Saga Anderson Quotes

We each have our lives... What matters is not how long those lives last, but what we do with them.

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.

We must think beyond ourselves

The Land Run should be called something like “Chaos Explosion Apocalypse Town” or “Reckoning of the DoomSettlers: Clusterfuck on the Prairie.

If nothing else, we today need a reminder that we must never take civilization for granted. I

I went to the library. I looked at the magazines, at the pictures in them. One day I went to the bookshelves, and pulled out a book. It was Winesburg, Ohio.. I sat at a long mahogany table and began to read. All at once my world turned over. The sky fell in. The book held me. The tears came. My heart beat fast. I read until my eyes burned. I took the book home. I read another Anderson. I read and I read, and I was heartsick and lonely and in love with a book, many books, until it came naturally, and I sat there with a pencil and a long tablet, and tried to write, until I felt I could not go on because the words would not come as they did in Anderson, they only came like drops of blood from my heart.

Every life has a destiny... the trick is to discover it before then end of your life. Otherwise, you will have too many regrets.

The world had little patience or concern for innocence.

I cannot abide red tape. It never strangles bad ideas, only good ones.

hi sadaa sukham.’ It means that one cannot have happiness alone.

dies novus est,” he said, quoting one of Flora’s favorite Latin expressions. “Tomorrow is a new day.

Fairness is a wonderful attribute, Major Anderson. It has nothing to do with war.

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the suns themselves begin to die.

Cynicism is boringly fashionable. I didn't think you would be afraid to say mankind is worth fighting for.

she'd say there must be something in Leviticus against mixing so many metaphors.

Sometimes, Don’t Panic does not apply.

Is that the ultimate paradox of life, she wondered, that the universe should become less clear with age?

That is not the case. We do not blame words for being insufficient to express new ideas.

Look, you can't take people off their planet willy-nilly. It's called alien abduction, and is frowned upon in the most respectable circles.

Cities are not microwave popcorn. Unless you are talking, as we are, about Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City is microwave popcorn.

A French hot air balloonist planned to hover just over Oklahoma until noon, then descend onto his favorite spot before anyone else had a chance.

Oklahoma City has chaos in its DNA.

But a universal state is not a new beginning for a civilization, it’s the start of the death, and it has to follow the same course over and over through history, like a kind of slow but terminal sickness.

• Was there a handbook that could tell me what to do next? There were thousands of books that taught parenting; I was pretty sure there wasn't a self-help book about alien roommates. If there was, it was probably about abductees, not subletters.

My name is Sally Webber. I’m a human from Earth, a college dropout with no career ambition. I’m wearing a wig, and I really need to sit down, these heels are killing me. And I’m going to save my planet and everyone on it from complete annihilation.

Buchanan recognized that the rising outcry from the North proscribed his range of options and made his own peaceful exit less and less likely. “If I withdraw Anderson from Sumter,” he said, “I can travel home to Wheatland by the light of my own burning effigies.

On second glance, though, the activities didn’t seem regimented or organized enough to have been put together by the Earth military. The EDF tended to lay out everything in straight lines and perfect grids. Conversely, this work seemed energetic and independent, as if each unit was following only a general master plan.

The most interesting answer is not just that we can’t stop tornadoes but that we shouldn’t. This was the answer I got from Greg Carbin, one of the wind geniuses at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman. “Why can’t we stop tornadoes?” I asked. “Well, what is the purpose of a tornado?” he responded. It had never occurred to me that a storm had anything as grand as a purpose. Consider a hurricane, Carbin said. It acts as a kind of air conditioner for the planet, pushing excess heat from the equator off toward the poles. Similarly, he said, a tornado releases pent-up instability. “In the process of that turning,” Carbin told me, “there’s something that the atmosphere is releasing, or relaxing. So if you could eliminate tornadoes, what does that mean? How does the atmosphere react to the fact that you’ve now suppressed this natural phenomenon? It’s going to manifest itself in some other way.

boondoggle,

Sure, war is degrading. But there are worse degradations. Sure, peace is wonderful. But you can't always have peace, except in death, and you most definitely can't have a peace that isn't founded on hard common interest, that doesn't pay off for everybody concerned. Sure, the Empire is sick. But she's ours. She's all we've got. Son, the height of irresponsibility is to spread your love and loyalty so thin that you haven't got enough left for the few beings and the few institutions which rate it from you.

