Able Quotes - Page 130

Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.

Under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don’t we secretly clasp each other’s hands?

Time is inelastic and inflexible. Time is indispensable. No achievement is possible without time.

Not being able to find meaning can be just as powerful as finding meaning.

I definitely felt like I needed a break, because when you do so much, you're not able to appreciate the things that you accomplish.

What's valuable to me has become clearer as I've got older. To me, it's about the value of your time and your day and the value of the people you spend it with.

The most important thing is that Milosevic agreed to sit at the negotiating table with the Kosovo Albanians

It is impossible on reasonable grounds to disbelieve miracles.

I realized ceativity is a renewable resource. You never run out of good ideas

What makes us different? We're the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.

Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

Every living thing is an elaboration of a single original plan. As humans we are mere increments - each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications and providential tinkerings stretching back to 3,8 billion years. Remarkably we are even quite closely related to fruit and vegetables. About half the chemical functions that take place in a banana are fundamentally the same as the chemical functions that place in you. It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will ever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.

Leadership is more likely to be assumed by the aggressive than by the able, and those who scramble to the top are more often motivated by their own inner torments.

I don't have any great love for Chicago. What the hell, a childhood around Douglas Park isn't very memorable. I remember the street fights and how you were afraid to cross the bridge 'cause the Irish kid on the other side would beat your head in. I left Chicago a long time ago.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.

You're not going to be able to make good decisions without building some relationship of trust between yourself and community.

Composing a concert is like composing a menu.... If you start with light pieces and play a 45-minute sonata after the interlude, it's like starting dinner with hors d'oeuvres and dessert and finishing with a Châteaubriand and vegetables.

Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.

I don't eat vegetables. I only eat food like cheeseburgers, Spam, hot dogs and pizza.

We are better able to study our neighbours than ourselves, and their actions than our own.

We are now integrated into American society and I don't like the word fashionable, because fashionable means that it's going to pass. It's not like that anymore.

On a plane you can pick up more and better people than on any other public conveyance since the stagecoach.

Spying among friends is never acceptable.

The French are predictably unpredictable.

The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage. It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don't have access to politicians, who don't have easy access to official documents, who aren't able to buttonhole people in power.