I always liked to hear about the old-timers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can’t help but compare yourself against the old timers. Can’t help but wonder how they would’ve operated these times. There was this boy I sent to Huntsville here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killed a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn’t any passion to it. Told me that he’d been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. Be there in about fifteen minutes. I don’t know what to make of that. I surely don’t.
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), No Country For Old Men (Film)
I like the idea. I like clearing my arm from the folds of the garment to look at my watch. The simple act of checking the time is transformed by this flourish. Decorative gestures add romance to a life. Idling students may see time itself as a complex embellishment, a romance of human consciousness, as they witness the chairman walking across campus, crook’d arm emerging from his medieval robe, the digital watch blinking in the late summer dusk. The robe is black of course, and goes with almost anything.
White Noise, Don DeLillo
Let me ask you something: if the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), No Country For Old Men (Film)
I only take a drink on two occasions: when I’m thirsty and when I’m not.
Brendan Behan, Irish dramatist, poet, and novelist
I don’t want to win unless I know I’ve done my best, and the only way I know how to do that is to run out front, flat out until I have nothing left. Winning any other way is chicken-shit.
Steve Prefontaine
Get married, in any case. If you happen to get a good mate, you will be happy; if a bad one, you will become philosophical, which is a fine thing in itself.
Socrates, in Diogenes Laertius
