
“The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.”
“The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.”
The Sheltering Sky (1949)
Context: Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
“People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we don't.”
Bjarne Stroustrup's FAQ: Did you really say that?, 2007-11-15 http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#really-say-that,
From a radio interview by Jed the fish (1997)
In interviews etc., About life and death
Introduction
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Context: The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial.
Asked about his consistent budget cuts to the CDC, the NIH, and the WHO.
White House press conference, , quoted in * 2020-02-28
As the World Reaches for Face Masks, Trump Buries His Head in the Sand
Jonathan Chait
New York Magazine
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/trump-coronavirus-response.html
2020s, 2020, February
Interviewed in Paris Review, Summer 1955; reprinted in Malcolm Cowley (ed.) Writers at Work (New York: Viking Press, 1959) p. 153.
Remarks by el-Sisi during a military conference (28 April 2013) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC93fn9s3-c.
2013