Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[gmw]

The thirteen year old narrator, after his first drag on a cigarette, and first swig of cheap booze thinks:

"This shit is poison. And I realise I've been betrayed by the two vices that fiction promised me I'd adore. Sal Paradise held up bottles of booze like a housewife in a detergent commercial. Holden Caulfield reached for his cigarettes like and act of faith. Even Huckleberry Finn tapped his pipe with relief and satisfaction. I can't trust anything. If sex turns out to be this bad, I'm never reading again."

-- Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones

[Lady Blue]

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
- Groucho Marx

[covingtoncat73]

"Every living thing is an elaboration of a single original plan. As humans we are mere increments - each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications and providential tinkerings stretching back to 3,8 billion years. Remarkably we are even quite closely related to fruit and vegetables. About half the chemical functions that take place in a banana are fundamentally the same as the chemical functions that place in you. It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will ever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is."

- Bill Bryson in "A Short History of Nearly Everything" (2003)

[kennyc]

Love Bill Bryson!

[BenG]

Oscar Wilde: 'Do you mind if I smoke?'
Sarah Bernhardt: 'I don't care if you burn.'

[Lady Blue]

Sometimes giving someone a second chance is like giving them an extra bullet for their gun because they missed you the first time.

- someone, somewhere.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Lady Blue

Sometimes giving someone a second chance is like giving them an extra bullet for their gun because they missed you the first time.

Is that your own quote or attributable to someone?

[Lady Blue]

I can't remember where or when I read it or heard it. It's been in my head forever.

(I've edited the above)

[kennyc]

Thanks. I just did a search and it seems to be anonymous...

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Thanks. I just did a search and it seems to be anonymous...

Anonymous is an excellent author!

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

Anonymous is an excellent author!

I would have said that as, "Unless your name is Atlas, the world is carrying you."

In fact, I think I will.

.....Unless your name is Atlas, the world is carrying you.
..........— William Thomas Sharpe, III (born c. mid 20th century), MobileRead moderator, literary opportunist.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I would have said that as, "Unless your name is Atlas, the world is carrying you."

In fact, I think I will.

Unless your name is Atlas, the world is carrying you.
..........— William Thomas Sharpe, III (born c. mid 20th century), MobileRead moderator, literary opportunist.

[covingtoncat73]

[BenG]

"Heavenly paradise, probably, is rather boring, and there’s so much fluffy Seraphic eiderdown there that smoking is banned… mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars."

-- Vladimir Nabokov, from a love letter to his wife, Vera.

[astrangerhere]

"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."

Justice Stewart in his majority opinion in Katz v US

I'm teaching a class on the 4th Amendment right now and it is really jarring to literally watch the erosion of the protection through the timeline of the cases.