Algis Quotes & Sayings

One night, encouraged by the male partners, I puffed away on a cigar - just one of the guys. Except that the smoking nauseated me and I reeked of cigar smoke for days. If that was fitting in, I stuck out. — Sheryl Sandberg

I would make up silver lies studded with shards of perfect detail like mosaic splinters, sharp and everlasting, the kind of tiny faultless detail that would make them all sure that what I said was true. I would have alibis. I would bring in other people and teach them a story, and rehearse it so carefully and for so long that soon they'd all start to believe that what they said was actually true. — Eleanor Catton

He felt everything - pride in his competence and leadership during the Second World War, pride in his noble intransigence during the Cold War, intellectual pleasure in what he called the "technically sweet" conception of the H-bomb, self-disgust that he could feel such pleasure in so monstrous a creation - but could decide on nothing. Brilliance of this scattershot type effectively disqualifies a man from political decision-making. Oppenheimer was simply not the sort of man a nation can entrust with its fate. — Algis Valiunas

Oppenheimer's agony tore him open from top to bottom. More important than any political dispute his biographers may hope to re-animate or even to settle is a sense of that agony: what it means to be a man desiring scientific and political and moral greatness and living out the crucial ideas and struggles of our time, which pierce like knives, and rend the flesh and the spirit, and allow not a moment's relief. — Algis Valiunas

Although Oppenheimer's mind was not the whiz-bang computer of a John von Neumann or the astral navigation system of a Hans Bethe, it processed other men's original contributions so adeptly that for multifaceted excellence it may well have been the finest scientific instrument of all. — Algis Valiunas

Shit, I could jerk you up from there, pop you like a whip. Pop you so hard your snatch will snap off and smack the wall."

"So," Vanilla said. "How was charm school? — Joe R. Lansdale

Perhaps no theoretical man can be equal to such a burden: to feel knowledge as power when one's mind reshapes the world irrevocably, to see the light of truth as the agent of some dark majesty, is not grace but ordeal. — Algis Valiunas

I was quite shy. I used to write stories all the time, and I think that was a worry for my parents. — Anne-Marie Duff

A millenarian fire burned in Oppenheimer's spirit, fueled by his pride as a world-historical individual, by his fear that the natural force he loosed upon the world would escape all human control, and by a pure-hearted longing to ensure that his discovery of the devastation latent in the elemental substance of the world would serve concord rather than the ultimate discord, perpetual peace rather than permanent self-destruction. — Algis Valiunas

Under relentless prosecutorial grilling he sputtered that he had earlier deceived investigators "because I was an idiot," and he finally admitted that he had lied about nothing less than a treasonable overture. That lie he could not explain - but Bird and Sherwin attempt to explain it by citing a remark Oppenheimer made five years earlier to a Communist graduate student and friend of his, in which he admitted "his tendency when things get too much" to blurt out "irrational things." How difficult it must have been for an intellectual of his abilities, pride, and accomplishment to make such an admission ordinary men can only imagine. — Algis Valiunas

The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim's breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new "gadget," as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb - a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki - brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated. — Algis Valiunas

He couldn't fuck Duke and close his eyes, pretending it was Austin. It was cheating, even though they weren't actually a couple, but he was surely cheating himself and he'd never disrespect Duke like that. "It's — A.E. Via

No, I can just read you. Finally. I can't believe how blind I was. I can't believe I never noticed. Victor's comment ... he was right." She glanced off at the sunset, then turned her gaze back on me. A flash of anger, both in her feelings and her eyes, hit me. "Why didn't you tell me?" she cried. "Why didn't you tell me you loved Dimitri? — Richelle Mead

That's the problem dealing with nonwerewolves," I said. "They lack that critical 'you are Alpha, you are right' gene. — Kelley Armstrong

In so many musicals today, the story is moved forward by a song. I don't think we're gonna try to do that. — John Mellencamp

Oppenheimer was lamenting the subservience of science to innate human cruelty in an address to the American Philosophical Society: "We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world ... a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing ... we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man." This public admission of personal despair at the moral collapse of the modern world's leading intellectual enterprise could not be more nakedly penitent. — Algis Valiunas

With The Good Lieutenant, Whitney Terrell has unwound the myths of one of our most encrusted literary forms - the war novel - and remade it to be humane and honest, glowingly new and true. Terrell knows his facts on the ground, but this is emphatically, triumphantly a work of imagination and literary ingenuity. It opens in conflagration - everything having gone wrong for Lieutenant Emma Fowler in one explosive instant - and from there the mystery of how we got to this disastrous moment unfolds backwards, Memento-like, as we watch Emma become more innocent, her life more full of hope and possibility, with each day less of war that she has experienced. This is brilliant, bold, heartbreaking storytelling for material that demands nothing less. — Adam Johnson

I am a very organized person. I get up at 6:15 a.m., the kids get up at 6:45 a.m., and so I get up and get it in. I'm addicted to the high function. To me it's a work thing
if you meditate, you can get so much work done. I always say to people you know how about three nights a year you get a good night sleep? You can have it every day with meditation. — Jerry Seinfeld

I have to have time to think. Why does time run on while a man thinks? — Algis Budrys

Constantly working outward, putting system after system inside the known universe, they were the bright hungry wave of mankind reaching out to gather in the stars. — Algis Budrys

Oppenheimer's theorizing was so startlingly original - so far in advance of the corroborating observations and so far off the beaten track of astrophysical research - that his colleagues' ignorance cost him the recognition he deserved. — Algis Valiunas

You don't know what it's like to be a man over thirty who's never had anything happen to him. You spend so many years trying to stay safe, stay alive, to avoid some unknown horror. Then you realize the horror is existence itself. The nothing-happening. — Dave Eggers

Perhaps it's the alien equivalent of a discarded tomato can. Does a beetle know why it can enter the can only from one end as it lies across the trail to the beetle's burrow? Does the beetle understand why it is harder to climb to the left or right, inside the can, than it is to follow a straight line? Would the beetle be a fool to assume the human race put the can there to torment it - or an egomaniac to believe the can was manufactured only to mystify it? It would be best for the beetle to study the can in terms of the can's logic, to the limit of the beetle's ability. In that way, at least, the beetle can proceed intelligently. It may even grasp some hint of the can's maker. Any other approach is either folly or madness. — Algis Budrys

He [Ryan white] spoke to me that my life was out of order. My life was a mess. I had no values anymore. And he was so stoic with his infection. He wasn't bitter. He wasn't angry. He just was a kid. He wanted to go to school and play football, drive his car. And he had no bitterness about him. — Elton John

If you want to do a certain thing, you first have to be a certain person. Once you become that certain person, you will not care anymore about doing that certain thing. — Dogen

Rob Chilson's mordant wit will keep you turning the pages until the wee hours! — Algis Budrys