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B Quotes

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All B Quotes

“But Brook was on a roll. She started gesturing and pacing the carpet. "All I ask for is a cute little hideaway that hasn't sustained decades of internal structural damage. I don't want a fixer-upper; I don't want to spend all my free time fixing the previous owners' mistakes; I just want to move in and unpack. Is that really so much to ask?" "Yes," Anna said. "Both with houses and with men." (p 187)”

“But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into what is the cause of goodness, so why the other shop? If lewdies are good that's because they like it, and I wouldn't ever interfere with their pleasures, and so of the other shop. And I was patronizing the other shop. More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me or our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning tbey of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you brothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do.”

“But . . . but was evil an entity at all? What caused evil? Imperfection in activity . . . imperfection of matter. It could not stand alone. It could not exist by itself. It had to use a pre-existing Good. It was an imperfection of the Good, a privation of the Good, a perversion of the Good. By itself? By itself . . . it was . . . nothing. By itself it had no being. It was *not* an entity. . . . Calmly Thomas began to dictate to Briancourt a sequence of thoughts which tore Evil from its throne of being an entity, a principle in its own right, and relegated it to the status of a parasite.”

“But ... but what if I hit you?” A snort. “You’re not going to hit me.” “How do you know?” I bristled at his amused tone. “I could hit you. Even master swordsmen make mistakes. I could get a lucky shot, or you might not see me coming. I don’t want to hurt you.” He favored me with another patient look. “And how much experience do you have with swords and weapons in general?” “Um.” I glanced down at the saber in my hand. “Thirty seconds?” He smiled, that calm, irritatingly confident smirk. “You’re not going to hit me.”

“But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.”

“But by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important. Hence it is that speculation commonly ceases where sight ceases; insomuch that of things invisible there is little or no observation.”

“But by now, he figured, there must be thousands of men like him, rich businessmen who over the past ten or fifteen years had divorced their old wives of two to three decades’ standing and taken on new wives, girls a whole generation younger. And what did all the experts have to say about these irresistible little morsels? Nothing! What if a man goes through all that, the separation, the divorce, all that agony, that struggle, that hellish expense, that…that…. that guilt…and one day, or one night, he wakes up and wonders, Who the hell is this in the bed next to me? Why is she here? Where did she come from? What does she want? Why won’t she leave? That they don’t tell you about.”

“But by this time Watt was tired of the ditch, which he had been thinking of leaving, when the voices detained him. And one of the reasons why he was tired of the ditch was perhaps this, that the earth, whose contours and peculiar smell the vegetation had first masked, now he felt it, and smelt it, the bare hard dark stinking earth. And if there were two things that Watt loathed, one was the earth and the other was the sky.”

“But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead that I only half believed in her. I wanted, I needed her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy like volcanic eruptions. I know. And the sick must husband their resources even as they are resourceful for their husbands. But I couldn't help wanting for her, couldn't help the feeling that she'd given in, that she had measured out with coffee spoons what it was that she might ask of life and having found it lacking, tragically, gapingly lacking, had decided none-the-less to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life.”