Puck's Quote Board, page 71
Boasting 1613 quotes!
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Well, OK, we are losers by definition, because delivering pizzas is a job for losers. But we’re not all dumb assholes. In fact, even with the Faulkner and Dickens, I was probably the dumbest one out of all the guys at work, or at least the worst educated. We got African doctors, Albanian lawyers, Iraqi chemists… I was the only one who didn’t have a college degree. (I don’t understand how there isn’t more pizza-related violence in our society. Just imagine: You’re, like, the top whatever in Zimbabwe, brain surgeon or whatever, and then you have to come to England because the fascist regime wants to nail your ass to a tree, and you end up being patronized at three in the morning by some stoned teenaged motherfucker with the munchies… I mean, shouldn’t you be legally entitled to break his fucking jaw?) Anyway. There’s more than one way to be a loser. There’ s sure more than one way of losing.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:48 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Most people get suicide, I guess; most people, even if it’s hidden deep down inside somewhere, can remember a time in their lives when they thought about whether they really wanted to wake up the next day. Wanting to die seems like it might be a part of being alive.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:48 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The ledge felt safe. There was no humiliation and shame there – beyond the humiliation and shame you’d expect to feel if you were sitting on a ledge, on your own, on New Year’s Eve.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:47 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
That’s what everything comes down to: ladders. Well, not ladders literally; the Middle East peace process doesn’t come down to ladders, and nor do the money markets. But one thing I know from interviewing people on the show is that you can reduce the most enormous topics down to the tiniest parts, as if life were an Airfix model. I’ve heard a religious leader attribute his faith to a faulty catch on a garden shed (he got locked in for a night when he was a kid, and God guided him through the darkness); I’ve heard a hostage describe how he survived because one of his captors was fascinated by the London Zoo family discount card he kept in his wallet. You want to talk about big things, but it’s the catches on the garden sheds and the London Zoo cards that give you the footholds; without them you wouldn’t know where to start.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:47 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
But no one attacked me. A couple of people wished me a happy New Year, but that was about all. There isn’t so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I’d spent the rest of it being afraid.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:46 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The cure for unhappiness is happiness, I don’t care what anyone says.
Speaker: Elizabeth McCrackenPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:45 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:42 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:42 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective ‘unchanged’ we have substituted the emotional adjective ‘stagnant.’ We have trained them to think of the future as a promised land which favored heroes attain – not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:41 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Humans must not be allowed to notice that all great moralists are sent by the Enemy, not to inform men, but to remind them, to restate the primeval moral platitudes against our continual concealment of them. We make the Sophists: He raises up a Socrates to answer them.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:40 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they ‘own’ their bodies – those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are rejected at the pleasure of Another!
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:39 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Men are not angered my mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Like most of the other things which humans are excited about, such as health and sickness, age and youth, or war and peace, it [love] is, from the point of view of the spiritual life, mainly raw material.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:37 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:36 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a joke.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:36 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:35 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
We always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is the least natural, least redolent of its maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula… To get the man’s soul and five him nothing in return – that is what really gladdens Our Father’s heart.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:35 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
He cannot ‘tempt’ to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased with their stumbles… Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:34 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:28 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!