Meredith > Recent Status Updates

Simenon: Once people have a considerable fortune, it is no longer money that matters but power.

Dr Johnson: Religious assumptions are not a legitimate basis for law.
Me: That’s not what US legislators believe.

Dr Johnson: People are not exactly open to changing their behavior in light of philosophical arguments and scientific evidence.

Simenon: As [Maigret] grew up, he had the sense that many people in his village were out of place, that they had followed a path that was not theirs, purely because they didn’t know what else to do.

Lavinia: I was fated, it seems, to live among people who suffered beyond measure from grief, who were driven mad by it.

Maigret: He’s an ugly looking character.
Bartender: There are a lot of ugly looking people, but they can’t do anything about it.

Lavinia: Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed … [men] make a virtue of their rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.

Lavinia: What is left after a death? Everything else.

Lavinia: Why must There be war?
Virgil: What a woman’s question that is! Because men are men.

Lavinia: I long for justice, but I do not know what justice is. It is hard to be betrayed. It is harder to know you made betrayal inevitable.

Virgil: Not even need and love can defeat fate.

Virgil: Women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.

Lavinia: I had not learned how peace galls men, how they gather impatient rage against it as it continues, how even while they pray the powers for peace, they work against it and make certain it will be broken and give way to battle, slaughter, rape, and waste.

Maigret: Everyone is afraid. We help young children overcome their fears with fairy tales ... Fear of water. Fear fire. Fear of animals. Fear of the dark. Fear of making the wrong choices and ruining your life.

Lavinia: Kings are quick to punish; it relieves their anxiety.

Estraven: The machine conceals the machinations.

Genly: Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization had an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, [one] can have either one or the other. Not both.

Linus: Staring death in the face is vastly overrated.

Arthur: Guilt is a powerful tool.