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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #tire
Slowly, even though I thought it would never happen, New York lost its charm for me. I remember arriving in the city for the first time, passing with my parents through the First World's Club bouncers at Immigration, getting into a massive cab that didn't have a moment to waste, and falling in love as soon as we shot onto the bridge and I saw Manhattan rise up through the looks of parental terror reflected in the window. I lost my virginity in New York, twice (the second one wanted to believe he was the first so badly). I had my mind blown open by the combination of a liberal arts education and a drug-popping international crowd. I became tough. I had fun. I learned so much. But now New York was starting to feel empty, a great party that had gone on too long and was showing no sign of ending soon. I had a headache, and I was tired. I'd danced enough. I wanted a quiet conversation with someone who knew what load-shedding was. ↗
They always loved my sense of humor. There used to be a light switch inside one of the nurseries that was a cutout of Jesus putting his arm around two children on each side of him as he towered above them. The switch was ironically located in the spot of where his penis would have been and I was the first to point this out. Everyone thought it was funny until I started singing the childhood church song “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” In fear of being struck by lightning or being involved in a massive pile-up car accident after leaving, their laughing ceased. I still thought it was funny. ↗
The car was on the FDR drive now and, turning her head, she glanced out at the bleak brown buildings of the projects that stretched for blocks along the drive. Something inside her sank at the sight of all that sameness, and she suddenly felt defeated. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. In the past year, she'd started experiencing these moments of desperate emptiness, as if nothing really mattered, nothing was ever going to change, there was nothing new; and she could see her life stretching before her--one endless long day after the next, in which every day was essentially the same. Meanwhile, time was marching on, and all that was happening to her was that she was getting older and smaller, and one day she would be no bigger than a dot, and then she would simply disappear. Poof! Like a small leaf burned up under a magnifying glass in the sun. These feelings were shocking to her, because she'd never experienced world-weariness before. She'd never had time. All her life, she'd been striving and striving to become this thing that was herself--the entity that was Nico O'Neilly. And then, one morning, time had caught up with her and she had woken up and realized that she was there. She had arrived at her destination, and she had everything she'd worked so hard for: a stunning career, a loving (well, sort of) husband, whom she respected, and a beautiful eleven-year-old daughter whom she adored. She should have been thrilled. But instead, she felt tired. Like all those things belonged to someone else. ↗
How beautiful to dream. But dreams, I tell Gil, in one of our quiet moments are so damned tiring. He laughs. I can't promise you that you won't be tired, he says. But please know this. There's a lot of good waiting for you on the other side of tired. Get yourself tired, Andre. That's where you're going to know yourself. On the other side of tired. ↗
Nevertheless a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now. And as I had ventured to take the whip of the satirist into my hand, I went beyond the iniquities of the great speculator who robs everybody, and made an onslaught also on other vices;--on the intrigues of girls who want to get married, on the luxury of young men who prefer to remain single, and on the puffing propensities of authors who desire to cheat the public into buying their volumes. ↗
Something refused to come into focus in my thinking. Indistinctly, as though in a fog, shapes moved toward me and retreated just beyond cognition. But that getting a hold of things is the uncertainty. As the Tractatus says right at the beginning, “The world is everything that is the case.” It seemed as though the Mammy≈Divas® were just like Steve Jobs, trying to have reality bent to their own wills. Objectively, the iPhone was a muddle of mysticism and logic—breakable glass, non-ergonomic design, lousy battery life, lousy irreplaceable battery, lousy headphone jack, lousy virtual keyboard, lousy email, lousy memory, lousy lice, etc., etc, and an interface that you had to adapt to by pretending as an article of faith that no adaptation was required. The Mammy≈Divas® promised a seamless racial interface—eternal blackness ordered and majestic. They put a benign face on their lust for panoptic power. They promised to discipline and punish with pancakes. ↗
People said there had to be a Supreme Being because otherwise how could the universe exist, eh? And of course there clearly had to be, said Koomi, a Supreme Being. But since the universe was a bit of a mess, it was obvious that the Supreme Being hadn't in fact made it. If he had made it he would, being Supreme, have made a better job of it, with far better thought given, taking an example at random, to things like the design of the common nostril. Or, to put it another way, the existence of a badly put-together watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. You only had to look around to see that there was room for improvement practically everywhere. This suggested that the Universe had probably been put together in a bit of a rush by an underling while the Supreme Being wasn't looking, in the same way that Boy Scouts' Association minutes are done on office photocopiers all over the country. So, reasoned Koomi, it was not a good idea to address any prayers to a Supreme Being. It would only attract his attention and might cause trouble. ↗
The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life. ↗
