“And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.”
Sad feeling
Sad Quotes — page 263 of 475
“All isn't well with the world.”
“Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.”
“When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.”
“The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.”
“My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions–which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.”
“I envy animals for two things - their ignorance of evil to come, and their ignorance of what is said about them.”
“Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.”
“To me, the difference between New York and London is that things are boring and staid in London.”
“I was at the foot of my class.”
“It is altogether unlawful to kill oneself... Wherefore suicide is contrary to the inclination of nature, and to charity whereby every man should love himself... Life is God's gift to man, and is subject to His power, Who kills and makes to live. Hence whoever takes his own life, sins against God... for it belongs to God alone to pronounce sentence of death and life.”
“Teaching school is but another word for sure and not very slow destruction.”
“When I gaze into the stars, they look down upon me with pity from their serene and silent spaces, like eyes glistening with tears over the little lot of man. Thousands of generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up by time, and there remains no record of them any more. Yet Arcturus and Orion, Sirius and Pleiades, are still shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the shepherd first noted them in the plain of Shinar!”
“Every year, it takes more brains to navigate this complicated world. More people are falling below what I call the 'incompetence line' through no fault of their own.”
“Most people are good at a handful of things and utterly miserable at most.”
“In 1995, sanctions led Sudan to cut its ties with terrorists and expel Osama bin Laden.”
“It's like everything in your life is wonderful, but you have so much wonderful - this is all going to sound horrible - but when you have so much wonderful, it isn't wonderful because you don't actually have time to enjoy it.”
“So much of my self worth was tied with my position. It felt like I was being enveloped in darkness. It was a sense of loss of enthusiasm, a loss of happiness, a significant decline in self worth.”
“When life's conditions don't equal your expectations you are unhappy, have no expectations only appreciations (especially in the area of relationships)”
“I don't know what it says about me that I have a greater affinity with the damaged. Probably nothing good.”