"parenting isn't a noun but a verb--an ongoing process instead of an accomplishment. And that no matter how many years you put into the job, the learning curve is, well, fairly flat."

“I don't think that Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO (leveraged buyout) business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits. All the jobs that he talks about came from Staples. That was a very early venture stage deal. That, you know they got out of long before it got to its current size.”

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.”

“Something whose connection with human experience we cannot grasp is bound to be frightening.”

Source : Kobo Abe (1970). “Inter Ice Age 4”

“We are born male or female, but not masculine or feminine.”

Source : Sandra Lee Bartky (2012). “Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression”, p.65, Routledge

“Groveling for connection from someone who compares you to Hitler is not good for a person's self-esteem.”

“It is infamy to die, and not be missed.”

Source : Carlos Wilcox (1828). “Remains of the Rev. Carlos Wilcox ...: With a Memoir of His Life”, p.207

“I was not able to stop or slow down the Vietnam War.”

“I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth's ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.”

Source : "Reading Your Friends’ Novels" by Brad Leithauser, www.newyorker.com. January 07, 2013.