Caputo Quotes & Sayings

Deconstruction is not meant to be a soft sighing for the future, but a way of deciding now and being impassioned in a moment. — John D. Caputo

In wartime, the degree of patriotism is directly proportional to distance from the front. — Philip Caputo

It's just that even though I'm totally old and unhip,I remember what boys in high school were like.Especially the kind like Jack Caputo."
"What kind is that?"
"The kind that doesn't even walk a girl to the door."
I rolled my eyes. "Well,he would have, but he had to go drop off his other dates. There were three of us." My dad finally cracked a smile. "Good night,old man," I said,giving him a hug.
"Wait a sec,honey.Did I do that okay?"
I pulled back. "Do what okay?" It hit me then that this was my first dance since my mom died.I felt a little guilty that I hadn't realized it before. It was just that the night was so perfect. Before he could explain, I said, "Yes.You did great."
"Night,Nikki."
The next morning,I found a note in my jacket pocket.I unfolded it and read two words, written in Jack's handwriting.
Ever Yours. — Brodi Ashton

Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the 'correct opinions about God' - 'fundamentalism' is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry - but not if it means holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held by God, in love and service. Theology is idolatry if it means what we say about God instead of letting ourselves be addressed by what God has to say to us. Faith is idolatrous if it is rigidly self-certain but not if it is softened in the waters of 'doubt. — John D. Caputo

Afternoon,Caputo," Cole said.
Jack's face remained a cool mask. "Hello, Cole.Becks."
Cole froze at Jack's casual use of his real name. His arm dropped from my shoulders. I couldn't help but smile.
Jack looked at me. "I'll see you in Mrs. Stone's room, Becks. You're coming, right? Mythology paper?"
I nodded.Just before he sauntered away, Jack winked at me and slapped Cole hard on the shoulder. "See you around, Neal. — Brodi Ashton

Aside from their companionship, I'd brought Sage and Sky as ambassadors, hoping they would attract attention and open the door to conversations with strangers. In a moment, they fulfilled their diplomatic function. — Philip Caputo

Go out and interview people to find a partner whom you can trust. Find somebody who subscribes to the same view that you do. I'm happy to tell you that I practice what I preach. I would have never thought I'd end up in financial services. — Lisa Caputo

I'm happy to tell you that my debt is retired. That happened because I got a good financial adviser. — Lisa Caputo

The Right thinks that the breakdown of the family is the source of crime and poverty, and this they very insightfully blame on the homosexuals, which would be amusing were it not so tragic. Families and 'family values' are crushed by grinding poverty, which also makes violent crime and drugs attractive alternatives to desperate young men and sends young women into prostitution. Family values are no less corrupted by the corrosive effects of individualism, consumerism, and the accumulation of wealth. Instead of shouting this from the mountain tops, the get-me-to-heaven-and-the-rest-be-damned Christianity the Christian Right preaches is itself a version of selfish spiritual capitalism aimed at netting major and eternal dividends, and it fits hand in glove with American materialism and greed. — John D. Caputo

The book is what we have come to expect from Marion: challenging, subtle and nuanced analyses, dassling formulations, . a provocative and original philosophical genius. — John D. Caputo

Nutshells close and encapsulate, shelter and protect, reduce and simplify, while everything in deconstruction is turned toward opening, exposure, expansion, and complexification, toward releasing unheard of, undreamt of possibilities to come, toward cracking nutshells wherever they appear. — John D. Caputo

Marital life cannot be easily represented in art because it is the
small, invisible, quotidian growth of the day-to-day, where
outwardly nothing happens. Romantic love is like a general
who knows how to conquer but not how to govern once the
last shot is fired. Unlike the aesthete, who knows how to 'kill
time' , married people master time without killing it. Marital
time is about the wise use and governance of time, setting
one's hands to the plough of the day-to-day. — John D. Caputo

