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B Quotes

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All B Quotes

“By the standards of war, Maria was a useless human being. They didn’t need bookkeepers or painters of pimpled faces at the front. Sometimes Maria would convince herself that making people beautiful for their burial was something, but what burials will there be if nuclear winter destroys everyone made-up or not very? How will anyone be buried if the whole Earth becomes one mass grave, and beauty is forgotten, an impossibility?”

“By the study of their biographies, we receive each man as a guest into our minds, and we seem to understand their character as the result of a personal acquaintance, because we have obtained from their acts the best and most important means of forming an opinion about them. "What greater pleasure could'st thou gain than this?" What more valuable for the elevation of our own character?”

“By the summer of 1933, Eleanor's melancholy had passed. 'The times of depression are often felt as gaps,' a psychologist has written, 'temporary losses of certainty or identity which leave us feeling empty.' Seen in this light, Eleanor's despondency was the intervening period of chaos between the breakup of her old identity as teacher and political activist in New York State and the establishment of a new identity in the White House.”

“By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, but music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night and his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.”

“By the terms of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in June of last year legalizing the practice of destitute families selling their children, hoping they’d have a better life, or of rich families taking a famous downer as a trophy to impress their friends, I have no legal status if granted freedom. I would be “a non-person and vulnerable as a piece of furniture abandoned on a sidewalk,” as Justice William O. Washington said in his blistering dissent when the court announced its decision. Spartak Jones, 16, the first legal slave since the Civil War America’s top gymnast, handsome, poor, kidnapped and sold, contemplating his future San Francisco in the year 2115 The Chronicles of Spartak—Rising Son, a novel”

“By the third week, it seemed like the civilized world was fighting a losing battle. There were riots, which led to anarchy. State militias had taken over, where the governments failed. The Union was facing its worst catastrophe, since the American Civil War. State officials were calling for the head of the president for failing his duty to his country.”

“By the time 1987 rolled around, the Sunset Strip was absolutely crazy. Fucking madness. One day, I watched Bobby Dall from Poison beat the shit out of this guy with a steal pipe. [This] guy kept covering up their flyers with his band's shit. Finally Bobby caught him at it. He followed him in his car to a Quik Stop, and then he just fucking ambushed the guy. Beat him senseless with a steel pipe. 'Who the fuck are you to cover my band flyer!' he kept screaming. It was brutal. Absolutely brutal. And someone else goes to the guy afterward: 'Hey, you just got your ass beat by a chick.' ~ Big John, Ratt & Poison Security.”

“By the time [of modern] generation was coming of age sexually, there was already this idea of safe sex. But that didn't exist for me. I came out of the free-swinging '60s and '70s. It was free love, baby. That was it. We had very liberal sex-ed classes in 1973, a yearlong environmental science class, and then Women's Lib and Gay Liberation. So it's insane to go from that to Reagan and AIDS. It was like, "What happened? Where's my future?"”

“By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...”

“By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, crowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to be barely remarked upon. Meanwhile, in the literally gilded towers above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepeneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept coktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.”

“By the time Cheryl Hersha came to the facility, knowledge of multiple personality was so complete that doctors understood how the mind separated into distinct ego states, each unaware of the other. First, the person traumatized had to be both extremely intelligent and under the age of seven, two conditions not yet understood though remaining consistent as factors. The trauma was almost always of a sexual nature… (p52)”

“By the time Dean returned from the washroom I was furious. And then came the food. Dean's Zucchini Alfredo tasted of absolutely nothing, though he claimed he loved it, which made me more livid. "You're lying!" I said, while choking down a taste of it. "There is absolutely no seasoning to it whatsoever. No salt, no pepper, no garlic, no fresh herbs, and it's swimming in water!" "I like its subtle flare," he said as he continued happily slurping, not noticing that he was splashing me with "zoodles" water as he ate. "That's right. Keep eating," I taunted. "You'll want to finish it while it's still tepid." And then Dean squeezed my knee, which is either his way of being affectionate or him telling me to shut up. I haven't figured out that odd little habit yet. I sat back and tried to relax sulk, while contemplating where the closest place to grab a quick slice of pizza may be.”

“By the time everyone was ready to leave, I was filling the last cream puff with pale green pastry cream. I licked a bit off my finger. It was good- an intriguing mix of warm pistachio, floral cardamom, and invigorating ginger. And ginger, of course, was a root. I only wished I knew what The Book would say about it. And was it good enough? Spotting the last of Mom's batch of kulfi- Indian ice cream made of thick sweetened cream and flavored with pistachio, ginger, and cardamom- had inspired me to make a pastry cream with the same flavors.”