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A reader is a carrier, not a creator.
“Youth is a wonderful thing,” said Mr. Harrigan. “What a shame it’s wasted on children.”
Henry Thoreau said that we don’t own things; things own us. Every new object—whether it’s a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that one—is something more we must carry on our backs.
I don’t have a television, because if I did, I would watch it, even though almost all of what it broadcasts is utter nonsense. I don’t have a radio in the house because I would listen to it, and a little country music to break the monotony of a long drive is really all I require. If I had that—”
when it comes to commerce, Craig, most people are like puppies that need to be housebroken.”
“Besides, my dad says it’s the thought that counts.” “An aphorism more often spoken than adhered to,”
Business is like football, Craig. If you have to knock someone down to reach the goal line, you better damn well do it, or you shouldn’t put on a uniform and go out on the field in the first place. But when the game is over—and mine is, although I keep my hand in—you take off the uniform and go home.
He was a mystery to me, to the very end and even beyond. But maybe that’s always true. I think we mostly live alone. By choice, like him, or just because that’s the way the world was made.
“Is spam annoying? Yes. Is it becoming the cockroach of American commerce, breeding and scurrying everywhere? Yes. Because spam works, Craig. It pulls the plow. In the not-too-distant future, spam may decide elections.
Mr. Harrigan said that allowing people to name things after you was not only absurd but undignified and ephemeral. In fifty years, he said, or even twenty, you were just a name on a plaque that everyone ignored.
We’d been like a couple of kids with Del Monte cans connected by a length of waxed string. Which is what most of our modern communications amount to, when you stop to think of it; chatter for the sake of chatter.
“The human brain is finite—no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone—but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin—the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo—billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.”
“What does that mean when he says ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’?”
“Everything you see. Everything you know. The world, Chucky. Planes in the sky, manhole covers in the street. Every year you live, that world inside your head will get bigger and brighter, more detailed and complex. Do you understand?”
When Holly was growing up, Charlotte Gibney taught her—patiently, perhaps even with good intentions—that she was thoughtless, helpless, hapless, careless. That she was less. Holly believed that until she met Bill Hodges, who thought she was more.
Because there really is a second world. It exists because people refuse to believe it’s there.”
Love is a gift; love is also a chain with a manacle at each end.
Like many people who struggle with insecurity, she’s a compulsive planner-aheader, and consequently almost always early.
he had no intention of junking up his mind with Trump, terrorism, or taxes.
Reality was deep, and it was far. It held many secrets and went on forever. 11
