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Tag: quotes

  • December 21st, 2012 8:32pm

    Ferris had lost some of his erectness. He wet his lips and said, “I want to see my lawyer. I don’t want to talk till I’ve seen my lawyer.”

    Spade said, “It’s all right with me. You’re up against it, but I don’t like blackmailers myself. I think Eli wrote a good epitaph for them in that book back there – "Too many have lived.”

    — Too Many Have Lived by Dashiell Hammett

  • December 20th, 2012 1:52pm

    There were literally hundreds of such often live-by-night magazines with wildly exotic and frequently misleading names from their initial appearance at the beginning of the 1920’a in America. And I would not pretend that everything they published was made of gold. Far from it. We are talking commercial fiction, mostly catering to the lowest common denominator. But then do our modern paperbacks have loftier ambitions and superior hit-rate, quality-wise?

    But what makes them stand out is the fact that the pulps had one golden rules which unsung editors insisted upon and good and bad writers alike religiously followed: adherence to the art of storytelling. Every story in the pulps had a beginning and and end, sharply-etched economical characterization, action, emotions, plenty going on. The mission was to keep the reader hooked, to transport him/her into a more interesting world of fantasy and make-believe, spiriting them away from the drab horizons of everyday life (remember, there was no television in those very early days,or CDs or other modern leisure addictions).

    — Maxim Jakubowski (in the introduction to  The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction)

  • December 19th, 2012 9:41am

    This is our first task: caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged. And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we’re meeting our obligations? Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children — all of them — safe from harm? Can we claim, as a nation, that we’re, all together, there, letting them know that they’re loved, and teaching them to love in return? Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?

    I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days. And if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is no. We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change.

    Since I’ve been President, this is the fourth time we’ve come together to comfort a grieving community torn apart by mass shootings. (The) fourth time we’ve hugged survivors; the fourth time we’ve consoled the families of victims. And in between, there’ve been an endless series of deadly shootings across the country — almost daily reports of victims, many of them children, in small towns and in big cities all across America. Victims whose, much of the time, their only fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.

    We will be told the the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law, no single set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society.

    But that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely we can do better than this.

    If there’s even one step we can take to save another child — or another parent, or another town from the grief that’s visited Tucson, and Aurora, and Oak Creek, and Newtown — and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that — then surely we have an obligation to try.

    In the coming weeks, I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this. Because what choice do we have?

    We can’t accept events like this as routine. Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage? That the politics are too hard?

    Are we prepared to say that the violence visited upon our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?

    — PRESIDENT OBAMA, at tonight’s interfaith service for the victims of Newtown (via fffemme)

  • December 15th, 2012 8:52pm

    You want to know why. This may sound cynical, but here’s why:

    It’s because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single victim of Columbine? Disturbed people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he’ll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.

    CNN’s article says that if the body count “holds up”, this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer’s face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer’s identity? None that I’ve seen yet. Because they don’t sell. So congratulations­, sensationalist media, you’ve just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day care center or a maternity ward next.

    You can help by forgetting you ever read this man’s name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem.”

    —

    – Morgan Freeman on Connecticut shooting

    R.I.P: Charlotte Bacon age 6, Daniel Barden age 7, Olivia Engel age 6, Josephine Gay age 7, Ana M Marquez-Greene age 6, Dylan Hockley age 6, Madeleine F Hsu age 6, Catherine V Hubbard age 6, Chase Kowalski age 7, Jesse Lewis age 6, James Mattioli age 6, Grace McDonnell age 7, Emilie Parker age 6, Jack Pinto age 6, Noah Pozner age 6, Caroline Previdi age 6, Jessica Rekos age 6, Avielle Richman age 6, Benjamin Wheeler age 6, Allison N Wyatt age 6, Rachel Davino age 29, Dawn Hochsprung age 47, Anne Marie Murphy age 52, Lauren Rousseau age 30, Mary Sherlach age 56, Victoria Soto age 27.

  • December 14th, 2012 6:16pm

    The human brain actually supports many consciousnesses….A conspiracy of the more active consciousnesses usually learn to define itself as ‘consciousness in the singular’ in monotheist and post-monotheist cultures. We learn to regard ourselves as ‘individuals’ despite that we have profound internal divisions, and we have to make big efforts and sacrifices to create a unitary sense of self. In magic and mysticism and creative thinking, we can gain much by relaxing the grip of the unitary consciousness that we have learned to construct.

    — Peter J. Carroll from “Multimind – Psychology” in The Apophenion (via 4thsoul)