Jack > Jack's Quotes

“I became a bodybuilder as a means of becoming a caricature. The inflated cartoon I became relieved me from the responsibility of being human. But once I'd become that caricature, that inflated cartoon, I longed for something else. As painful and humiliating it is to be human, being subhuman or superhuman is far worse.”
― Samuel Wilson Fussell

“It is well known that women carry poison in their pockets. Did you expect a gun? A woman with a gun would be just another policeman. We fall in love with the convicts, remember that. Policemen marry girls from the neighborhood, high school looms over their unions, the first uniform is her prom dress and his black bow tie and white shirt. But the girls are thinking of poison, thinking of poison as the lights go out on the dresser where the revolver has been placed with care for the night. The black shoes, the fine, thick serge of the coat, shoulders and thighs of stallions. And the policemen are usually shot down by someone out of shape, thin, thin, nothing but living bones. Remember that.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick

“The fact is that it is utterly pointless to make anyone a generous offer unless he is a rich man; rich men are the only people who can accept a generous offer. To be poor is simply the peculiar human condition of not being able to take advantage of a generous offer. The essence of being a poor peasant is the inability to avail oneself of the gifts that politicians offer to promise and to be left at the mercy of ideals that only make rich richer and the poor poorer.”
― Halldór Laxness

“I often think about bachelors, a life of pure decision, of thoughtful calculations, of every inclination honored. They go about on their own, nicely accompanied in their singularity by the companion of possibility. For cannot any man, young or old, rich or poor, turn a few corners and bump into marriage?”
― Elizabeth Hardwick

“-and he flew in to her from the clutter of Somerville, the compost heap behind the Harvard Yard.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building. A vigorous totalitarian order requires that people be invested in the leaders' scheme, and while genocide may be the most perverse and ambitious means to this end, it is also the most comprehensive. In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing ans indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history.”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“A fat servant is not much of a man. A beaten servant is a great man, because in his breast freedom has its home.”
― Halldór Laxness, Iceland's Bell