Emma K > Emma's Quotes

“On all those random occasions, I seemed to myself as implausible a father as she seemed to be a daughter.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“太虚幻境”。两边又有一副对联，道是：“假作真时真亦假，无为有处有还无。”
― Cao Xueqin, 红楼梦

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Today, I slept in until 10,
Cleaned every dish I own,
Fought with the bank,
Took care of paperwork.
You and I might have different definitions of adulthood.
I don’t work for salary, I didn’t graduate from college,
But I don’t speak for others anymore,
And I don’t regret anything I can’t genuinely apologize for.
And my mother is proud of me.
I burnt down a house of depression,
I painted over murals of greyscale,
And it was hard to rewrite my life into one I wanted to live
But today, I want to live.
I didn’t salivate over sharp knives,
Or envy the boy who tossed himself off the Brooklyn bridge.
I just cleaned my bathroom,
did the laundry,
called my brother.
Told him, “it was a good day.”
― Kait Rokowski

“即使我有自己的价值观，以外在的判断来看，我的自尊也不可能永远不动摇。害怕失败的感觉一直存在，有时很想放弃长久以来的奋斗，因为这种奋斗似乎漫无终点。”
― 黄仁宇, 黄河青山：黄仁宇回忆录

“一天靠劳力工作两、三个小时，在当时足足可以赚到最低生活费，事实上还是劳动的好方式，除了活动身体外，还可以打破孤寂的感觉。”
― 黄仁宇, 黄河青山：黄仁宇回忆录

“我享有自由，我拥有许多人想像不到的自由，我也拥有此刻自己不需要的自由。不过，这却是流亡者的自由，是没有影子的人所拥有的自由。”
― 黄仁宇, 黄河青山：黄仁宇回忆录

“政治基于心理，心理基于物理，物理基于几何。”
― 黄仁宇

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
― Roberto Bolano

“Nearly two decades later, others would raise this question, would talk about books as mirrors and windows, and Ed Lim, tired by then, would find himself as frustrated as he was grateful. We’ve always known, he would think; what took you so long?”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“I told a story about how my dad had once worked in a lab at a VA hospital on the same floor with a guy who managed to get dogs addicted to cigarettes. There was a tracheostomy tube so the dogs had to inhale the smoke. At first the dogs hated smoking, but eventually they got addicted, and when the cigarettes were taken away, they howled, all day and all night. I didn’t realize until I got to the end that it was a really depressing story. There was a pause.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“No, these were women who were motivated and available and interesting and interested and exciting and excited.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“Mostly, he said, because he was too busy being sad. Mostly because he felt like garbage all the time, and a person shouldn’t feel like garbage all the time. More than that, a person shouldn’t be made horny when he felt like garbage. The intersection of horniness and low self-esteem seemed reserved squarely for porn consumption.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“He’d given her a key to his new apartment not to pull shit like this, but so they could have something that was amicable. Amicable amicable amicable. Did you ever notice that you only use the word amicable in relation to divorce? Was it because it was so often used for divorce that you didn’t want to poison anything else with it?”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“As Eddie saw it, there are very few things that really matter in life, and if you have a few, it’s a lot.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“The rear axle broke and the car spun around, hit an embankment, and flew in the air like a flying saucer. Parts of the body shredded. Thiel, a practicing libertarian, was not wearing a seatbelt, but he emerged unscathed. He was able to hitch a ride up to the Sequoia offices. Musk, also unhurt, stayed behind for a half-hour to have his car towed away, then joined the meeting without telling Harris what had happened. Later, Musk was able to laugh and say, “At least it showed Peter I was unafraid of risks.” Says Thiel, “Yeah, I realized he was a bit crazy.”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

“They agreed to a merger in which X.com would get 55 percent of the combined company, but Musk almost ruined things soon after by telling Levchin he was getting a steal.”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

“Levchin and Musk soon clashed on an issue that sounded technical but was also theological: whether to use Microsoft Windows or Unix as the main operating system.”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

“For the second time in three years, Musk had been pushed out of a company. He was a visionary who didn’t play well with others.”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

“His doctor had treated two cases of falciparum malaria prior to treating Elon—both patients died.” Thiel remembers that he had a morbid conversation with the HR director after learning that Musk had taken out, on behalf of the company, a key-man life insurance policy for $100 million. “If he had died,” Thiel says, “all of our financial problems were going to be solved.”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

“Vacations will kill you. Also, South Africa. That place is still trying to destroy me.”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

“He had become fascinated by Fermi’s Paradox, named after the Italian American physicist Enrico Fermi, who in a discussion of alien life in the universe said, “But where is everyone?” Mathematically it seemed logical there were other civilizations, but the lack of any evidence raised the uncomfortable possibility that the Earth’s human species might be the only example of consciousness.”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

“He had a mind for the age that was coming. He stood on the right rung of the evolutionary ladder.”
― Tracy Kidder, A Truck Full of Money: One Man's Quest to Recover from Great Success

“I was coming to understand what all those poems were about, what all the fuss was. Everything was cold before, motionless, emotionless. Any woman I had loved hadn’t loved me back, and the one who maybe had, loved me the wrong way.”
― Elliot Page, Pageboy: A Memoir

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be,” Vonnegut wrote.”
― Elliot Page, Pageboy: A Memoir

“Simon referred to research from sociologists and linguists that posited that people are better at “talking topically” than actually staying on topic.”
― Bo Seo, Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard