Ali

“I don't mean to bum you out but... we're all going to die. The thing is, very few of us actually believe it. We look at pictures of people who have died and marvel at the pathos. 'Ah, there's Jean all smiling. She didn't know she'd be dead in three months.' Well, maybe Jean knew and maybe she didn't. But what she didn't do was go around hoping to provide someone else with a satisfying sense of dramatic irony. Nobody lives like that and it's odd that we do it to the dead sometimes.”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be A Boy

“The future was always there; you couldn't get away from a thing like that. Nobody could. But it was a way of seeing it that terrified him, a glimpse he only got when he wasn't expecting it, like turning a corner on the right street and having the city line itself up perfectly, all the way to the river. It wasn't like the river went anywhere, George told me. It never got up and walked off or dried up when you weren't looking. It was just that most days you didn't worry about it. But then you'd see it, and you'd worry; and this future, too, was something that tempted you, that asked you to cast yourself into it and drown. And then you'd turn, George said, and when you looked back it'd be gone. You'd have escaped once more.”
― Patrick Nathan, The Future Was Color

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we
are. They are different. ”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I was wrong. I knew I was wrong, and yet I persisted. If that is possible of any explanation it is this: From the day I left my father my lines had been cast, or I cast them myself, among crooked people. I had not spent one hour in the company of an honest person. I had lived in an atmosphere of larceny, theft, crime. I thought in terms of theft. Houses were built to be burglarized, citizens were to be robbed, police to be avoided and hated, stool pigeons to be chastised, and thieves to be cultivated and protected. That was my code; the code of my companions. That was the atmosphere I breathed. 'If you live with wolves, you will learn to howl.”
― Jack Black, You Can't Win