“Mess with Texas. No live human being could mess with Texas. If you succeed in messing with Texas, it s a sure bet you re as dead as a Junebug in July.”
“Who was Steve Jobs, anyway? An adopted half-Arab on acid, really. Everything you need to know is right there. Close enough to Jesus to confuse some into thinking he might’ve been the second coming, but far enough, when you know the facts, like Ray does, to reveal himself for what he really was: the Antichrist.”
“New devils require new gods.”
“Les gens de qualité savent tout, sans avoir jamais rien appris. People of quality know everything without ever having learned anything.”
“I d been so focused on my existential malaise, my navel-gazing, I seemed to be oblivious to the reality around me.”
“Only man has turned away from the law of survival of the fittest, taken up the weak and ailing, and guaranteed their right to survival. So heroes perish, but the weak live on. One measure of a civilisation, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society. There s even a political scientist (anonymous) who claims that our modern age is an age of the patient, by the patient, for the patient .”
“Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was”
“and i especially don´t like talking to old people. i don´t like having to shout to be heard. i don´t like their turned milk and their soft biscuits. i don´t like their fishy cats and youth dew perfume that smells of mothballs. i don´t like that they grown every time they sit down or stand up., or how loud they have their tv and how much they complain about what´s on tv or how they boast about having their own teeth or why i should be interested in the fact that they can still spell when they´re 89 years old. i´m with the eskimos putting their useless grandparents on ice floes and waving goodbye. this may be monstrous slander on eskimos. it could just as easily be some other tribe with access to large bodies of ice, or just plain water, with crocodiles.”
“Karne chalithi mussalmanon ko benaqaab jo Khud duniya naqaab-posh hogayi.”
“Yup, the whole world is comin here to get paid. And our country s just one big strip-mining club, makin it rain for everyone, hahahaha!”
“From that Sunday on Preacher Franklin added a new song to the service called , I Am Better Than You and it went like this: Many years I wandered lost and scared, Through troubles and toils my wickedness flared Then in my darkness I realized what I needed to do Now I do all the right things and I am better than you. Chorus: Better than you, yes I am better than you My life has a purpose and I can tell you what to do Better than you, yes I am better than you If you are a scared miserable loser, I will help pull you through.”
“Satire is what closes on Saturday night”
“Why, it s a commandment handed down by our ancestors. That was the way they behaved-- And I suppose their conduct was invariably impeccable, huh? Chris mocked. One of the reasons I ve always had respect for polygamy is that our ancestors handed it down to us.”
“At the end of an interview for her first post-PhD job Tessa abandons the politically correct answers and says, The doctrine of equity sounds good--and maybe the hearts of some of those who profess it are in the right place. But in reality, it s immoral, unfair, harmful to academic standards, and deeply paternalistic. So in response to your question, Dr. Franco, I do not promote equity in the classroom. I promote education instead.”
“As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o clock and time to get up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulators that Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to achieve perfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was - as anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa,when his house burned down when Grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the rest of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor ( which faced north as his former bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and then moved in his mind to the house he d grown up in, and in the end didn t know one day from another until he died. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, but there s more than one kind of of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great-grandpa. He died of misdirection. / Lake Wobegon Days Garrison Keillor/ ”
“Misery made me a writer, Hardship broke my pen.”
“Red is frequently associated with passion because it is the color of fire. Those who take this seriously need to be reminded there is such a thing as arson.”