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All A Quotes

“And this,' Astrid says, gesturing at a wiry gentleman wearing eyeglasses and a houndstooth suit in need of pressing, standing a little distance away from the rest of the group, looking slightly uncomfortable, 'is Dexter Palmer, and he's a—what?' 'I,' says Dexter Palmer. 'Um.' 'He's a novelist,' Astrid brays, and Harold looks at Dexter, at his right arm rubbing his threadbare left elbow. Harold sees the oaken trunk in the corner of Dexter's filthy downtown loft with an enormous padlock on it, sees the tens of thousands of pages of handwritten manuscript that fill it. He sees the stub of the tallow candle on Dexter's rickety wooden desk, purchased for a dollar-fifty at a rummage sale. He sees the short leg of the desk propped up with a seven-hundred page study of phrenology, printed during the age of miracles. He sees Dexter's eyes going bad by candlelight, a whole diopter lost with each late night. 'Zounds, I am working on my masterpiece,' Dexter Palmer yells hoarsely, disturbing the neighbors. He slings a cup half-full of tepid chamomile tea at the wall, where it shatters. 'Dexter's writing a novel,' Astrid says brightly. After a few minutes of introductory cross-talk, the group of five splits into separate conversations: Harold talks with his sister and Charmaine, while Marlon ends up with Dexter. To Harold, Marlon looks cornered—Harold can't hear what Dexter's saying, but whatever he's talking about, he's clearly going on about it at length and in fine detail. Maybe Marlon is getting to hear all about the novel. Every once in a while Marlon will look at Harold and theatrically roll his eyes and sigh, but Dexter, who's frantically gesticulating, wrapped up in whatever he's chattering about, doesn't notice.”

“And this Atlantean Destroyer is now leading the Daimons and sending them out to battle against Acheron, who is just using us and the humans as cannon fodder to protect himself? Really, Kyros, put down the crack pipe...or go write children’s fantasy novels. I’ll bet you even know exactly who conspired to kill Kennedy, huh? I’m sure the money from D.B. Cooper is what financed your stunning collection of furniture. (Danger)”

“And this exclusion of "women's work" continues, despite United Nations data gathered since 1975 (the beginning of the UN Decade for Women) indicating that women globally contribute two-thirds of the world's work hours, for which - given the imbalanced, unjust, and truly peculiar nature of the accounting characteristic of dominator economics - they globally earn only one-tenth of what men do and own a mere one-hundredth of the world's property.”

“And this ghost believed he was in the last phase of life. He considered his anesthesia an inevitable chapter of a human being. After a certain amount of naked bodies, blood on the walls, and vomit on the floor, the color white will look gray. Once he surrendered to gray, the uncaring world proved his worldview. He walked the sunny streets and knew no passerby would ever save him from his rainstorm. He could cry all the way to work and back unstopped. The unconcern of the world confirmed to him that he was a ghost, not only because he was deadened from the hotel, but because when he left and stepped outside it, he knew, indisputably, everyone else was dead to everyone else. To be alive is to play the role of ghost.”

“And this God, if he exists, why does he allow women to suffer in such a way? The worst of it is that God doesn't appear to have any wife. If he was married, the Goddess, his wife, would intercede on our behalf. Through her, we would ask to be blessed with a life based on harmony. But the Goddess must exist, I keep thinking. She must be as invisible as all of us. No doubt her space is limited to the celestial kitchen.”

“And this has been man's stupidity - a very ancient one: whenever he gets into difficulty, he changes the word. Change the word marriage into soul mates, but don't change yourself. And you are the problem, not the word; any word will do. A rose is a rose is a rose...you can call it by any name. You are asking to change the concept, you are not asking to change yourself.”

“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.”

“And this indifference is still very much present in modern South Africa. Just listen to Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer - a representative of the British elite in this country: Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation.”

