Book: Lights

The innocence goes away and is replaced by experience. Nothing can be done, baby. It's human nature.

Flattery was always the best lubricant for the wheels on which our world revolves.

He is still an alcoholic and will always. Maybe he became an alcoholic at the time when the Institute's party of sophomores first drink. This had nothing to do with will power, the morality of drinking, to the weakness or force of his own character. Somewhere inside was a broken relay or switch that did not work, so Willy-nilly Jack pushed down under the hill - slowly at first, then <...> faster.

- Any invasion of another country paying only ordinary, gloomily said the woman with sharp features.
- Really?
Yes. This country needs to stop its dirty voinishki. Whatever the dirty war was in this century America, always at the origins of the CIA. The CIA and dollar diplomacy...

To make a living brains - means always knowing where the wasps.

He said the fuel pump was all shot to shit.
Danny, don't say such words.
- The fuel pump? he asked with genuine surprise.

Time - wheel; sooner or later everything returns to where it started.
The wheels of progress; sooner or later they took you back to where you started from.

If you want to be happy, eat lots of prunes.

But flattery is the stuff that greases the wheels of the whole world.
- And what is flattery?
- Flattery - said Wendy, - when dad says my new yellow pants he likes, and actually it's not... or when he says I do not need to lose five pounds.
- Oh, it's when you lie for fun?
- In General, Yes.

- Don't be afraid, my lad, ' said Ullman. - Safe, as in Christ's bosom.
- About the "Titanic" say so too, - said Jack.

... for the hasty marriage, the young are paying slowly.

Monsters and ghosts do exist. They live inside us and sometimes they win up.

Can I expect you to behave as a thinking human being, if your hand is pierced by red-hot pointy needles?

Are you sure you can afford the luxury of self-pity?