Consider The Lobster And Other Essays Quotes
"The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand."
"It is not a coincidence that the Oscars ceremony is held during TV’s Sweeps Week."
"We pretty much all tune in, despite the grotesquerie of watching an industry congratulate itself."
"The whole mainstream celebrity culture is rushing to cash in and all the while congratulating itself on pretending not to cash in."
"Underneath it all, though, we know the whole thing sucks."
"The adult industry is vulgar. Would anyone disagree?"
"At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby."
"The typical porn producer really is the ugly little man with a bad toupee and a pinkie-ring the size of a Rolaids."
"The typical porn director really is the guy who uses the word class as a noun to mean refinement."
"The typical porn starlet really is the lady in Lycra eveningwear with tattoos all down her arms who’s both smoking and chewing gum while telling journalists how grateful she is."
"Every time someone I know decides to terminate a pregnancy, I am required to believe simultaneously that she is doing the wrong thing and that she has every right to do it."
"Language changes constantly; Change is normal; Spoken language is the language; Correctness rests upon usage; All usage is relative."
"An 'authoritative' physics text presents the results of physicists' observations and physicists' theories about those observations."
"Grammar and usage conventions are, as it happens, a lot more like ethical principles than like scientific theories."
"Language was invented to serve certain very specific purposes."
"The point of the analogy is that claims to Objectivity in language study are now the stuff of jokes and shudders."
"Meaning is inseparable from some act of interpretation and an act of interpretation is always somewhat biased."
"Language is not only non-private but also irreducibly public, political, and ideological."
"The Descriptivists' assumption that all usage norms are arbitrary and dispensable leads to a literal Babel."
"The truth is that structural linguists like Gove and Fries are not scientists at all; they're pollsters who misconstrue the importance of the 'facts' they are recording."
"The fact is that John McCain is a genuine hero of maybe the only kind Vietnam has to offer us, a hero because of not what he did but what he suffered — voluntarily, for a Code."
"This gives him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them."
"The John McCain of recent seasons, though — arguing for his doomed campaign-finance bill on the Senate floor in ’98, calling his colleagues crooks to their faces on C-SPAN."
"Something about him made a lot of us feel that the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or dollars."
"If Bush takes down his negative ads, we'll pull the response right away. Immediately. Quote me."
"You guys want a pacifist, go support Bradley."
"It's way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit."
"In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote."
"It hurts to be lied to. It’s ultimately just about that complicated: it hurts."
"Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?"
"Pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own."
"The lobster behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water."
"Is the whole thing just a matter of personal choice?"
"It is difficult not to sense that they're unhappy, or frightened, even if it's some rudimentary version of these feelings."
"Is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don't want to think about it?"
"Isn't being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet?"
"There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other."
"The vast majority of people are much, much dumber than you have ever been led to believe."
"Do not trust anyone unless you have some sort of significant leverage over him or her and they know that you have that leverage over them."
"Assuming that he’d be acquitted and that his Riviera Country Club wouldn’t have the guts to kick him out, that I was going to become a caddy at Riviera, knock him off, and see whether or not a certain lawyer could get me off on jury nullification."
"The whole world of sports and local news is so disgusting ... local TV news is half a step above prostitution."
"My whole life has been ruined by it. I’ve lost relationships, I can’t get married, I can’t have kids, all because of Political Correctness."
"The hardest thing is choosing what to talk about, especially in this day and age."
"How in the world are you supposed to know what thirty or forty thousand nameless, faceless people want to hear you talk about?"
"Aren’t there parts of ourselves that are just better left unfed?"