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we need a better sort of human being, not a more just law. We need to change the way people think.
You should not be distracted by anything, you infant. When you work, you work. Does fucking SEAL Team Six get distracted by Twitter? No. Why not? Because they focus. They have discipline. They know that what they do has consequences. People will die. Well, here is the news: the same is true of us. Money is life. Poverty kills. If you are going to get distracted by your computer, you don’t deserve your job.
It was the first of many ways in which I have given him cause to find me an irritating old man. The first, but not the last, and we have turned our backs on one another and inevitably reunited a dozen times over the years. We argue because Michael cannot understand that in some small reserved areas of the world I still know better than he does; and I cannot get my fuddled head around the possibility that I should accord him the same respect I would to a man of his accomplishments and standing who was not my son. I do try, but somewhere in me is the shape of him, standing naked astride a pile
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Of the various ways to operate your biology according to your conscious desires she has learned here and there, one of the most useful is the knowledge that it is physiologically difficult if not impossible to vomit while humming.
No one ever says that people have to be better. No one says that all these things we espouse—these free choices and self-governances—depend on our behaving like the best of ourselves and not the worst. Who is to stop us, to catch us, when we fail? When rage spirals like birds in a meadow, like a cloud of insects, and tears apart whatever is underneath, good or bad?
the ends and the means. I’m familiar with that one, too. But the means is all we ever get. We never quite reach the end.
People will be very alarmed, and in his experience they always feel better knowing there’s a bookshop open.