The name of God is the name of the chance for something absolutely new, for a new birth, for the expectation, the hope, the hope against hope (Rom. 4:18) in a transforming future. Without it we are left without hope and are absorbed by rational management techniques. — John D. Caputo

Citigroup has the opportunity to be the largest financial institution and to serve us well. What we decide to do is not what everybody else does. Other companies sponsor women's events and put a woman's face in advertising. This is financial services wrapped in pink. — Lisa Caputo

I don't care if your the President of the United States, the Queen of England, the inventor of the microchip, a bankable movie star, or an ordinary Joe or Jill, you're no paragon in my book, but the same as a zebra or gazelle - a source of protein. In fact, I'd rather hunt you, because you're slow and feeble. — Philip Caputo

the truth of the event does not belong to the order of identificatory knowledge, as if our life's charge were to track down and learn the secret name of some fugitive spirit. — John D. Caputo

Before you leave here, Sir, you're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy. — Philip Caputo

No you don't," he said. "The corpses can wait."
I wasn't sure if he was referring to me or the screen. I would've asked him to clarify but, Jack's lips were suddenly very busy moving against Nikki's. I resisted the urge to dry-heave and looked up at the sky, the trees, the buses anywhere that wouldn't trigger the upchuck reflex.
Jack needed to learn some manners. Damn epic love. — Brodi Ashton

you get nothing else from this book, know this: your deceased loved ones are loving, guiding, and protecting you from the Other Side. — Theresa Caputo

Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself, and the way it preserves itself is to keep you from having any doubts, and the way it keeps you from doubting is to blind you to the way things really are. Evidence contrary to the belief can be staring you straight in the face, and you won't see it ... True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore. — Philip Caputo

It's paradoxical that the death of your quarry is besides the point and at the same time the whole point. A chase without a kill as its object is like a journey without a destination; a kill without a chase employing all the hunter's craft is killing, not hunting. — Philip Caputo

As a rule he had found it useful as well as prudent to trust his fellow man to do the right thing only when the wrong thing failed to present itself. — Philip Caputo

The beaver dam had been constructed on the ruins of a man-made one, built by the CCC back in the thirties and later dynamited by an irate Finn who'd objected to the government's meddling with nature. — Philip Caputo

Stay with me, Becks. Dream of me. I am ever yours. — Brodi Ashton

Someone had told me, years ago, that Key West's latitude was the northernmost from which the Southern Cross was visible. I had glimpsed it just once, in 1980, while on a night swordfishing trip in the Gulf Stream. It hung a hand's width above the horizon in the southwest - four stars like the points of a crystal kite. On — Philip Caputo

Anyone who does not acknowledge the darkness in his nature will succumb to it ... the lamp of conviction needs to be shaded by doubt, or it burns with a blinding light. — Philip Caputo

I really believe that when we start talking ourselves back, we'll have more to offer the world." he [Woodenkinfe] said. "I don't want a gray world."
"You mean taking back our cultures and where we come from."
"Absolutely! You want to talk about the fabric of this country, that's it."
"So rather than a melting pot, it would be a ... "
"A blanket of color, all sewn in the shape of the U.S. — Philip Caputo

Too often, contemporary continental philosophers take the "other" of philosophy to mean literature, but not religion, which is for them just a little too wholly other, a little beyond their much heralded tolerance of alterity. They retain an antagonism to religious texts inherited straight from the Enlightenment, even though they pride themselves on having made the axioms and dogmas of the Enlightenment questionable. But the truth is that contemporary continental philosophy is marked by the language of the call and the response, of the gift, of hospitality to the other, of the widow, the orphan and the stranger, and by the very idea of the "wholly other," a discourse that any with the ears to hear knows has a Scriptural provenance and a Scriptural resonance. ("A Prologue", Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 1.1, Fall 2003, p. 1). — John D. Caputo

We have become as the scum of the world, the dregs of all things, even until now" (V. 13). PAUL'S GREAT — Michael Caputo

