"At some point I started getting published, and experienced a meager knock-kneed standing in the literary world, and I started to get almost everything that many of you graduates are hoping for--except for the money. I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled--all the things that the culture tells you, from preschool on, will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you. I got some stature, the respect of other writers, even a low-grade fame. The culture says these things will save you, as long as you also manage to keep your weight down. But the culture lies."
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Long
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"I'd wanted to be a writer my whole life. But when I finally made it, I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing for so long--discovering it was merely metal, wrapped in cloth. It wasn't alive; it had no spirit. It was fake."
"Now she and I sit together in her room and eat chocolate, and I tell her that in a very long time when we both to go heaven, we should try to get chairs next to each other, close to the dessert table."
"I'm not going to get off the pony as long as they let me ride it."
"Cooking breakfast and brunch professionally really kind of ruined breakfast service for me for a long time."
"Silly trends don't last long. A lot of this nonsense that pops up, I don't even really pay attention because it'll be gone in a flash."
"I learned a long time ago that trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times."
"You become responsible for a long time for what you've tamed."
"People, when they get out of a long stretch of prison, are completely mal-adapted to society. Comfort for them is when there is a threat."
"The liberation of Iraq was part of a broader effort to seriously confront the greatest threat to world security: rogue states capable of obtaining long range weapons of mass destruction."
"From the time they get up in the morning and flush the toilet, they're taxed. Then they go and get the cup of coffee, they're taxed....This goes on all day long. Tax, tax, tax."
"I have settled down in this border area; I am trying to find distinct standards of shape, and I long to experience, formulate, and evoke this dark, heavy, tranquillity."
"My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so."
"To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again."
"History is the long, difficult and confused dream of Mankind."
"To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial."
"NOT to my contemporaries, not to my compatriots but to mankind I commit my now completed work in the confidence that it will not be without value for them, even if this should be late recognised, as is commonly the lot of what is good. For it cannot have been for the passing generation, engrossed with the delusion of the moment, that my mind, almost against my will, has uninterruptedly stuck to its work through the course of a long life. preface to the second edition of "the world as will and representation"
"As long as the colored man look to white folks to put the crown on what he say . . . as long as he looks to white folks for approval . . . then he ain't never gonna find out who he is and what he's about."
"Marriage is overdone. As long as there are people, people are going to find it interesting."
"The most important thing for a writer to do is to write. It really doesn't matter what you write as long as you are able to write fluidly, very quickly, very effortlessly. It needs to become not second nature but really first nature to you. And read; you need to read and you need to read excellent books and then some bad books. Not as many bad books, but some bad books, so that you can see what both look like and why both are what they are."