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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“It's supposed to be very beautiful, the Citadel,' Oak says. 'It is beautiful, Wren?' When the light went through the ice of the castle, it made rainbows that danced along its cold halls. You could almost see through the walls, as though the whole place was one large, cloudy window. When I was brought to it for the first time, I thought it was like living inside a sparkling diamond. 'It's not,' I say. 'It's an ugly place.”

“It's sweet and everything, but it's like you're not even there sometimes. It's great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn't need a shoulder? What if they need the arms or something like that? You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things." "Like what?" I asked. My mouth was dry. "I don't know. Like take their hands when the slow song comes up for a change. Or be the one who asks someone for a date. Or tell people what you need. Or what you want.”

“It's tempting. I can see why those Ottomans hide their women. If I could, I might dress you in silk- deep-red silk- and put you away where no other man might see you." She turned her head to glare at him, those dark eyes sparking. "I shouldn't like that." He smiled at her fondly, almost sadly. This woman- why did he want this woman so very much? "I know." He sipped at her lips lightly- so lightly. "And yet, as I say, tempting." He caught her lips with his, widening her mouth, tasting red wine and gravy, apples, and her, all her. Bridget, Séraphine, her. Her. Her. Her.”

“It's tempting to base a woman's evil on the abuse of a man or the death of a child, because they are, unfortunately, relatable and understandable motivations. However, insisting that women can only be evil once violence has been done to them robs them of agency and puts them on an unrealistic, restrictive pedestal as literary and critical figures.”

“It's tempting to imagine that economic injustice destabilizes societies to the point where they collapse and have to reform themselves, but the opposite appears to be true. Countries with large income disparities, such as the United States, are among the most powerful and wealthy countries in the world, perhaps because they can protect themselves with robust economies and huge militaries. They're just not very free. Even societies with income disparities that are truly off the chart—medieval Europe had a Gini coefficient of .79—are relatively stable until a cataclysmic event like the plague triggers a radical redistribution of wealth. During the last decades, progressive reforms have reduced the Gini coefficient—and stabilized the economies—in many Latin American countries. From every standpoint—morally, politically, economically—such reforms are clearly the right things to do. But throughout the great sweep of human history, egalitarian societies with low Gini coefficients rarely dominate world events. From the Han Dynasty of Ancient China to the Roman Empire to the United States, there seems to be a sweet spot of economic injustice that is moderately unfair to most of its citizens but produces extremely powerful societies. Economist Walter Scheidel calculates that 3,500 years ago, such large-scale states controlled only 1 percent of the Earth's habitable landmass but represented at least half the human population. By virtually any metric, that's a successful society. 'For thousands of years, most of humanity lived in the shadow of these behemoths,' Scheidel writes. 'This is the environment that created the 'original one percent,' made up of competing but often closely intertwined elite groups.' The question, then, is how do ordinary people protect their freedom in the face of such highly centralized state control?”

“It's tempting to imagine this romanticization as the opposite as the opposite of stigmatization. Rather than discounting people as stigma does, romanticization lifts them up as paragons of beauty or intellect or some other virtue. But really, I see these as complimentary strategies, used to make "the sick" into an "other," a group of people fundamentally distant and different from the rest of the social order. … Imaging someone as more than human does much the same work as imaging them as less than human. Either way, the ill are treated as fundamentally other because the social order is frightened by what their frailty reveals about everyone else's.”

“It's tempting to think of red for sun," she said, "but it has to be just a dash, not much. More of a dark orange and a hint of brown. And then white on yellow on white. Not bright white,' she said. 'The kind of white that makes you squint, but in a softer way...' 'Go look at fire for a while. Go spend some time with fire.' Looking at fire was interesting, I have to admit. I sat with a candle for a couple hours. It has these stages of color: the white, the yellow, the red, the tiny spot of blue I'd heard mentioned but never noticed.”

“It's that feeling you get somehow knowing that something great is about to happen... about to happen. While every passing day nothing great really does happen. You wake up, go to classes, study, sleep and wait for another monotonous day. You know the great day is not tomorrow, not even the day after, not even in a week or a month's time. But it says it will come soon, the way you live your life, one day at a time, only to realize 20 years have elapsed effortlessly. It will come soon, the way you meet someone without expecting or knowing that you are going to have so much fun together. It will come soon, the way dreams come true overnight- demanding years of perspiration, ironically. It will come soon like a gush of cold air in a hot afternoon. It will come soon like a stranger you feel you have already met. It will come like a guest who would be here to stay. It will come like an eternity, a serendipity, an irony. It will come when it is time for it to come, the way you fall asleep and dreams arrive from a distant land, surely but stealthily.”

“It’s that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money. It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, “Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Polish-Jewish skin it’s made of, we find that’s best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.” And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, “Treblinka – 100% human stereate.” Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is this? Yet I’m not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can't you? Why can't you?”

“It’s that time of the year when I yearn to reunite with my soul, that hapless wanderer. That part of me which resides in an exalted state in the ancient kingdom of Ojoto. A place where my beloved soul saunters unchecked, whispering my name in the quietness of the night, whistling same with the wind, and yelling it during thunderstorms. Since my prolonged absence, it mumbles and sobs for me, a titular truant.”

“It's that when the best hostesses pluck someone to be their new original, they can sometimes drop him as swiftly." "I hold in my palm a guarantee they will not." Lifting her hand to his again, he pressed his lips to the back of her fingers. This was awful! Awful that he flirted with her. Awful that she relished his attentions. "I wish you wouldn't... court me. It makes me uncomfortable." Taking no notice of her appeal, he remained on his knees before her. In a voice both low and curious, he said, "You're not what I expected." "No," she whispered. "I suppose not." Time seemed to slow and stretch. He observed her with intensity, as if she were a songbird he had trapped and would cage forever.”