#lis

Sometimes all you need is just for somebody to believe in you in order to be able to accomplish maybe what you never thought you could. ↗

— Drew Brees

#accomplish #believe #could #just #maybe

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#analogies #arabs #colonialism #crusades #europe

I remember driving home one evening while they were reviewing the papers on the radio. One of the articles was about me separating from my wife. It's a weird thing to listen to a news report about the break-up of your marriage. ↗

— Rory Bremner

#articles #break-up #driving #evening #home

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing. ↗

— Robert Bresson

#hearing #inattention #listen #look #magazines

We're living in a time when parenting is not at all mirroring the way I was parented. For me, I just followed my parents around on their errands; when they were busy on the phone, I was quiet. It's a different kettle of fish these days: They run the house, and you listen to their music, and you go to their appointments. ↗

— Edie Falco

#around #busy #days #different #fish

Being varied is something I do instinctively and naturally. I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment. ↗

— Sarah Brightman

#being #feel #i #i do #i feel

Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. I've had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam... and I'm not happy to be right in all of those cases. ↗

— David Brin

#berlin #berlin wall #cases #failures #fall

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives. ↗

— David Brin

#best #better #could #differential #doubt

Just listen to people and react to what they are saying. ↗

— Jimmy Fallon

#listen #people #react #saying

Listening is more important than talking. Just hit your mark and believe what you say. ↗

— Jimmy Fallon

#hit #important #just #listening #mark