I believe most Americans want their next President to remind them of the guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off.
Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind and some you carry with you, world without end.
This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.
We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.
To fire a bullet into the heart or brains of one's fellow man even a fellow man striving to do the same to you creates what might be called an unassimilable memory: a memory that floats on daily life the way an oil stain floats on rainwater. Stir the rain barrel, scatter the oil into countless drops, disperse it all you like, but it will not mix; and eventually the slick comes back, as loathsomely intact as it ever was.
Goddamn you," Jacob said. "There's no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.
Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.
Matter of fact, the way we got a path, a great friend, Arlen Specter, I convinced him to switch parties. Not a joke. Not a joke. He was the deciding vote.
Aside from the equivalent of blowing up the lab or letting a pathogen escape, the only failure is spending too long or too much money to learn.
Here's my proposal, which is based on the TV show Survivor: We put the entire Congress on an island. All the food on this island is locked inside a vault, which can be opened only by an ordinary American taxpayer named Bob. Every day, the congresspersons are given a section of the Tax Code, which they must rewrite so that Bob can understand it. If he can, he lets them eat that day; if he can't, he doesn't.
I'm thinking of writing a book on national health care. It will be 2,000 pages, and you'll have two hours to read it.