#bs

This is our life now: slaving away in thankless, monotonous jobs and spending half our salaries on fattening food. ↗

— Katrina Ramos Atienza

#jobs #life #monotonous #salary #work

The Italians say “Chow.” To them it means “Bye,” but to me it means food. Of the greetings, goodbye is the desert. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#bizarre #funny #humor #odd #strange

Oh, Myr," he chokes out. "I hate having to ask this of you..." He glances towards the car again, and I crouch down in the shadows, hoping it's too dark for him to see whether the window is open or closed. The woman pats his arm, cradling her hand against his elbow. "You know I'd do anything for you and Hil," she says. I like her voice. It's throaty and rich. "You'd do anything?" my father repeats numbly. "Even now? After -?" "Even now," the woman says firmly. ↗

— Margaret Peterson Haddix

#asking #fear #forgiveness #guilt #help

(He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute ↗

— Bruce Sterling

#freedom #futility #mankind #freedom

To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them. ↗

— Idries Shah

#obsession #slavery #struggle-strength-character #freedom

It is a Bush administration official on the moment when torture breaks a victim: The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely. From Neil Gaiman's account of a torturer in hell: We will hurt you. And we are not sorry. But we do not do it to punish you. We do it to redeem you. Because afterward, you'll be a better person ... and because we love you. One day you'll thank us for it. War is peace. Torture is freedom. In the end, you love Big Brother. ↗

— Andrew Sullivan

#life #freedom

Freedom is to stand naked at the moment, having no expectations, nothing to lose or to gain. The empty then is fulfilled, just to be emptied again at the next moment. The Absolute Freedom is, to become every path, at any given moment. ↗

— Grigoris Deoudis

#expectations #freedom #moment #naked #path

Both groups [of pundits] were critics, and that is the heart of the problem. If you are a pundit, you seem so smart when you are telling the President what he did wrong… This [is] mostly BS. ↗

— Jeffrey A. Miller

#democracy-fascism #democracy-freedom #democracy-voting #democrats #elections

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend. ↗

— Héloïse d'Argenteuil

#company #consolation #friends #friendship #images

The endorsements on books aren’t entirely impartial. Unbeknownst to the average reader, blurbs are more often than not from the writer’s best friends, colleagues or teachers, or from authors who share the same editor, publisher or agent. They represent a tangled mass of friendships, rivalries, favors traded and debts repaid, not always in good faith. ↗

— Rachel Donadio

#endorsements #publishing #reviews #faith