Hard to imagine, but . . . well, we have so many bureaucrats, so many people in high places like Lord Hauksberg who insists the enemy doesn't really mean harm

I won't lie down and die gracefully. I'm far too cowardly for that.

I hope we do feel and reason enough alike that I can play tricks on you.

You'll either be killed, young man, or you'll do something that will force us to step on you, or you'll go far indeed.

Root'—radix—you radicals are all alike," Flandry said. "You think everything springs from one or two unique causes, and if only you can get at them, everything will automatically become paradisical. History doesn't go that way. Read some and see what the result of every resort to violence by reformists has been.

The engineers are in charge,” he told me. “They’re not broad-thinking people. In their mind, their job is only to move traffic. They’ll have cars running from one end of the country to the other, and they’ll just drop them off in the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean.

You knew a storm was going to be bad, Oklahomans would say, when Gary England took off his jacket.

You are shameless! Will go far indeed, if no one shoots you first.

You know," he said, "ever since Akhnaton ruled in Egypt, probably since before then, a school of thought has held we ought to lay down our weapons and rely on love. That, if love doesn't work, at least we'll die guiltless. Usually even its opponents have said this is a noble idea. I say it stinks. I say it's not just unrealistic, not just infantile, it's evil.

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Some days, I was instructed not to pick up the phone at all. I would take down the messages left on the machine; bring them to my boss, who promptly ate them. Grisham had some odd habits. The part of my job that did not consist of answering phones revolved around making sure the world didn't know about them.

Nothing's impossible. Everything's got screwed up probability ratios.

I've toppled empires. I can figure out how to get water to the right temperature.

Try to stay longer, and your head will be the only part of you that makes it home.

Oklahoma’s ultra Conservative government after years of aggressive tax cuts even during the boom years had been corrupted the state. Social services, mental health programs, public transportation and infrastructure were all in various stages of collapse. The public education budget was stripped so bear that teachers had started flooding out to neighbouring states in search of living wages, forcing Oklahoma to patch the gaps by issuing hundreds of emergency teaching licenses and even cutting some of the school back to 4 days a week. It was a radical experiment in ante government governance and it was failing miserably. In 2014, Oklahoma botched an execution so badly that it horrified the entire world. The state was becoming what it used to be: a nowhere place that occasionally erupted with very bad reviews, a kind of grim American joke.

Oklahoma's state government was, by this point, unbelievably dysfunctional, and the state's infrastructure was the worst in the nation, and the roads and bridges were crumbling everywhere.

You don't get to bargain with me, motherfucker.

This was a place whose newspaper published not only a daily prayer on its front page but near-constant caricatures of an idiotic Barack Obama on its editorial page, and where a six-foot-tall granite monument of the Ten Commandments would soon be erected next to the state capitol.

A good indicator of a healthy economy is when people buy completely useless things.

In a time of war and rationing, folks have no choice but to accept whatever reports come their way. They don’t hear anything else.

But if that's the case, Anderson, then in my opinion God is a bugger. You can quote me on that.

The connection between basketball and the bombing may seem like a stretch.

the ultimate proof that Kevin Durant was nice, the strongest case for his sainthood, was his ability to tolerate Russell Westbrook.

Destiny, sometimes, will agree to look the other way until the details match up with its grand plan.

Here lies the union," one banner proclaimed. "Born 4th July, 1776. Died 7th November, 1860." "The clouds are threatening," Anderson wrote in his report to Washington. "And the storm may break upon us at any moment." In fact, the clouds had been gathering for decades.

