#sum

We only get together when there's a good reason. Like, last summer, we didn't really intend to go out, but we thought the B-52's tour was a good opportunity. ↗

— Kathy Valentine

#get together #go #good #good opportunity #good reason

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#consume #culture #decisions #feel #helpless

There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#consumption #establishment #everyone #good #massive

I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then - I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn't, luckily, have to bother about that. ↗

— Agatha Christie

#borrowed #bother #come #go #i

For the producers, there was no reason to produce. You get money, but you couldn't use this money. For consumers, you could have money, but you have no way to use it because you go to the shop and see nothing. ↗

— Anatoly Chubais

#consumers #could #get #go #money

Last summer when we were preparing for the movie, I actually kind of wanted to stay fairly uninformed about it. As we went through the process that we do in the movie, I wanted to be a little wide-eyed. ↗

— Thomas Haden Church

#actually #fairly #i #kind #last

Dieting on New Year's Day isn't a good idea as you can't eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover. I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second. ↗

— Helen Fielding

#consume #day #dieting #ease #eat

We are assuming that we exist, that there is reality, and that the matter of which we are made is real. ↗

— John Clayton

#exist #made #matter #real #reality

At night in the tent, he leaves the flaps open, to feel the fire outside, to hear Anthony in the trailer, to see her better. She asks him to lie on his stomach, and he does, though he can't see her, while she runs her bare breasts over his disfigured back, her nipples hardening into his scars. You feel that? she whispers. Oh, he does. He still feels it. She kisses him from the top of his head downward, from his buzz-cut scalp, his shoulder blades, his wounds. Inch by inch she cries over him and kisses her own salt away, murmuring into him, why did you have to keep running? Look what they did to you. Why didn't you just stay put? Why couldn't you feel I was coming for you? You thought I was dead, he says. You thought I had been killed and pushed through the ice in Lake Ladoga. And what really happened was, I was a Soviet man left in a Soviet prison. Wasn't I dead? He is fairly certain he is alive now, and while Tatiana lies on top of his back and cries, he remembers being caught by the dogs a kilometer from Oranienburg and held in place by the Alsatians until Karolich arived, and being flogged in Sachsenhausen's main square and then chained and tattooed publicly with the 25-point star to remind him of his time for Stalin, and now she lies on his back, kissing the scars he received when he tried to escape to make his way back to her so she could kiss him. As he drives across Texas, Alexander remembers himself in Germany lying in the bloody straw after being beaten and dreaming of her kissing him, and these dreams morph with the memories of last night, and suddenly she is kissing not the scars but the raw oozing wounds, and he is in agony for she is crying and the brine of her tears is eating away the meat of his flesh, and he is begging her to stop because he can't take it anymore. Kiss something else, he pleads. Anything else. He's had enough of himself. He's sick of himself. She is tainted not just with the Gulag. She is tainted with his whole life. Does it hurt when I touch them? He has to lie. Every kiss she plants on his wounds stirs a sense memory of how he got them. He wanted her to touch him, and this is what he gets. But if he tells her the truth, she will stop. So he lied. No, he says. ↗

— Paullina Simons

#dreams

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours. ↗

— Grover Cleveland

#ago #assigned #assumed #civilization #higher