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B Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All B Quotes

“But that’s the way life is; felicity and expiation play together in the narrow lanes of life like bosom friends, inseparable. You find one, and the other is always around the corner.”

“But that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing. There is no violent push in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach. Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.”

“But that’s what happens. Once the human tragedy has been completed, it gets turned over to the journalists to banalize into entertainment. Perhaps it’s because the whole irrational frenzy burst right through our door and no newspaper’s half-baked insinuating detail passed me by that I think of the McCarthy era as inaugurating the postwar triumph of gossip as the unifying credo of the world’s oldest democratic republic. In Gossip We Trust. Gossip as gospel, the national faith. McCarthyism as the beginning not just of serious politics but of serious everything as entertainment to amuse the mass audience. McCarthyism as the first postwar flowering of the American unthinking that is now everywhere.”

“But that’s what they do with everything inconvenient in history— either label it as some freak event, or as irrelevant surface details. The only reason their theories even seem consistent is that they’ve presented a version of history rendered into reductive pap, with more lies of omission than facts. They simply can’t allow themselves to acknowledge that history’s basically nothing but messy absurdities, and that there is no inevitable path to it. Every shape will fit into a round hole if you carve it and hammer it enough.”

“But that was the thing about zero. Its weakness. Even if zero had taken over the entire universe, the biggest fascist of all, one tiny gesture could deny it. One footprint, one atom. You didn't have to be a genius. You didn't even have to know that was what you were doing. You made a mark. You changed something. It said, "A human being passed here." And changed zero to one.”