Bruce > Bruce's Quotes

“No Tank Tops, the sign had said at Youth Guidance. Because it was presumed the parents didn’t know better than to show up to court looking like hell. The sign might have said Your Poverty Reeks.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“And these are only the ones I happen to know about. As soon as you discover you’re not the best, you throw it in and hate yourself. Same with relationships. You want too much and move on.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“The Greeks were right to invent their gods as argumentative unpredictable punitive members of a lofty elite. If he could believe in such all-too-human gods they would be the ones to fear. 4 In the third week after Alissa’s disappearance Roland set about imposing order on the overstuffed bookshelves around the table just off the kitchen.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“He suspected he had brushed against a fundamental law of the universe: such ecstasy must compromise his freedom. That was its price.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“It was either hilarious or it was tragic, that people should go about their daily business in the conventional way when they knew there was this.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Life is messy, everybody makes mistakes because we’re all fucking stupid”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“The people who applaud the loudest, Lucrezia notes, are the ones who talked through the performance.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait

“In 2012, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced newly mandated safety labeling on statin drugs to warn doctors and patients about their potential for brain-related side effects, such as memory loss and confusion.”
― Michael Greger, How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

“She puts her arm around me. ‘You’re just too young to understand.’ As soon as she says this, I realise she is just like everyone else, and wish I was back at home so that all the things I do not understand could be the same as they always are.”
― Claire Keegan, Foster

“if definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further. I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush. Notes and Acknowledgments The quote referenced on this page, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,” is from John Buchan’s 1919 novel Mr.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“in the mechanics of the ordinary, working week. Sundays could feel very threadbare, and raw. Why could he not relax and enjoy them like other men who took a pint or two after Mass before falling asleep at the fire with the newspaper, having eaten a plate of dinner?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“It took me miles of gentle puzzling before I worked out that the love was about my father and me. For weeks after he died, I’d sat in front of the television watching the British television drama Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy over and over again; hours of grainy 1970s 16mm cinefilm, soft and black on an old VHS tape. I’d curled up mentally in its dark interiors, its Whitehall offices and gentlemen’s clubs. It was a story of espionage and betrayal that fitted together like a watch, and it was glacially slow and beautiful.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“The anger was vast and it came out of nowhere. It was the rage of something not fitting; the frustration of trying to put something in a box that is slightly too small. You try moving the shape around in the hope that some angle will make it fit in the box. Slowly comes an apprehension that this might not, after all, be possible. And finally you know it won’t fit, know there is no way it can fit, but this doesn’t stop you using brute force to try to crush it in, punishing the bloody thing for not fitting properly. That was what it was like: but I was the box, I was the thing that didn’t fit, and I was the person smashing it, over and over again, with bruised and bleeding hands.”
― Helen Macdonald

“slow down as if they’re moving through liquid. I am becoming fascinated by her quality of attention. I’m starting to believe in what Barry Lopez has called ‘the conversation of death’, something he saw in the exchange of glances between caribou and hunting wolves, a wordless negotiation that ends up with them working out whether they will become hunter and hunted, or passers-by.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“times in our marriage I loathed him. I saw, with a kind of dull disc of dread in my chest, that with his pleasant distance, his mild expressions, he was unavailable. But worse. Because beneath his height of pleasantness there lurked a juvenile crabbiness, a scowl that flickered across his soul, a pudgy little boy with his lower lip thrust forward who blamed this person and that person—he blamed me, I felt this often; he was blaming me for something that had nothing to do with our present lives, and he blamed me even as he called me “Sweetheart,” making my coffee—back then he never drank coffee but he made me a cup each morning—setting it down before me martyr-like.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Oh William!

“As the year began, I wrote a tally of my good fortunes, a practice I highly recommend. If you start small and build out, it can clarify the magnitude of your blessings. You start with elemental things, like: A heart that beats. Eyes that see. Blood that flows. Lungs that breathe unimpeded by gunk. A mental windshield not too splattered with bugs. Failing to note the absences will cut any proper list of good fortunes in half. The bones that aren’t broken, the illnesses or hates you don’t have, the aches you don’t feel. Like many things that are unswervingly good—oxygen, say, and water—health is likewise transparent and easy to miss when you have it. Then you get to the meaty stuff. A wife you love. A house that isn’t falling down.”
― Neil King Jr., American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal

“present a binary between the revolution and the individual. I was thinking really explicitly about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which influenced me a lot. Ellison’s book traces a similar narrative of someone coming into consciousness, becoming a revolutionary, and then, discovering that the revolution has failed, turns back to individualism. And”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“If Pepper was not mistaken, Carney’s father was the first person to take him there—Big Mike was a proponent of a proper meal before a robbery. Breaking a guy’s leg or casing a warehouse didn’t necessarily require nutritional prep, but a robbery called for a hearty sit-down, without fail. Pepper, reluctant to offer praise on anything or anybody, privately assessed that it was the best chicken he’d ever tasted.”
― Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto

“So long as you continue to respond to impossible demands on your time by trying to persuade yourself that you might one day find some way to do the impossible, you’re implicitly collaborating with those demands. Whereas once you deeply grasp that they are impossible, you’ll be newly empowered to resist them, and to focus instead on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever situation you’re in.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“instead to focus on doing a few things that count.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“It was one thing to recognize the terrible toll they could take on the people inside them, and that, thanks in part to new medications, a majority of people with schizophrenia no longer needed to live there. It was something else to know what could replace the state system without destroying the idea of asylum that had given rise to it in the first place, or harming the people the system had been created to help. Hardest of all was to realize that the answers of a moment could not substitute for the slow, hard, complicated, and imperfect work of providing daily practical care for patients whose rights had finally been recognized but whose illness could itself seem like a violation of their reason and will.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Personality change may sound like an eerie, out-of-body experience—and as the quantum change stories show, it can be. But the science behind it is remarkably simple: You just have to remember to act how you’d like to be, consistently. And”
― Olga Khazan, Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change