Nebraska Man Quotes

You say men ought to be hung for the way they are executing the law; I say the way it is being executed is quite as good as any of its antecedents. It is being executed in the precise way which was intended from the first, else why does no Nebraska man express astonishment or condemnation? Poor Reeder is the only public man who has been silly enough to believe that anything like fairness was ever intended, and he has been bravely undeceived. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Why, these men would destroy the Bible on evidence that would not convict a habitual criminal of a misdemeanor. They found a tooth in a sand pit in Nebraska with no other bones about it, and from that one tooth decided that it was the remains of the missing link. They have queer ideas about age too. They find a fossil and when they are asked how old it is they say they can't tell without knowing what rock it was in, and when they are asked how old the rock is they say they can't tell unless they know how old the fossil is. ~ William Jennings Bryan

I meet a man with a thousand dollars and leave him with two; that's the meaning of subtraction. ~ Mae West

...in the strange dizziness of that moment, the statue every man eventually erects and that hardens in the fire of the years, into which he then creeps and there awaits its final crumbling - that statue was rapidly cracking, it was already collapsing. All that was left was this anguished heart, eager to live, rebelling against the deadly order of the world that had been with him for forty years, and still struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanting to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, discover at least in order to be, just once to be, for a single second, but forever. ~ Albert Camus

I swear, I'm not afraid of love. There's just no one out there for me and I've made peace with that. If you can't find a man to share your heart with, well ... share your vagina with him instead. ~ Karina Halle

He woke whimpering in the night and the man held him. Shh, he said. Shh. It's okay.
I had a bad dream.
I know.
Should I tell you what it was?
If you want to.
I had this penguin that you wound up and it would waddle and flap its flippers. And we were in that house that we used to live in and it came around the corner but nobody had wound it up and it was really scary.
Okay.
It was a lot scarier in the dream.
I know. Dreams can be really scary.
Why did I have that scary dream?
I dont know. But it's okay now. I'm going to put some wood on the fire. You go to sleep.
The boy didnt answer. Then he said: The winder wasnt turning. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Allah, the Exalted, gave the angels intellect without desires, He gave the animals desires without intellect, and He gave both to the sons of Adam. So a man whose intellect prevails over his desires is better than the angels, whilst a man whose desire prevails over his intellect is worse than the animals. ~ Ali Ibn Abi Talib

Though man a thinking being is defined, Few use the grand prerogative of mind. How few think justly of the thinking few! How many never think, who think they do! ~ Jane Taylor

I think can sit here for hours,
Arguing with the world as to why I can't give up,
Tell everyone around me what a blessing you are,
Laugh at all the times that you've brought sun into my life,
I can tell everyone how passionate you are and how much you bring into this world,
But right now I'm sitting here for hours,
Trying to keep myself together because I'm trying to figure out how to tell the world that the man I love,
Is the reason why I'm so broken. ~ Tanzy Sayadi

Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? ~ Woodrow Wilson

The thing I like the most about Sachin is his intensity. After being in the game for so long, he still has the same desire to do well for India in any international match. I tell you what, this man is a legend. ~ Sourav Ganguly

You took to the trenches and said: war is more beautiful,
you shall never see my feet again.
I will seek the roads and taverns,
I am the blind poet.
The frowning autumn gives music for colors –
sunset gives me the opulence of roses
and I ask about you. I ask about you
but as a stung man does after something has afflicted his blood.
Peace be . . .
– I do not want your reply. ~ Saadi Youssef

Man's innate yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed. Totalitarianism cannot renounce violence. If it does, it perishes. Eternal, ceaseless violence, overt or covert, is the basis of totalitarianism. Man does not renounce freedom voluntarily. This conclusion holds out hope for our time, hope for the future. ~ Vasily Grossman

The animal creation shall again gladden a new Paradise as they did when Adam and Eve called them by name, and carressed them and mingled in their society. The Bible everywhere indicates that the new earth will be a counterpart of the old before the fall, so we must conclude that lower animals who were created before man and have been his companions before and since the fall will be restored with him in the "new Creation" ~ Ed Buckner

He dreamed of becoming a fully illustrated man. ~ Amanda Davis

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event - in the living act, the undoubted deed - there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of
its features from behind the unreasoning mask. ~ Herman Melville

Could a man decide, 'I am right, and everyone else is wrong?'
No evidence of a malfunction, he thought. I am not a coward. Neither am I insane.
His heart cried, 'I am disgusted with this purposeless war. I shall quit fighting it. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

loved a man for years who said her eyes looked like the ocean, because she always wanted to be somebody's poem, somebody's simile, somebody's lackluster metaphor. ~ Trista Mateer

Looking at a king's mouth, ' said an old man, 'one would think he never sucked at his mother's breast. ~ Chinua Achebe

Knowledge and action combined can win over any adversity known to man. ~ Karen Hawkins

Angela had never really got on with modern poetry. Even stuff like Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist and the other book. He seemed such a lovely man and she really did try, but it sounded like prose you had to read very slowly. Old stuff she understood. Rum-ti-tum. Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white ... Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack ... Something going all the way back. Memorable words, so you could hand it down the generations. But free verse made her think of free knitting or free juggling. This, for example. She extracted a book at random. Spiders by Stanimir Stoilov, translated by Luke Kennard. She flipped through the pages ... the hatcheries of the moon ... the earth in my father's mouth. ~ Mark Haddon

Wyatt had been adamant that she wear his ring, that she show she was his. God, the man was so possessive and with anyone else it would annoy the shit of her. ~ Katie Reus

What is it like to be made vice-president?
On one level, it's a nearly hallucinatory degree of success. I was barely forty years old, and a shaky, sixty-three-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the entire Western world.
It was also like throwing up in convention-hall bathrooms before giving speeches, and after. It was sitting through dinners with men and women with whom I had nothing in common. Spending an enormous amount of time on trains. Promising thins and agreeing to things as advised by people I had barely met, on very little sleep. Huge sums of money were changing hands and everything happening on the grandest scale imaginable while still in most moments remaining pointless and usually outright seedy. I pretended to learn to fly-fish; I watched sporting events. In Maine I was assaulted by a lobster; it seized my lapel in a threatening manner. I tasted local foods and admired factories,farms, department stores, hotels, and (unless I'm misremembering) several empty plots of land....
It was like being given what was almost the nation's highest honor by a man you held in infinite esteem and regarded with perhaps a certain amount of terrified suspicion, a man who disliked you and clearly wanted nothing to do with you, who would scowl and change the subject at the mention of your name. And then being given a very important and very nasty job by that person, and despised for it, almost as much as you despised yourself. ~ Austin Grossman

A man of many thoughts but few words. Lucky for us all that it's not the other way around. Vidocq ~ Richard Kadrey

My stepfather, John O'Hara, was the goodest man there was. He was not a man of many words, but of carefully chosen ones. He was the one parent who didn't try to fix me. One night I sat on his lap in his chair by the woodstove, sobbing. He just held me quietly and then asked only, "What does it feel like?" It was the first time I was prompted to articulate it. I thought about it, then said, "I feel homesick." That still feels like the most accurate description - I felt homesick, but I was home. ~ Sarah Silverman

Consider that people will talk about the fact that I now "pass" as a woman, but nobody ever asks about how difficult it must have been for me to "pass" as a man before. ~ Julia Serano

Softly, reassuringly, he comforted his friend, as they waited for death together. As if the Don could truly snatch the life of Genco Abbandando back from that most foul and criminal traitor to man. ~ Mario Puzo

Sorry to disappoint the liberals who tuned in tonight to gloat about Obama's lead in every poll, but I am not worried. McCain may be behind, but the man is a fighter. He doesn't know the meaning of the word 'quit.' He used to, but it was stored in the same part of his brain that remembered to vet his running mate. ~ Stephen Colbert

Let me get this straight. The man with the gun says stay in your seat and you take that to mean jump around the room like demented grasshoppers. ~ Koushun Takami

Well. There was noting to be done for it. Things had happened as they did, time's arrow had yet to be reversed by humans, done was done. If a man spent his life looking over his shoulder at every possible branching of his path he could have taken, he would never accomplish anything. One must learn from history so as not to repeat it, but one must not waste one's energy or time worrying about what might have been. Sorry ... but people die every day and the galaxy continues on quite well without them. Consider yourself lucky you are one of those as yet unselected by the Fates. ~ Steve Perry

You told me you believed marriage was for other people."
"You're the only man who could make me believe that it's for me, too. Although when you get down to it, love is what's real. I still say marriage is just a piece of paper."
Jack smiled. "Let's find out," he said, and he pulled me down to the bed with him.
Jack & Ella ~ Lisa Kleypas

It is my firm faith that man is by nature going higher. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

The Black homosexual is hard pressed to gain audience among his heterosexual brothers; even if he is more talented, he is inhibited by his silence or his admissions. This is what the race has depended on in being able to erase homosexuality from our recorded history. The "chosen" history. But the sacred constructions of silence are futile exercises in denial. We will not go away with our issues of sexuality. We are coming home. It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator, or rebel. Whom did he love? It makes a difference. I can't become a whole man simply on what is fed to me: watered-down versions of Black life in America. I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal. ~ Essex Hemphill

I've always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I've never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it. ~ John Steinbeck

I don't believe in trouble. Because I think that trouble is sometimes good, sometimes bad. I've been known to be called trouble, which I think is quite a compliment. But I suppose, thinking about it, that my best and worst trouble has always had something to do with a man. ~ Beth Orton

...that the doctor being himself a mortal man, should be diligent and tender in relieving his suffering patients, inasmuch as he himself must one day be a like sufferer. ~ Thomas Sydenham

Manlius ... took care in his invitations, actively sought to exclude from his circle crude and vulgar men like Caius Valerius. But they were all around; it was Manlius who lived in a dream world, and his bubble of civility was becoming smaller and smaller. Caius Valerius, powerful member of a powerful family, had never even heard of Plato. A hundred, even fifty years before, such an absurdity would have been inconceivable. Now it was surprising if such a man did know anything of philosophy, and even if it was explained, he would not wish to understand. ~ Iain Pears

How? Well, if a girl has had enough of every man who exists, her only remaining desire could be for a man who doesn't exist at all ... ~ Italo Calvino

On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit ... Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong. ~ Louis Kronenberger

Now, then, young lady. Which of these gentlemen will you marry?"
"This one." She squeezed [his] arm.
The vicar inspected [him] and sniffed. "Doesnt look that much different from the other one."
"Nevertheless"- she fought to remain sober-faced- "this is the man I want. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

I could never live with this man, she thought. I could never get inside his heart. But I might be able to die with him." - ( From the short story "Landscape in Flatiron") ~ Haruki Murakami

Footnote 164: "I finally hooked up with Ashley. I went over to her place yesterday morning. Early. She lives in Venice. Her eyebrows look like flakes of sunlight. Her smile, I'm sure, burnt Rome to the ground. And for the life of me I didn't know who she was or where we met... We sat down and I wanted to talk. I wanted to ask her who she was, where we'd met, been before, but she just smiled and held my hand as we lay down on the hammock and started to swing above all those dead leaves... Before I left she told me our story: where we met - Texas - kissed, but never made love and this had confused and haunted her and she had needed it before she got married which was in four months to a man she loved who made a living manufacturing TNT exclusively for a highway construction firm up in Colorado where he frequently went on business trips and where one night, drunk, angry and disappointed he had invited a hooker back to his motel room and so on and who cared and what was I doing here anyway?... I was still hurting, abandoned, drank three glasses of bourbon and fumed on some weed, then came here, thinking of voices, real and imagined, of ghosts, my ghost, of her, at long last, in this idiotic footnote, when she gently pushed me out her door and I said quietly 'Ashley' causing her to stop pushing me and ask 'yes?' her eyes bright with something she saw that I could never see though what she saw was me, and me not caring now at least knowing the truth and telling her the truth: 'I've ~ Mark Z. Danielewski