“And this is apparently not without merit. Because in our countries for some time now a great hurricane of subversion has arisen, pushed forward by I do not know what vicious demons—and doubtless in accord with the life-style that we have made our own, unfortunately. This hurricane tries to reverse our traditional order of values, to throw out all that we put forward as being unselfish, gracious and open to the world, open to things and to others, all that is active in dilating our minds and our hearts. It wants to replace it by the single, brutal, arithmetic, and inhuman motivation of profit. Henceforth, all that counts, all that is to be considered and preserved, is what brings profit. The truly ideal aspects of knowledge will not be more valuable than those of interest rates and of financial laws. The only sciences that are to be encouraged are those that teach us how to exploit the earth and the people. Besides that, everything is useless.”

“And this is how I know that it's all just words, words, words - that fundamentally, they make no difference... Our relationship, for as long as things were good, and in that moment when they could have been good again, was about the irrelevance of words. You feel what you feel, you act as you act, who in the history of the world has ever been convinced by a well-reasoned argument?”

“And this is how it happens. Someone does something shit to you, makes you suffer, maybe you die, and you get tunnel vision for the revenge you want to feel in your hands—The punishment you believe you deserve to dole out. You come back to find the fucker that ruined your life and you’ll do anything you can to get them back. You can’t see anything else and everyone becomes collateral damage to the pain you have to cause or the justice you have to find. It hurts too much to think of what someone else took from you, that you can’t see anything outside of the future you can’t grasp anymore. Then, when you hurt someone else because your focus is on whoever fucked you up, they come back feeling the same pain, same anger, their future taken from them too and it just keeps going, again and again, over and over, until everyone’s been promised mutual destruction by proximity and nothing else matters. No one cares about any story that’s not their own. The pain caused is invisible to everyone else until it becomes personal and everyone’s reaching for the thing that blew their lives to pieces. Regret and rage are toxic seeds, planted to consume the heart.”

“And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.”

“And this is Isabella's nonna's, made with the whole Moro orange from her grove--- pulped into the mix and no dusting, no glaze. Plain." "You mean perfect," says Isabella, scolding Luca. There was no doubting Isabella's would win. The pulp added something even softer and more luscious to the crumb. If the cake we had yesterday, warm from the oven, was divine, this was magic. "I told you," says Luca. "The orange."”

“And this is Louie," Gabe said, pointing to a redheaded guy on a La-Z-Boy, sipping a purple smoothie with a giant straw, playing Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. "He works at Misi." "Yo," he said, frantically tapping the controls, helping Link cook some mushrooms to restore his hearts. "Hey," said Isabella, no stranger to the game. The last guy that she'd hooked up with had canceled their second date because he was deep inside a shrine.”

“And this is not just the United States’ problem, it is a global problem. One of the primary arguments used by apologists for this surveillance state that has developed across the United States and in every country worldwide is a trust of the government. This is critical — even if you trust the U.S. government and their laws[...] think about the governments you fear the most, whether it is China, Russia or North Korea, or Iran. These spying capabilities exist for everyone. This is not just an American thing; this is happening in every country in every part of the world. We first need to move beyond the argumentation by policy officials of wishing for something that is technically impossible. The idea ‘Let's get rid of encryption’. It is out of their hands. The jurisdiction of Congress ends at its borders. Even if all strong encryption is banned in the United States because we don’t want Al Qaeda to have it, we can't stop a group from developing these tools in Yemen, or in Afghanistan, or any other region of the world and spreading the tools globally.”

“And this is not the happiness of a magazine writer who sends in his gay little philosophy of life to the editor for the one paragraph spread in front of the magazine: This is a serious happiness full of doubts and strengths. I wonder if happiness is possible. It is a state of mind, but I'd hate to be a bore all my life, if only because of those I love around me. Happiness can change into unhappiness just for the sake of change.”

“And this is pain? I think this is pain? I survived my mother leaving me when I was five. I survived the death of the woman who filled her place when I was nine. After all of that, after everything I’ve been through, this is what brings me down? This is what knocks me to my knees? I deserve it, then. I deserve every part of it because if I can’t survive this, then I can’t survive anything.”