This is how we go on: one day a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root canal at a time; boat builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.
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Stephen King, Bag of Bones
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You know why the birdies wake up singing, don’t you? … They’re happy to be alive one more day. You can’t count on that, Hewes. Them little birdies know it too. That’s why they’re out there singing all the time. They’re trying to tell us something. ‘Tweet, tweet, you’re alive, you ignorant asshole.’
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Richard Ford, A Piece of My Heart
Sometimes I reread this and I’m reminded that all is well. Tweet, tweet.
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I hope this inspirational novel-story helps to give you inspiration in your attempts to stop being a regular normal person and to start being a champion instead.
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Kenny Power, Eastbound & Down (Chapter 21)
Damn. I’m going to miss this show.
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He felt a keen pang of nostalgia, but he didn’t know for what. Maybe for the time before he had realized that good intentions don’t make you innocent, for the time when he had less regret. Ransom wasn’t sure if he was waiting for something to happen, or hoping nothing would. Sometimes he felt he was preparing for some sort of confrontation, and at other times he believed he had seen enough trouble already.
When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it.
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Humphrey Bogary as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon
Every time I see this on television, I have to stop what I’m doing to watch it. Besides Newman, of course, was there anyone cooler than Bogart? I tried using this at the bar once back in college. Needless to say, the meathead didn’t take it or like it.
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I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.
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Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in The Maltese Falcon
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If there was any justice in this world, I would have been a dead man at least two times over. By this, I mean simply that many times in my life the statistical probabilities of a fatal outcome have been overwhelming – thanks to my sins of excess and poor judgment and my inability to say no to anything that sounded as if it might have been fun.
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Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential
But I’m wising up.
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If I were a reasonable man, a smart man, I would have retreated to my hotel long ago. But I am a flawed vessel. I carry within me, as so many do, the seeds of my own destruction. A Rumsfeldian delusional belief in my own infallibility.
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Anthony Bourdain, The Layover (Montreal)
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We crawled up to bed, tumbled down half dressed, and stayed there ten hours. Most of my Saturday nights went like this. On the whole, the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent headache. For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living.
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George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
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Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? …Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.
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John Steinbeck, East of Eden (via talkativolive)
I love this exchange between Samuel Hamilton and Adam Trask. When I first read East of Eden eight years ago for my junior English class, I had envisioned, for reasons I am no longer sure, Liam Neeson as the Irish farmer Samuel and Tim Robbins as the mild-mannered Adam. Their image still sticks in my mind when I reread this novel or parts of it.
Oh and for the record: the James Dean adaptation of this sucks.
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Here’s what you need to know about life in general - any place that refuses to sell you a burger under medium temperature… is basically on the side of the terrorists.
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Anthony Bourdain, The Layover
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[W]e wise grown ups here at the company go gliding in and out all day long, scaring each other at our desks and cubicles and water coolers and trying to evade the people who frighten us. We come to work, have lunch, and go home. We goose-step in and goose-step out, change our partners and wander all about, sashay around for a pat on the head, and promenade home till we all drop dead.
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Joseph Heller, Something Happened
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If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel - as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them - wherever you go.
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Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
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The years are too short, the days are too long.
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Joseph Heller, Something Happened
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