Do you really want to know who I think started the war?... Who would ever have believed that human beings would be stupid enough t...o blow themselves off the face of the earth?... The trouble with you is you want a simple answer and there isn't any. The war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn't possibly use without committing suicide. Everybody had an atomic bomb and counter-bombs and counter- counter-bombs. The devices outgrew us, we couldn't control them. I know. I helped build them, God help me. Some poor bloke probably looked at a radar screen and thought he saw something, knew that if he hesitated one thousandth of a second his own country would be wiped off the map, so, so he pushed a button. And, and the world went crazy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I've kinda lo...st track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off--you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great leading distinction between writing and speaking is, that more time is allowed for the one than the other, and hence dif...ferent faculties are required for, and different objects attained by each. He is properly the best speaker who can collect together the greatest number of apposite ideas at a moment's warning; he is properly the best writer who can give utterance to the greatest quantity of valuable knowledge in the course of his whole life. The chief requisite for the one, then, appears to be quickness and facility of perception--for the other, patience of soul and a power increasing with the difficulties it has to master. He cannot be denied to be an expert speaker, a lively companion, who is never at a loss for something to say on every occasion or subject that offers. He, by the same rule, will make a respectable writer who, by dint of study, can find out anything good to say upon any one point that has not yet been touched upon before, or who by asking for time, can give the most complete and comprehensive view of any question. The one must be done off-hand, at a single blow; the other can only be done by a repetition of blows, by having time to think and do better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you--you do not... even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The mariner who makes the safest port in heaven, perchance, seems to his friends on earth to be shipwrecked, for they deem Boston ...Harbor the better place; though perhaps, invisible to them, a skillful pilot comes to meet him, and the fairest and balmiest gales blow off that coast, his good ship makes the land in halcyon days, and he kisses the shore in rapture there, while his old hulk tosses in the surf here. It is hard to part with one's body, but, no doubt, it is easy enough to do without it when once it is gone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Untidy is perhaps too mild a word; slut would be a better one. Being a slut is of course partly a matter of bad luck as well as ba...d management: things just do boil over oftener, fuses blow sooner, front doors bang leaving us outside in our dressing-gowns; but it goes deeper than bad luck. We are not actually incapable of cleaning our homes: but we are liable to reorganize instead of scrub; we do our cleaning in a series of periodic assaults. A mother-in- law has only to appear over the horizon and we act like the murderer in a Ray Bradbury story who kept on wiping the finger prints off the fruit at the bottom of the bowl. We work in a frenzy; but ... the frenzy usually subsides before we have got everything back into the cupboards again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who begin sentences with "I may be old-fashioned but--" are usually not only old-fashioned but wrong. I never thought the t...ime would come when I should catch myself leading off with that crack. But I feel it coming on right now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Medusa, come, we'll turn him into stone," they shouted all together glaring down, "how wrong we were to let off Theseus lightly!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »