The 16th Round Quotes

#1. People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

Iris Murdoch

#2. I am certain that I never did grow in grace one-half so much anywhere as I have upon the bed of pain.

Charles Spurgeon

#3. Solitude sometimes is best society.

John Milton

#4. Government and other scientists have identified hundreds of chemicals that are linked to diseases in small concentrations and that are unregulated in drinking water or policed at limits that still pose serious risks.

Charles Duhigg

#5. Thoughts come and go. It's impossible to stop your thoughts, but the idea is that the thoughts are kind of like waves on the ocean. That's Jon Kabat-Zinn's big analogy and that this is actually kind of diving under the waves. And you know it's kind of interesting.

Anderson Cooper

#6. It seemed so illogical to punish some poor criminal for doing something that civilization taught him how to do so he could have something that civilization taught him how to want. It seemed to him as wrong as if they had hung the gun that shot the man.

Chester Himes

#7. I had to comport myself with something approaching dignity, at twenty.

Carrie Fisher

#8. The bonobo would first of all urge the atheist to stop "sleeping furiously." There is no point getting all worked up about the absence of something, especially something as open to interpretation as God.

Frans De Waal

#9. It struck me there might be a reason why Helena Justina whipped along at such a cracking pace: she did not want to be stuck in the wilderness with my corpse. I thanked Jove for her ruthless good sense. I did not want my corpse to be stuck with her in any case.

Lindsey Davis

#10. Whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.

William J. Brennan

#11. She pulled the phone back to look at her photo, then, drawn by its ruthless intensity, kissed the image. Her lips left semen smears on the screen. Commodity fetishism at its finest.

David Cronenberg

#12. A person's own definition of leadership defines the glittering crown of his leadership.

Anuj