16 January 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
I could tell that my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.
— Rodney Dangerfield
13 January 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
I have always found it difficult to teach something to someone who thinks they know all the answers.
— Robert T. Kiyosaki, Retire Young, Retire Rich
13 January 2006 – 8:08 am +0800
I have read only one Grisham book prior to this. I blasted through The Firm in two days in high school, not long after it first became a mega-hit. I did enjoy it while reading, but I wanted a shower afterward, partly because the plot and theme were so poorly integrated, and partly [...]
12 January 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
And I can vacuum all the walls
and paint the rugs
And I won’t feel like
doing drugs!
— Dramarama, “Don’t Feel Like Doing Drugs”
12 January 2006 – 1:19 pm +0800
One of the two aspects of Chinese culture that continually surprises me (because it runs counter to my experience with the Chinese in the US and with me reading of Chinese history) is how shabby and imprecise the great vast majority of them are, in just about everything. This is the land of what [...]
11 January 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
My buddy had a lisp, so he went to a speech therapist who had a new system. You have to stuff your mouth full of marbles, then learn to speak clearly around them. Once you can do that, you take out one marble every day. Then, when you’ve lost all your marbles…
— [...]
11 January 2006 – 8:36 am +0800
As if my pay-the-bills work, my two or three novels-in-waiting, my various screenplay revisions, and forcing myself to learn passable Mandarin (including reading Chinese characters — I hate being illiterate!) weren’t enough.
The few days before my birthday I inadvertantly gave myself two unexpected birthday gifts. In my notebooki are two provisional business plans, written [...]
10 January 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
For I had lost the path that does not stray.
— Dante, Inferno, trans. Allan Mandelbaum
10 January 2006 – 11:48 am +0800
The translation and sale of The Fountainhead surprised me. The fact that Atlas Shrugged is on its way next year caught me off-guard.
But both of those I considered to be within the realm of the possible.
Before a few days ago, I would have counted seeing any of Harry Wu’s books at all as an [...]
9 January 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
To the Chinese, once something was known in China, it was known everywhere that mattered.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Shadow
9 January 2006 – 10:46 am +0800
“Say,” said Pescud, stirring his discarded book with the toe of his right shoe, “did you ever read one of these best-sellers? I mean the kind where the hero is an American swell—sometimes even from Chicago—who falls in love with a royal princess from Europe who is travelling under an alias, and follows her to [...]
6 January 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
He looked at her. He fastened his eyes on the hollow of her white throat, which had the invincible charm of things young, palpitating, delicate, and alive.
— Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
6 January 2006 – 9:41 am +0800
Dean Koontz can be an infuriating writer. He’s one of the few who completely enjoys the process of actually writing. He writes every day, all day, sometimes more than 10 hours at a clip. The only other writers I’ve heard of who are that productive and happy to do more are Joyce [...]
5 January 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
I don’t make a million dollars a year but I think every member of Congress should be paid at least that much. It’s not because those turkeys in Washington deserve it. It’s because we deserve a lot better people than we have in Congress.
— Thomas Sowell, December 2005
4 January 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.
— Benjamin Franklin