Quotes About Influence

By adolescence, if not earlier, people are getting feedback about their market value, feedback that shapes their self-esteem and thus affects how high they aim their sights.

The chances of a small country on Assyria's periphery in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE not hosting a single shrine to an Assyrian god are about the same as the chances of a small modern country in America's sphere of influence having no McDonald's and no Starbucks. 96 (And the chances of no Israelites resenting those shrines are roughly the chances of no one resenting the cultural intrusion of a globally hegemonic America.) On

A sound by itself is a passive, not an active, thing, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. So to make it unpleasant, you have to go out and, in a sense, do something to it.

what we call the "self" is in such constant causal interaction with its environment, is so pervasively influenced by the world out there

So if the conscious mind isn't in control, what is in control?

It's good to love. It's bad to be impressionable.

Charly Cruz asked him if he liked Spike Lee. Yes, said Fate, although he didn't really. "He seems Mexican," said Charly Cruz. "Maybe," said Fate. "That's an interesting way to look at it." "And what about Woody Allen?" "I like him," said Fate. "He seems Mexican too...

Los buenos escritores necesitan a los malos escritores aunque sólo sea como lectores o como escuderos.

Nevertheless his work lived on, precariously, desperately (as he would have wished, perhaps), yet it lived on. A handful of young men read it, reinvented him, tried to become his followers, but how can you follow someone who is not moving, someone who is trying, with every appearance of success, to become invisible?

In any case, on the wall of Juan Stein's house, there hung a rather ornately framed portrait of Chernyakhovsky, and that, I dare say, incommensurably more important than the busts and the cities named after him and the countless Chernyakhovsky Streets, full of potholes, scattered through the Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania and Russia. I don't know why I've kept the photo, Stein said to us.

book on Archimboldi, a book that might be the grand Archimboldian opus, the pilot fish that would swim for a long time beside the great black shark of the German's oeuvre, or

According to Dieter Hellfeld, a member of the Swedish Academy

Someday Neruda and Octavio Paz will shake hands. Sooner or later Paz will make room on Olympus for Neruda. But we will always be on the outside.

Savage words: how one can destroy someone by simply sitting there in an armchair reading a book, not too far from him.

E***: Our fate is governed by two mummies: that of Lenin in his mausoleum and that of Bentham at University College, London.

Un libro ti rimane addosso per una vita intera.

La mala palabra no nació así. La sociedad la hizo mala.

Que me importa lo que hizo Maradona con su vida. Me importa lo que hizo con la mía.

We write a line we're especially proud of, and weeks later find it staring -no glaring - back at us from some stanza in George Herbert or Emily Dickinson. All poets have debts outstanding. It's how we learn; how we adore; we come to ourselves by putting those selves into the hands of masters. With experience we learn how to disguise our thefts (sometimes by flaunting them). It is how we both continue and extend a tradition. -J.D. McClatchy, Writing Between the Lines

Design is action at a distance.

Diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power.

We are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us.

Oh, my boy. The best mistake Chivalry ever made was you. Go on now.

If you don't decide what you will do with the rest of your life, someone else will decide it for you.