Since I was a kid. I had this series by Ballantine Books about the history of World Wars I and II. In my 20s, it was the Vietnam War literature of novelists like Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, and Tobias Wolff, and then nonfiction such as "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan and "The Best and Brightest" by David Halberstam . Those are the two best histories of Vietnam. — George Packer

In a guerrilla war, the line between legitimate and illegitimate killing is blurred. The policies of free-fire zones, in which a soldier is permitted to shoot at any human target, armed or unarmed, further confuse the fighting man's moral senses. — Philip Caputo

I'm a Midwesterner by birth, and when I traveled there, when I was young, most of the small towns were thriving, vibrant places. — Philip Caputo

If we remove the dulling effects of the nineteen centuries that had passed, and make ourselves contemporaries with Christ and his little band of apostles, we might restore the difficulty, the trauma, the great paradox of Christ's appearance which requires us to fit together both a divine and a human nature, the creator of the universe and the babe born in a manger. — John D. Caputo

I do not recommend ignorance and I am not saying that there is no truth, but I am arguing that the best way to think about truth is to call it the best interpretation that anybody has come up with yet while conceding that no one knows what is coming next. There are lots of competing truths battling with one another for their place in the sun, and the truth is that we have to learn to cope with the conflict. The skies do not open up and drop The Truth into our laps. — John D. Caputo

And men who do not expect to receive mercy eventually lose their inclination to grant it. — Philip Caputo

I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring. Had it not been for the fear that I was going crazy, I would have found it an interesting experience, a trip such as no drug could possibly produce. Asleep and dreaming, I saw dead men living; awake, I saw living men dead. — Philip Caputo

I had only one hard-and-fast rule: avoid interstates. They are predictable and boring, and their uniformity somehow erases changes in landscape; you can drive six hundred miles, from forests into desert, and feel that you haven't gone anywhere. In a sense, you haven't. You have no idea about the lives of the people in the towns and cities you've bypassed at seventy miles an hour. * — Philip Caputo

Don't be like my mother when my father had a heart attack. My mother had never handled the finances. I don't ever want to see anybody go through that. Women shouldn't be in that position. — Lisa Caputo

The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain. — Philip Caputo

Seek first the Kingdom of God: that is, the first order of business is to transform one's own inner life, not the accumulation of external trappings of speculative knowledge. — John D. Caputo

Key West has become an imitation of its former self, its eccentricities commoditized for sale to tourists. That "character" you see with a parrot on his shoulder is about as authentic as vinyl siding, employed to provide local color. Gargantuan cruise ships dock two or three times a week, disgorging passengers by the thousands to troll the cheesy T-shirt shops on the main drag, Duval Street. And with all sorts of diversions to keep visitors occupied, like parasailing and jet skiing, tourist season is year-round, clogging the streets with autos, bikes, motor scooters, and pedestrians. I — Philip Caputo

There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier's sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb. — Philip Caputo

She's dating the school quarterback."
"People date all the time. And they break up all the time."
"Not these two," Meredith said with a snort. "Their love is epic. Everyone at school knows it. He gave up his philandering ways to be with his longtime childhood bestie."
I finally glanced at her sideways. "They're in high school. High schoolers don't philander."
"Jack Caputo does. Or did. — Brodi Ashton

What finger-shaped Florida lacks in breadth it makes up for in length; Tallahassee is 480 miles from Miami (farther than New York City is from Cleveland). The — Philip Caputo

War - the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary. — Philip Caputo

I have to give a lot of credit to Sandy Weill, because he gets it. He gets the power of the women's contribution to the economy. — Lisa Caputo

It is a confession that we do not have such a prodigious head as is required to answer the question what is happening, that we cannot get on top of what is happening, that we are stuck in the middle of it, in medias res, inter-esse, amazing and bewildered. We cannot soar over what is happening with philosophy's eagle-wings. What's happening has clipped our wings. — John D. Caputo

I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war ... suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own. — Philip Caputo