Tony Judt

We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself. If this sounds paradoxical, remember Rilke’s admonition: love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which the self may flourish. 

Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today's Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety.

But the disposition to disagree, to reject and to dissent - however irritating it may be when taken to extremes - is the very lifeblood of an open society. We need people who make a virtue of opposing mainstream opinion. A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy.

Diana Gabaldon

I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem.

For where all love is, the speaking is unnecessary.

Don't be afraid. There's the two of us now.

When the day shall come that we do part," he said softly, and turned to look at me, "if my last words are not 'I love you'-ye'll ken it was because I didna have time.

I can bear pain myself, he said softly, but I couldna bear yours. That would take more strength than I have.

Oh, aye, Sassenach. I am your master . . . and you're mine. Seems I canna possess your soul without losing my own.

Ye werena the first lass I kissed," he said softly. "But I swear you'll be the last.

“Blood of my Blood," he whispered, "and bone of my bone. You carry me within ye, Claire, and ye canna leave me now, no matter what happens, You are mine, always, if ye will it or no, if ye want me or nay. Mine, and I wilna let ye go.”

Rachel Caine

Damn, Claire. Warn a guy before you do a face-plant on the floor next time. I could have looked all heroic and caught you or something.

“Perv."
He pointed to himself. "Male and eighteen. What's your point?

Want to play baseball?’” she asked. Shane’s eyes opened, and he stopped stroking her hair. “What?’” “First base,’” she said. “You’re already there.’” “I’m not running the bases.’” “Well, you could at least steal second.’” “Jeez, Claire. I used to distract myself with sports stats at times like these, but now you’ve gone and ruined it.

Scoot over, man. I don't like you that much.
Dick. That's not what you said last night.
Bite me.

Boys. I'd turn gay if they weren't so sexy.

Tatiana de Rosnay

When would he realize that it wasn't his infidelity I couldn't bear, but his cowardice?

You get attached to places, you know. Like people, I suppose.

How was it possible that entire lives could change, could be destroyed, and that streets and buildings remained the same, she wondered.

I wanted to cry, but the tears did not come.

The more I read, the hungrier I become. Each book seemed promising, each page I turned offered an escapade, the allure of another world, other destinies, other dreams.

You're playing with Pandora's box. Sometimes it's better not to open it. Sometimes, it's better not to know.

She couldn't imagine why there was such a difference between those children and her. She couldn't imagine why she and all these other people with her had to be treated this way. Who decided this, and what for?

Nathaniel Philbrick

Hope was all that stood between them and death.

Melville's example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference.

The moment any of them gave up on the difficult work of living with their neighbors--and all of the compromise, frustration, and delay that inevitably entailed--they risked losing everything

The sperm whales' network of female-based family unit resembled, to a remarkable extent, the community the whalemen had left back home on Nantucket. In both societies the males were itinerants. In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey.

No matter how much the inhabitants might try to hide it, there was a savagery about this island, a bloodlust and pride that bound every mother, father, and child in a clannish commitment to the hunt.

Michael Pollan

You are what what you eat eats.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.

Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. 

Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.

The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.

Nikki Sixx

Selling my soul would be a lot easier if I could just find it.

When You've lost it all....thats when you realize that Life is Beautiful.

There is something about spending Christmas alone, naked, sitting by the Christmas tree gripping a shotgun, that lets you know your life is spinning dangerously outta control.

Life is like a long ride to nowhere in particular.

Anything worth doing, is worth overdoing.

I was so happy every morning when I woke up that I was pissing smiley faces.

Don’t Take Anything Personally Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.

Friends tell each other what nobody else is willing to tell you.

Darcey Steinke

The problem with being a modern woman, I thought, as the front door swung wide, is that you have to pretend to be stronger than you are.

When you love a woman, you love yourself, and it's terrible really, how it seems perfectly possible to swallow the other. With a man you want to join, you want your ribs to connect like handcuffs. But with a woman if you swallow, she becomes you.

You’ll see, there are a million ways to kill off the soft parts of yourself.

Everything was new, now I’m a junkie, I seem to need more severe doses of experience to feel anything.

Relationships are like wall paper patterns, you think your moving forward but your always caught in your own obsessions.

What is love but a nostalgia for someones history? Their boyhood haunts and sullen adolescence, their teenage trips cross-country and fights with their fathers and especially their old lovers?

I thought of happy endings, how novelists usually flinched. To admit your characters are doomed means you are too.

Yana Toboso

I like black for clothes, small items, and jewelry. It's a color that can't be violated by any other colors. A color that simply keeps being itself. A color that sinks more somberly than any other color, yet asserts itself more than all other colors. It's a passionate gallant color. Anything is wonderful if it transcends things rather than being halfway...

Humans cannot reject temptation. When they are plunged into the depths of despair, likened to hell, they will hold on to anything that may help them escape from the situation they are in, even if it's merely a spider's thread, no matter what sort of humans they are.

So what? You're another person, so of course you look different. What do you need to be ashamed for?

If it's your wish, I will follow you everywhere even if your throne crumbles, and your shiny crown turns to rust. Even if the bodies pile up endlessly, above the bottomless pile of corpses. Beside you as you lie softly down I will be until I hear the word "Check mate!"

The line between education and brainwashing is paper thin.

He is nothing more than one of my pawns. However, he is not a normal pawn. He is a pawn that can get across the whole board in one move.

Rick Atkinson

In battle, topography is fate.

There is something within our biological structure that screams out and says it is morally wrong for the old to outlive the young. This is one of the times when God doesn’t seem to make sense. This is the worst that life gets.

Now arrogance and error would reap the usual dividends.

A soldier doesn’t fight to save suffering humanity or any other nonsense. He fights to prove that his unit is the best in the Army and that he has as much guts as anybody else in the unit.

In the first half of 1944, battle casualty rates for every 1,000 bomber crewmen serving six months in combat included 712 killed or missing and 175 wounded: 89 percent. By one calculation, barely one in four U.S. airmen completed twenty-five missions over Germany, a minimum quota that was soon raised to thirty and then thirty-five on the assumption that the liberation of France and Belgium and the attenuation of German airpower made flying less lethal.

The more stars you have, the higher you climb the flagpole, the more of your ass is exposed.

Always do whatever you can to keep your superior from making a mistake.