Syble Abramek > Syble's Quotes

“Teacher,” I said. “Can you feel love?”
― Steven Decker, Child of Another Kind

“They remained imprisoned in the CICU, kept alive in physicality by mechanical devices and medicinal support, inexorably suffering. I revered their resiliency, though I struggled to understand whether they were truly resilient or if this was a descriptive term I used to assure myself that what we were doing was just. Could they merely represent physical beings at this point, molecular derivatives of carbon and water, void of souls that had moved on months prior once the universe had delivered their inevitable fate, simply kept alive by us physicians, who ourselves clutched desperately to the most favored of our prehistoric binary measures of success: life?”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“Aha, Yury, I wonder if they are getting more US military. I am very anxious to get the recording. We want to know what is taking place between these Americans and Iraqis.”
― Karl Braungart, Counter Identity

“He was sure people detested accountants; they were boring. In fact, he had put down his profession as an airline pilot on the form he had filled in for a dating agency. As an airline pilot you could be away just the right amount of time, when you needed a break from your love life, without facing awkward questions from her when you got back.”
― Max Nowaz, Get Rich or Get Lucky

“…the excitement of doing something for the first time had passed. I laid there in the back seat looking at the moon. It was unobscured by clouds except for a few wisps here and there. (Mitch) put his arms around me, and we looked at the moon together. You think we’ll have a lot of moons like this, this month? Mitch asked. “I hope so,” I said. We turned to each other and laughed. He didn’t try to fuck me after that. We just talked for a while about music, school, our brothers, and Janice, of course. And then he drove me home.”
― Karen Hinton, Penis Politics: A Memoir of Women, Men and Power

“We are not allowed to linger, even with what is most intimate.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“If Marion Hawthorne doesn't watch out, she's going to grow up into a lady Hitler.”
― Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy

“Puff, puff, chug, chug, went the Little Blue Engine. “I think I can - I think I can - I think I can - I think I can - I think I can - I think I can - I think I can - I think I can - I think I can.”

[…]

“I thought I could. I thought I could. I thought I could.

I thought I could.

I thought I could.

I thought I could.”
― Watty Piper, The Little Engine That Could

“Casi el 12 por ciento de la masa continental del planeta está cultivada, mientras que solo el 3 por ciento está ocupado por ciudades grandes o pequeñas. Si incluimos también los pastizales, la cantidad de tierra del planeta dedicada a la producción de alimento humano es más de la tercera parte de su superficie terrestre.”
― Alan Weisman, El mundo sin nosotros

“I won’t hold you, I won’t even refute you — go! —
strike out for Italy on the winds, your realm across the sea.
I hope, I pray, if the just gods still have any power,
wrecked on the rocks mid-sea you’ll drink your bowl
of pain to the dregs, crying out the name of Dido
over and over, and worlds away I’ll hound you then
with pitch-black flames, and when icy death has severed
my body from its breath, then my ghost will stalk you
through the world! You’ll pay, you shameless, ruthless —
and I will hear of it, yes, the report will reach me
even among the deepest shades of Death!”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its jagged edges.”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings

“A uniformed cop around 6’4” with pock marked face squinted, “Looky here, if it ain’t one a the bad seed O’Shaughnessy’s, female version.”
― A.G. Russo, The Cases Nobody Wanted

“In the conditions of this “New World Order,” a crucial part of the contemporary world economy is a criminal economy, in which the excess profits are accumulated not by the production of material comforts, but by drug-traffic, arms trafficking, and human trafficking, including prostitution. The contemporary world economy is an economy of the global organized criminality whose eminently form is the modern capitalist state. The contemporary world economy is an economy not of the real commodity production, but an economy of the jobbery; this is expressed directly in supply and demand of the capital of the speculation, i.e., in the fictitious capital trade, in the antagonistic games with share capital in the stock exchange. Just Wall Street’s stock exchange, i.e., the world speculative capital market, is the contemporary tremendous pump for inflation of the balloons of the world economic crises, the last one of which began in 2007. The aggregate amount of the bonds on the world market, as many economists know, is over one hundred trillion US dollars! Without taking in mind the derivatives! If including those, the aggregate amount is several times more! This is an enormous balloon as inflated as a red giant star! And when added to this amount the world market of the shares, the passing each other between real and fictitious capital grows to cosmic dimensions! This cosmic balloon will burst very soon! That means the most destructive capitalist crisis in human history lies just round the corner, the global economic apocalypse is just forthcoming! This ruin will be due to the stock exchange antagonistic games, the stock exchange that is, as a matter of fact, a gambling house! Because the securities and shares’ trading is sheer gambling! This becomes clear by the direct proportionality between risk and profitability, the more risk—the more profitability, and vice versa! However, this is gambling in which the stakes are not simply money, but millions and billions of human fates. So, this is a destroying-the-civilization-world crime economy!”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“The woman patted Sarah's hand. "Of course, my dove," her thick, almost black lipstick bunched into a dark oval, punctuating her face. Sarah snatched her hand back, startled. The volunteer label didn't quite fit with the black lipstick.
 ”
― Theasa Tuohy, Mademoiselle le Sleuth

“Goldberg was a tough, square-jawed New York detective who by various odd quirks of fate now held a position in the US  military administration in London. In 1942, the British government had ceded to the American military police all legal jurisdiction over American troops stationed in the UK.”
― Mark Ellis, Death of an Officer

“Scott could feel the contents of his stomach flip over and over on themselves. He turned to the side and retched, frothy yellow bile spilled out onto the newspaper covered floor, filling the room with the putrid stench of previously ingested alcohol.

'Look's like someone can't hold their drink,' McBlane said, and Dominic and Shugg laughed.

Scott was still staring at the steam rising from his evacuated stomach contents as he heard the hammer fall. The dull crack of bone splintering under its weight.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“Death rides on all of our shoulders from the day we are born.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Death Leaves a Shadow

“Routine had become rhythm. Rhythm had become identity.”
― D.L. Maddox, The Dog Walker: The Prequel

“After March in 1945, the Japanese felt threatened by possibility of the people of Indochina rising against them. Therefore, they stated:
“We of the Imperial Japanese Army have only invaded other Asian countries in order to remove the European and American white man from Asia! Stick with us Japanese and together we shall make Asians great while we kick the whites out of the entire region!”

(A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)”
― Michael G. Kramer

“If there is any society
among robbers and murderers, they must at least. . . .abstain
from robbing and murdering one another. So beneficence
is less essential than justice is to the existence of society; a
lack of beneficence will make a society uncomfortable, but
the prevalence of injustice will utterly destroy it.”
― Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

“So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“It's the only condition I know. Bitter Love, Loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It's where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new.”
― Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch

“Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“that inner stillness which Charles Morgan describes as “the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea: 70th Anniversary Edition

“I wouldst rescue Leandra from the convent, where she is surely held against her will, and place her in thy hands so that thou couldst do with her as thou wouldst and as it pleaseth thee, always, however, adhering to the laws of the chivalry, which commandeth that no damsel shalt have any offense whatsoever committed against her person,”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote