“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave imp…”— Ernest Hemingway, amazon.com
“That is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful. Perhaps that is wisdom. It is a very unattractive wisdom.”— Ernest Hemingway, amazon.com
“That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.”— Ernest Hemingway, amazon.com
“What drove black musicians was the desire: You wanted to be known by your name, not 'that nigger over there.'”— Bob Redcross, amazon.com
“They told John McCain he could leave if he told them certain things. 'No one would know.' 'I would know. I would know.'”— John McCain, amazon.com
“If you want to know how God feels about money look at whom she gives it to.”— Anne Lamott, amazon.com
“The pursuit of landscaping is a cause of the deranged man. Imperfection is emancipation.”— Austin Kleon, amazon.com
“If you buy something for another, it's a gift. When you take something you cherish and give it to another, it's called sharing. Sharing is what love is all about.”— Robert Evans, amazon.com
“As weeks turned to months and Chatterton continued to distinguish himself, he studied himself and others in action, watched soldiers live and die and show courage and break down, paid careful attention to the behavior of men around him, all to divine further insight into the right way to live. Gradu…”— Robert Kurson, amazon.com
“Life's slendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, but its right name, it will come.”— Franz Kafka, amazon.com
“It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam…”— Dashiell Hammett, amazon.com
“He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the acc…”— Dashiell Hammett, amazon.com
“Here is what happens to a panicked diver in trouble inside a shipwreck: His heart and respiratory rates jump. At 200 feet, when every lungful of air requires seven times the volume as that on the surface, a panicked diver can breathe down his tanks so quickly that the needles on his gauges begin to…”— Robert Kurson, amazon.com
“A diver lost or tangled inside a shipwreck has come face-to-face with his maker. Corpses have been recovered inside wrecks–eyes and mouths agape in terror, the poor diver still lost, still blinded, still snagged, still pinned. Yet a curious truth pertains to these perils: rarely does the problem its…”— Robert Kurson, amazon.com
“For four months, Chatterton thought about the right way and the wrong way to live, and he continued to contemplate his principles. As one patrol bled into another and men died, his thinking solidified, and he began to consider that it might have been for these insights that he had come to Vietnam, t…”— Robert Kurson, amazon.com
“The guy who gets kill is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn't care anymore, who has said, 'I'm already dead–the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,' is the most formidable force in the world...The worst possible deci…”— Robert Kurson, amazon.com
“Some of Alexander the Great's successors resembled him 'with their purpose customers, their bodyguards, the way they copied the poise of his neck which as tilted slightly to the left, and their loud voices in conversation, but Pyrrhus, and Pyrrhus alone, in arms and action.'”— Plutarch, amazon.com