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Sally, are you really going to believe the word of a man who tried to kill you over the one who stopped him from doing so?

It was, on Lincoln’s part, a clever gambit: He was sending food to starving men. Who could object? If the ships were allowed to deliver it unimpeded, peace would reign and Anderson and his men would have all the supplies they needed to continue holding the fort. If Confederate forces fired on the ships, however, they would in the world’s eyes be the offenders, engaging in an act of dishonor, the very thing the chivalry were schooled from childhood to avoid.

I went to the library and found again the books that had changed my life: Sherwood Anderson, Jack London, Knut Hamsun, Dostoevsky, D’Annunzio, Pirandello, Flaubert, de Maupassant. The welcome they gave me was much warmer than the cold curiosity of old friends I met in the town.

But if that's the case, Anderson, then in my opinion God is a bugger. You can quote me on that.

His personal motto, which he was glad to repeat at any time, for any reason, was a bit of Yoda-like egalitarianism: “Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.

It was a war zone, the very definition of a triage situation, and some victims were so badly hurt they had to be allowed to die.

He wondered which army they’d give him. Three commanders were graduating soon, including Petra, but it was beyond hope for them to give him Phoenix Army—no one ever succeeded to command of the same army he was in when he was promoted. Anderson took him first to his new quarters. That sealed it—only commanders had private rooms. Then he had him fitted for new uniforms and a new flash suit. He looked on the forms to discover the name of his army.

It is a place where a golden geodesic dome sits down the street from a tiny building with a giant milk bottle on its roof, where a thin-shell concrete retro-futuristic church is known affectionately, to certain locals, as the City Titty.

You want to make me the best soldier possible. Go down and look at the standings. Look at the all-time standings. So far you’re doing an excellent job with me. Congratulations. Now when are you going to put me up against a good army?’ Graff’s set lips turned to a smile, and he shook a little with silent laughter. Anderson handed Ender a slip of paper. ‘Now,’ he said.

An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications. Or else a mouse is a transistorized elephant.

It’s unclear, in fact, what part of the country Oklahoma actually belongs to. It is spoken of, variously, as part of the Southwest, Midwest, Bible Belt, and Heartland. It’s easier to say what it is not: it’s not the arid West or the frigid North or the humid South or the old-world East. Instead, it is precisely where all of those things meet.

Oklahoma was overrun, at various times, by dinosaurs, mammoths, rhinos, horses, and camels, all running wild, eating and mating, owning the land outright. Again, to someone who knows only modern Oklahoma City, to someone who has watched a tennis shoe float down the Bricktown Canal past Toby Keith’s I This Bar & Grill, none of this will seem possible.

For the purposes of this book, and with apologies to Charleston, Austin, the Portlands, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, Chattanooga, Charlotte, Memphis, San Antonio, and of course Seattle (always special apologies to Seattle), Oklahoma City is the great minor city of America.

Oklahoma City is tiny and huge at the same time.

Harden “won Sixth Man of the Year the way Freddie Mercury would’ve won a small town dive bar’s Wednesday night karaoke contest.

If a Starbucks drink could be a church, it would be LifeChurch.TV

In recounting the saga of Sasha Orlov, Peter Sichel gave a weary sigh. “It was a classic example of case officers falling in love with their agents. I tried to tell them they were being played. Unfortunately, in this case they refused to listen.” But of course, everything in the intelligence shadow world can be interpreted from at least two different angles, because everything has the potential of being the precise opposite of what it first appears.

Most places have one sky. Oklahoma city has about 12.

the ruined building would pop into his

Robotics is never yet got to where live brains can be altogether replaced, except in bureaucrats.

That was the trouble with war. Leave out the toil, discipline, discomfort, scant sleep, lousy food, monotony, and combat, and war would be a fine institution.