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Oblivious Quotes

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Oblivious Quotes

“Dana had one arm. He'd lost the other one to cancer. Being the film freak I was, I never bothered to ask about it further. Or even what his last name was. Not enough time before or between the films. A one-armed schoolteacher, teaching kids in the shitty L.A. school district, probably full of more stories and personality than the electric fables being projected above us. But I was more focused on the mummies and vampires and dinosaurs and aliens to take a deeper interest in an actual, unique human being sitting right next to me. Such was my addiction, at that point. Cut off from the world. A ghost, but breathing and jacketed with flesh.”

“Never had I felt so much the slave as when I scoured those stone steps each afternoon. Working against time, I would wet five steps, sprinkle soap powder, then a white doctor or a nurse would come and, instead of avoiding the soppy steps, walk on them and track the dirty water onto the steps that I had already cleaned. To obviate this, I cleaned but two steps at a time, a distance over which a ten-year-old child could step. But it did no good. The white people still plopped their feet down into the dirty water and muddled the other clean steps. If I ever really hotly hated unthinking whites, it was then. Not once during my entire stay at the institute did a single white person show enough courtesy to avoid a wet step.”

“It wasn't that Elain was cruel. She wasn't like Nesta, who had been born with a sneer on her face. Elain sometimes just... didn't grasp things. It wasn't meanness that kept her from offering to help; it simply never occurred to her that she might be capable of getting her hands dirty. I'd never been able to decide whether she actually didn't understand that we were truly poor or if she just refused to accept it. It still hadn't stopped me buying her seeds for the flower garden she tended in the milder months, whenever I could afford it. And it hadn't stopped her from buying me three small tins of paint- red, yellow, and blue- during that same summer I'd had enough to buy the ash arrow. It was the only gift she'd ever given me, and out house still bore the marks of it, even if the paint was now fading and chipped: little vines and flowers along the windows and thresholds and edges of things, tiny curls of flame on the stones bordering the hearth. And spare minute I'd had that bountiful summer, I used to bedeck out house in colour, sometimes hiding clever decorations inside drawers, behind the threadbare curtains, underneath the chairs and table. We hadn't had a summer that easy since.”

“I could have had her right there, in front of everyone. She would have welcomed it.” “But you didn’t.” “It wouldn’t have been fair.” “To who?” My voice was tight with confusion. “Her. I wouldn’t be thinking about her.” “What would you be thinking about?” He groaned, his eyes closing momentarily. He breathed deeply, his exhale carrying another rough sound. “Not what. Who.”

“Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally - oh, very rarely! - the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.”

“When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes. Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms. There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.”

“I once heard that women dress for women -- not for men -- and I think that has some truth to it. Men, what do they know? They don't know if you gain or lose five pounds. They're oblivious to those kinds of things. A lot of men will say "I like you just as you are." And you're like "But I'm bloated!" If they're attracted to you, they're attracted to you.”