Amy Bond

“We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

“He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“You can't eat hope,' the woman said.
You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied.”
― Gabriel García Márquez; Morino, Angelo (translator), El coronel no tiene quien le escriba