The men had built up a backlog of shared experiences that offset the vast differences between them.

Nevertheless, there was a remarkable absence of discouragement. All the men were in a state of dazed fatigue, and nobody paused to reflect on the terrible consequences of losing their ship. Nor were they upset by the fact they were now camped on a piece of ice perhaps 6 feet thick. It was a haven compared with the nightmare of labor and uncertainty of the last few days on Endurance. It was quite enough to be alive – and they were merely doing what they had to do to stay that way.

There was even a trace of mild exhilaration in their attitude. At least, they had a clear-cut task ahead of them. The nine months of indecision, of speculation about what might happen, of aimless drifting with the pack were over. Now they simply had to get themselves out, however appalling difficult that might be.

From studying the outcome of past expeditions, he believed that those that burdened themselves with equipment to meet every contingency had fared much worse than those that had sacrificed total preparedness for speed.

(more…)

the shallowness of sanity

Many people assume that we must be, since sometimes one and sometimes the other would get a better review, the bigger advance, in some way “competitive,” that our private life must be a minefield of professional envies and resentments. This was so far from the case that the general insistence on it came to suggest a certain lacunae in the popular understanding of marriage.

Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.

I could not give away the rest of his shoes.

I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return.

The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought.

I have still not tried to determine (say, by giving away the shoes) if the thought has lost its power.

(more…)

I loved Vin like he was a part of me, and he loved me like a stick of gum. He’d spat me out when the flavor went, unwrapped another, and stuffed it in, and not just anyone, but Stella Yearwood.

That’s the problem with boys: They tend to help you only ’cause they fancy you, but there’s no embarrassing way to find out their real motives till it’s too late.

“What if … what if heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you’re dying of thirst, or when someone’s nice to you for no reason, or …” Mam’s pancakes with Mars Bar sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me. “Sleep tight don’t let the bed bugs bite”; or Jacko and Sharon singing “For She’s a Squishy Marshmallow” instead of “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” for every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it’s not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. “S’pose heaven’s not like a painting that’s just hanging there forever, but more like … like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you’re alive, from passing cars, or … upstairs windows when you’re lost…”

Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.

“Now, what can I do for you sweetheart?”

“Not calling me ‘sweetheart’ would be a good start.”

Life’s a matter of Who Dares Wins.

(more…)

What sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or, particularly, in the media, is suspicious.

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those that are best fit to the latest cycle. This does not happen too often with dentists or pianists – because these professions are more immune to randomness.

Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists – or anyone.

For instance, you study every day and learn something in proportion to your studies. If you do not feel that you are going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized. But reality rarely gives us the privilege of a satisfying linear positive progression: You may study for a year and learn nothing, then, unless you are disheartened by the empty results and give up, something will come to you in a flash.

(more…)

But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate. So when speakers stood up when the occasion demanded and said “Our beloved Mayor,” it was one of those statements that everybody says but not actually believes like “God is everywhere.”

he’s uh man at changes everything, but nothin’ don’t change him.

They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.

She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen.

(more…)

I knew that until I truly believed that whatever I did was the exact right thing, I’d keep doing the wrong thing.

A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.

But if you keep something hidden away, all tied up, it’s hard to summon it when you really need it.

It was beautiful, no lie, to watch a person burn.

My mom had once told me that being a mother was made up of “reget and then forgetting about that regret sometimes.”

In my sunglasses, I felt like a movie star. I couldn’t see myself, which helped the fantasy.

“I’m okay,” I said, though I liked being asked.

(more…)

Talking to her was against the rules, but, as I saw him smiling, I realized there were no rules. Meat had laid out the “carnival plan” as a game; now as he was acting on the will to quench the simplest desires, a frequent occurrence in adolescence.

How do you control your mind? Rather, how do you force your brain to stop remembering?

They read “Keep,” “the,” and “Faith.” It stated neither to whom nor in what.

I searched some bookshelves, in a very ineffienct manner, for the late author’s work, discovering what I hoped to (nothing).

(more…)

The lesson was: DO what you like in life, not what you feel you “should.”

He valued “killers,” those with a single-minded focus who wouldn’t quit on a math problem until arriving at a solution. Simmons told another colleague that some academics were “super smart” yet weren’t original thinkers worthy of a position at the university.

Let the problem be … It will solve itself.

Sometimes I look at this and fell I’m just some guy who doesn’t really know what he’s doing.

Truth is much too complicated to allow for anything but approximations.

(more…)

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when on prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way.

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it – perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than the grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole.

(more…)

What writers have is a license also the freedom to sit – to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time. And it’s not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. It’s that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop…and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.

But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I’m going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.

Trying to show how much he doesn’t like publicity. Except if he isn’t a genius, there’s no good reason to read the novel. You don’t open a one-thousand-page book because you’ve heard the author’s a nice guy. You read it – once you prop the thing open at all – because you understand the author is brilliant. He’s grabbed the wrong lesson: The people who seem to adore the press the way, say, Pooh loves a honey jar, look foolish; but the people who seem to hate it also risk foolishness too, because the reader knows how good press must feel, like having the prettiest girl in school drop you a smile. Like having the whole country rub against your toes and twist between your ankles.

So I think it’s got something to do with, that we’re just – we’re absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something. To run, to escape, somehow. And there’s some kinds of escape – in a sort of Flannery O’Connorish way-that end up, in a twist, making you confront yourself even more.

(more…)