Mee Coran > Mee's Quotes

“Lieutenant Linh said, “Thank you for this valuable information, it gives us an opportunity to take counter-measures to nullify the American attack! I have here, over a thousand young and inexperienced soldiers who are a bit fearful of the Americans. Our young soldiers are asking questions like, “Will an old carbine bullet kill a big American?” and “Would a bullet actually kill a big black American?” He went on to say, “I reassure them that their bullets will kill Americans if they strike at the right spot!” Later on, he was to say, “Four days later, the Americans came. We watched with heavy hearts as their helicopters endlessly were landing men.”
― Michael G. Kramer, A Gracious Enemy

“As the taxi entered the intersection, the two drivers in the attorney general’s entourage slammed on the brakes. Both Suburbans fishtailed out of control. Ducking in the back seat, Blake could smell the burning rubber from tires skidding on the asphalt and hear the pedestrians screaming and car horns sounding off in rebuke.”
― Chad Boudreaux, Scavenger Hunt

“Being the World’s Most Powerful Leader is Easier Than You Think
One of my first executive orders was to impose a moratorium on any new federal government hiring. That got the “Incredible Shrinking Government” meal simmering. Veto stamps branded into any Congressional salary increase proposal added a certain singed aroma.”
― Nancy Omeara, The Most Popular President Who Ever Lived [So Far]

“The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“How long ago did she die, Wyatt?" Morgan pressed. "Is it nine years now?"
"Eight," Wyatt said, halfway between stubborn and sad. "I promised to love her all my life, Morg. I meant to keep my word."
That shut Morgan up, but Doc's eyes opened and he gazed at Wyatt for a long time. "What?" Wyatt asked.
"That is your ghost life, Wyatt," Doc told him, and closed his eyes again. "That is the life you might have had. This is the life you've got.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Doc

“But if we look a little deeper we shall find there is a pathetic, one might almost say a tragic, side to the picture. A shy man means a lonely man—a man cut off from all companionship, all sociability. He moves about the world, but does not mix with it. Between him and his fellow-men there runs ever an impassable barrier—a strong, invisible wall that, trying in vain to scale, he but bruises himself against. He sees the pleasant faces and hears the pleasant voices on the other side, but he cannot stretch his hand across to grasp another hand. He stands watching the merry groups, and he longs to speak and to claim kindred with them. But they pass him by, chatting gayly to one another, and he cannot stay them. He tries to reach them, but his prison walls move with him and hem him in on every side. In the busy street, in the crowded room, in the grind of work, in the whirl of pleasure, amid the many or amid the few—wherever men congregate together, wherever the music of human speech is heard and human thought is flashed from human eyes, there, shunned and solitary, the shy man, like a leper, stands apart. His soul is full of love and longing, but the world knows it not. The iron mask of shyness is riveted before his face, and the man beneath is never seen. Genial words and hearty greetings are ever rising to his lips, but they die away in unheard whispers behind the steel clamps. His heart aches for the weary brother, but his sympathy is dumb. Contempt and indignation against wrong choke up his throat, and finding no safety-valve whence in passionate utterance they may burst forth, they only turn in again and harm him. All the hate and scorn and love of a deep nature such as the shy man is ever cursed by fester and corrupt within, instead of spending themselves abroad, and sour him into a misanthrope and cynic.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

“There are certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“Kumiko and I felt something for each other from the beginning. It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go. As our meetings grew more frequent, I felt not so much that I had met someone new as that I had chanced upon a dear old friend.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Он был тщеславен, как молодая девушка; весьма возможно, что болезненная робость была одним из следствий его непомерного тщеславия.”
― Уильям Теккерей, Vanity Fair

“The craggy lines that made up the character in his face now seemed like scars of defeat, inflicted on him over time.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“Aye. I’m afraid for my immortal soul now.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Steel Blood

“Guilt often resembles shadows, playing games in the dark.”
― H. Meadow Hopewell, Rage Against the Machine

“So Admiral, the marshal tells me your trip to Paris was a success.” Jean Louis Xavier François Darlan, admiral of France and the senior minister in Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy government, stroked his cheek. “Yes, all went well as planned, Pierre, although little has been finalised as yet.”
Pierre Laval, former prime minister of France and, until recently, vice-president of Vichy France’s Cabinet of Ministers, chuckled and patted his companion on the knee. “The marshal mentioned no qualifications. He told me you had got everything he wanted from the Germans.”
― Mark Ellis, The French Spy

“His dark hair was tousled from the wind, the
kind of mess that looked accidental but somehow perfect.”
― D.L. Maddox, Secrets

“She’s a cop’s wife. She understands what her husband does for a living,” the priest said.”
― A.G. Russo, The Cases Nobody Wanted

“He desperately tried to think of a story to explain his involvement in her sudden appearance, without mentioning the book of magic in his possession.
 ”
― Max Nowaz, The Three Witches and the Master

“I was pleased to see that the Briton members of our forces were becoming accustomed to the discipline of the Kimbern and they were performing much better than both my brother and I expected.”
― Michael G. Kramer, Full Story of the Anglo-Saxon Invasion

“… the primitive comprehension that the state property represents a social one, their identification, and their equalization  could not resist the criticism of the time. The state property is not socialism. The state-monopoly property, as it was on the both sides of the Berlin Wall and which continues to be such one even after it dropped down, is not social property. There was never and nowhere any socialism! In the twentieth century, we passed through a system of utopian socialism as proof that this was not socialism that was not possible, but the utopia of the writers before Marx and after Marx. We were visited by a utopian socialism, which at the contemporary stage is simply capitalism—state, monopolistic.”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“You must attract a lot of attention on the road,” I said, “doing all that.” “Yeah, sometimes,” she said. “Yesterday, I pulled into a gas station, and this truck driver followed right behind me and pulled up alongside. He said, ‘Ma’am, I have been driving behind you for the last forty-five minutes, and I’ve been watching. First you did your makeup. Then you did your hair. Then you did your nails. I just wanted to get up close and see what you looked like.’ He gave me a big wink and told me I was right pretty. But then he said, ‘Let me ask you something. I noticed every couple of minutes you’ve been reaching over and foolin’ with something on the seat next to you. Whatcha got over there?’ ‘That’s my TV,’ I told him. ‘I can’t miss my soaps!”
― John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

“Better to run to the woods than the city, I thought. Here, there is the world to occupy the mind.”
― Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain

“Be patient with him. If the same quality did not exist in you, you wouldn’t notice it in him.”
― Robyn Mundell, Brainwalker

“What is unthinkable is undoable”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“It Is Our Duty To Remember”
― Steve Snyder, Shot Down: The True Story of Pilot Howard Snyder and the Crew of the B-17 Susan Ruth