#lit

Tennis taught me so many lessons in life. One of the things it taught me is that every ball that comes to me, I have to make a decision. I have to accept responsibility for the consequences every time I hit a ball. ↗

— Billie Jean King

#decision #responsibility #tennis #wisdom #life

I watched bulls bred to cows, watched mares foal, I saw life come from the egg and the multiplicative wonders of mudholes and ponds, the jell and slime of life shimmering in gravid expectation. Everywhere I looked, life sprang from something not life, insects unfolded from sacs on the surface of still waters and were instantly on prowl for their dinner, everything that came into being knew at once what to do and did it, unastonished that it was what it was, unimpressed by where it was, the great earth heaving up bloodied newborns from every pore, every cell, bearing the variousness of itself from every conceivable substance which it contained in itself, sprouting life that flew or waved in the wind or blew from the mountains or stuck to the damp black underside of rocks, or swam or suckled or bellowed or silently separated in two. ↗

— E.L. Doctorow

#life #vitality #life

Politics is applesauce. ↗

— Will Rogers

#politics

Whatever you want too much you can't have, so when you really want something, try to want it a little less. ↗

— Joel Rosenberg

#little #much #really #something #too

I don't know anything more piggish - I don't know anything more un-American than saying, 'Oh, I'm worried about my own little handout or my own little program or my own little economy and we'll kick this can down the road and let some future generation deal with it.' ↗

— Todd Rokita

#anything #deal #down #down the road #economy

We have revenue coming in. We can pay our interest payments. And then we can prioritize what government programs that have been given to the American people that are unsustainable promises that have been made by reckless politicians that can't possibly be sustained. We can determine which one of those if any we need to keep. ↗

— Todd Rokita

#american people #any #been #coming #determine

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#responsibility #freedom

I have observed private and proprietary colleges, like the University of Phoenix, and the market they serve. And I found it intriguing the way in which they are trying to deliver the product, with more accountability, for a price. ↗

— Roy Romer

#colleges #deliver #found #i #intriguing

We talk. Darlene worries aloud that her husband works with a lot of attractive young women; she herself is fourty. I tell her it´s not about age. "Little thing called character," I say, thinking, Accepting marital advice from me: the height of lunacy. ↗

— Suzanne Finnamore

#divorce #infidelity #marriage #age

No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of "little girls"—not simply "young girls." Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and "sex kittens." Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his "aging mistress. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#morality #nymphets #starlets #age