Abe > Abe's Quotes

“While poutine is a dish unique to Eastern Canada (Montreal and Ottawa), the concoction of French fries covered in cheese curds and (for no apparent reason) gravy, clearly deciphers Canadian culture.”
― Jim Gaffigan, Food: A Love Story

“Microwaves are like winter coats. They warm quickly, people never clean them, and they look ugly after a year.”
― Jim Gaffigan, Food: A Love Story

“There is cheese from just about every country in the world except China. No cheese from China? Maybe tofu is Chinese cheese. No wonder there was a cultural revolution.”
― Jim Gaffigan, Food: A Love Story

“It would be embarrassing trying to explain what an appetizer is to someone from a starving country. “Yeah, the appetizer—that’s the food we eat before we have our food. No, no, you’re thinking of dessert—that’s food we have after we have our food. We eat tons of food. Sometimes there’s so much we just stick it in a bag and bring it home. Then we throw it out the next day. Maybe give it to the dog.”
― Jim Gaffigan, Food: A Love Story

“This book is an account of the collision of two forces: aspiration and authoritarianism.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“This is a work of nonfiction, based on eight years of conversations.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“then he was assigned to lead a company on the island of Quemoy, known during the Cold War as the “lighthouse of the free world,” because it was the final spit of land before the Communist shoreline.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“The FHA required developers to use restrictive covenants barring blacks, and it denied black families the mortgages that allowed working-class whites to leave public housing.”
― Anonymous

“Blacks don’t in fact make up a majority of residents receiving housing assistance nationwide today (the number is closer to about 44 percent).”
― Anonymous

“Within the Detroit Housing Commission, according to HUD data, 99 percent of public housing residents are black. Within the D.C. Housing Authority and the Housing Authority of New Orleans, 98 percent are.”
― Anonymous

“In surveys, Chinese casino gamblers tend to view bets as investments and investments as bets. The stock market and real estate, in the Chinese view, are scarcely different from a casino.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“a lifelong disciple of Lord Chesterfield’s maxim that a gentleman was free to do anything he pleased as long as he did it with style.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers

“Over the past few months, I have become so dependent upon tracking my pizza online through Domino's Pizza Tracker, that I now understand the need overbearing parents feel to strap a GPS-enabled phone to their child. I am anxious about the whereabouts, well-being and safety of my pizza and must know exactly where it is at all times.”
― Ben Nesvig, First World Problems: 101 Reasons Why The Terrorists Hate Us

“in another era the same behavior that is now throttled with Ritalin and disciplinary rap sheets would have been the mark of greatness, the early blooming of a true champion.”
― Christopher McDougall, Natural Born Heroes: Mastering the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance

“In the 1930s, the Nazis borrowed the frugal image of the one-pot meal, putting it to ideological use. In 1933, Hitler’s government announced that Germans should put aside one Sunday, from October to March, to eat a one-pot meal: Eintopf. The idea was that people would save enough money in this way to donate whatever was saved to the poor. Cookbooks were hastily rewritten to take account of the new policy. One recipe collection listed no fewer than sixty-nine Eintopfs, including macaroni, goulash, Irish stew, Serbian rice soup, numerous cabbagey medleys, and Old German potato soup.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“The crews, the young men who’d transmuted their fear into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel any sense of security and power.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates

“this. To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Seven years after I saw the pictures of those doors, I received my first adult passport. I wish I had come to it sooner.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Her disposition toward life was that of an elite athlete who knows the opponent is dirty and the refs are on the take, but also knows the championship is one game away.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Service simply means we embrace the possibility of living for more than ourselves.”
― Wes Moore, The Work

“People tend to confuse determination and positive attitude with false optimism or naiveté.”
― Wes Moore, The Work

“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, and it’s the rare person who can walk away from what feels like a sure thing.”
― Wes Moore, The Work

“I gave him my full American pitch: about how America was a large experiment, and with every generation we struggle to expand and live up to our greatest ideals, to be greater in the future than we were in the past. I told him I fought for my country because I love it, flaws and all. I fought for it because the people who make up our beautiful, diverse tapestry deserve to be fought for. I fought for it so that this experiment can continue, so that we have a chance to become the country that my grandparents dreamed of and that my grandchildren deserve.”
― Wes Moore, The Work

“After my time working for the government as a soldier, I reacquainted myself with the possibilities of government as a force for good beyond its awesome capacity as a force in war and security.”
― Wes Moore, The Work

“One thing I began to realize in my travels was that everyone I met who was truly successful—whether in business, in philanthropic work, in human rights, in government, or in raising a family—shared one common trait: they were fanatically passionate about the work they did.”
― Wes Moore, The Work

“Whenever I saw the sun, I reminded myself that I was looking at a star. One of over a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. A galaxy that was just one of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe. This helped me keep things in perspective.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One