"She gave me a wide-eyed, innocent smile that looked as out of place on her as it would have on a desert scorpion."

George Alec Effinger Literature See all quotes by George Alec Effinger →

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“Proper knowledge defeats the shouting minions of emotion.”

“The only negative thing she had to say was that I displayed a tendency to exaggerate the facts for the sake of interesting reading.”

“You bought the girls drinks and you stared at their perfect bodies and you pretended that they liked you. And they pretended that they liked you, too. When you stopped spending money, they got up and pretended that they liked someone else.”

“Perhaps he could organize everyone. He could stand up on something and shout slogans until he had attracted enough attention. Then he could begin some rambling speech, hoping that the people around him would be so desperate for leadership they wouldn’t notice the absurdity of what he said.”

“With a stiff forefinger I silenced the koto music. Peace flooded in; the world thanked me.”

“His thoughts grew confused, and he mistook that quality for complexity.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power."

— Bertrand Russell

Philosophy1872–1970

#happiness

"The search for joy is therefore an act of will, a firm refusal of the fixed conditions of capital and its values. The first of these refusals is that of work as a value. The search for joy can only co…"

— Alfredo M. Bonanno

Journalism1937–2023

#happiness

"According to a new survey, 67 percent of teenagers are content or extremely happy most of the time. They're called stoners!"

— Amy Poehler

Entertainment1971

#happiness

"And the brain has been trained to record because then in that recording there is safety, there is security, there is strength, a vitality, and therefore in that recording the mind creates the image ab…"

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

Education1895–1986

#freedom