#ow

Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit. ↗

— Norman Mailer

#bit #dying #every #existence #growing

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell. ↗

— Norman Mailer

#blows #bullets #cell #each #experts

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same. ↗

— Norman Mailer

#else #grow #just #law #life

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped. ↗

— Norman Mailer

#democracy #discovers #far #go #how

There are four stages in a marriage. First there's the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce. ↗

— Norman Mailer

#cannot #children #divorce #finally #first

The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world. ↗

— Norman Mailer

#cry #dirty #how #irish #know

From the beginning, I wanted to live my own life, and patiently I shored up that desire against wind and tide. ↗

— Ella Maillart

#beginning #desire #i #life #live

Humanity is made up of an infinity of different individuals. Each of us travels for motives exclusively his own. ↗

— Ella Maillart

#each #exclusively #his #humanity #individuals

I can see now that a concept or even a feeling makes no sense unless out of our substance we spin around it a web of references, of relationships, of values. ↗

— Ella Maillart

#concept #even #feeling #i #i can

I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it. ↗

— Ella Maillart

#conditioning #direct #feared #gained #i