Last Chance To Read Quotes & Sayings

To the last we will have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished. No one can accept that an imperial has been annihilated by men with bows and arrows and rusty old guns who live in tents and never wash and cannot read or write. And who am I to jeer at life-giving illusions? Is there any better way to pass these last days than in dreaming of a saviour with a sword who will scatter the enemy hosts and forgive us the errors that have been committed by others in our name and grant us a second chance to build our earthly paradise? — J.M. Coetzee

The rest of the letters were pretty much the same as I got every day now. Two hundred and forty-six proposals, a number of them for marriage. Almost five hundred photographs taken in various stages of undress, the majority in the last. Several invitations to strange places where they wring the necks of chickens and take turns beating each other with whips, etc. (In case any of these correspondents may chance to read my book, I'd like to just say this to them: Doubtless you are sincere in what you do, but it does strike me that more useful pursuits could be found for grown people to spend their time at.) — Kenneth Patchen

Socialism as such from its very origins is a workers' system, and when there occur deviations, it is workers that react first. — Wojciech Jaruzelski

It wasn't hard to find such data. For example, between 1948 and 1954, psychologists asked more than 10,000 adolescents whether they considered theymselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was revisited in 1989, and this time it wasn't 12 percent who considered themselves very important, it was 80 percent of boys and 77 percent of girls. Psychologists have a thing called the narcissism test. They read people statements and ask if the statements apply to them. Statements such as "I like to be the center of attention ... I show off if I get the chance because I am extraordinary ... Somebody should write a biography about me." The median narcissism score has risen 30 percent in the last two decades. Ninety-three percent of young people score higher than the middle score just twenty years ago.4 The largest gains have been in the number of people who agree with the statements "I am an extraordinary person" and "I like to look at my body. — David Brooks

Because ... Beacause it's so good, and there's only one chance to read a book for the first time, and I want it to last. That experience. I'd finish it in a day otherwise, and that'd be like ... like eating a carton of ice cream in one sitting. Too much richness over too quickly. This way, I can draw it out. Make the book last longer. Savor it. I have to since they don't come out that often. — Richelle Mead

Let's read as if books were to disappear tomorrow! — Gabrielle Dubois

I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page. — Steve Erickson

I didn't just feel it; I recorded each and every sensation. I can replicate each one. I will. I'll play it back plus ten for the pastardthat caused my love to fall. And before they go down, I'll wet the concrete with their brain mattter. I'll explode their marrow out of their bones and make a mess of their capillaries. I'll make a paste of their eyes, Yasmine, I promise. I'll make them bleed from their ears and turn their digestive system against them. They'll digest their own organs. I'll increase their pain receptors so that their clothes feel like sandpaper. I'll make their own breath soun d like a DC-10 is landing in their chest. I'll fill their longs with every excessive fluid in their body I can find. I'll make a decomposing mess of them, I swear I will. They'll pray to gods they don't belive in for the pain to end before I explode each taste bud in their mough and inflame their genitals with the stray parasites they immune system usually fights off. — Ayize Jama-Everett

It's not the theme parks of Paradiso and Inferno that I dread most - the heavenly rides, the hellish crowds - and I could live with the insult of eternal oblivion. I don't even mind not knowing which it will be. What I fear is missing out. Health desire or mere greed, I want my life first, my due, my infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a consciousness. I'm owed a handful of decades to try my luck on a freewheeling planet. That's the ride for me - the Wall of Life. I want my go. I want to become. Put another way, there's a book I want to read, not yet published, not yet written, though a start's been made. I want to read to the end of My History of the Twenty-First Century. I want to be there, on the last page, in my early eighties, frail but sprightly, dancing a jig on the evening of December 31, 2099. — Ian McEwan

If people lacked the capacity to receive the thoughts of the men who preceded them and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts. And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by art, people would be almost more savage still, and, above all, more separated from and more hostile to one another. Therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech itself and as generally diffused. — Leo Tolstoy

We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead. — D.H. Lawrence

Maybe we're all shedding our fear and regret and hope everywhere we go, and we're catching up traces of people we've never met. Maybe it's everywhere. — Scott Cawthon

that he had to be respectful to his parents, and even if he wasn't a Christian, he couldn't make fun of people who went to church. He was also supposed to go to church, even if his parents didn't go - which lots of parents don't, and should. As you maybe know, if you've read some of the other stories about the Sugar Creek Gang, about half of us were not Christians at first. Little Jim had nearly all the religion there was in the whole gang, but most of us became Christians. Dragonfly was the last one of us to be saved - except for little red-haired Tom Till, whose father wouldn't believe in God and whose mother had never had a chance in life to be happy, which is maybe one reason Little Tom Till's big brother, Bob, had turned out to be such a bad boy. It is not easy for a boy to become a Christian unless his father is one too. Most boys do what their dads — Paul Hutchens

Newt Gingrich is an idiot of great renown ... There's something so hopelessly gross and vile about him it's hard to take him seriously. — Maurice Sendak