there, though, me and Ma, we re the only ones not there. Are we still real?”
“Haven t you ever noticed that life is like a series of movies?”
“Maybe belief is the biggest lie. In ages past, the earliest philosophers tried to explain the stars in the sky and the world around them. One of them conceived of the notion that the universe was mounted on giant crystal spheres controlled by a giant machine, which explained the movements of the heavens. He was laughed at and told that such a machine would be so huge and noisy that everyone would hear it. He simply replied that we are born with that noise all around us, and that we are so used to hearing it that we cannot hear it at all.”
“Each of us sees things not as they are but as we are.”
“How you look it is pretty much how you ll see it”
“After five seconds there was a click, and the entire Universe was there in the box with him.”
“The worm in the radish doesn t think there is anything sweeter.”
“We think of those nights spent with one or more friends, nights when we merged with the shadows and could see the world with eyes that were not our own.”