People From Austin

"If only she could convince them, perhaps she could convince herself."

"She was a reader; there were many citizens who were not. The prevailing social explanation for illiteracy was that there were people who were temperamentally unsuited for reading—and indeed there were few callings in a computerized, video-saturated world that required literacy. Lilo accepted that, but had always had a feeling that most people never learned to read because they simply were not smart enough."

"This was a killer. Quite possibly a soldier, though Lilo was not expert in mental diseases."

"But now she was fifty-seven, and suddenly ancient. Soon she would be dead. Dead. You can’t get any more ancient than that."

"Religion and science don’t mix well, as science likes to observe and draw conclusions—to learn, in other words—and religion cares only about learning the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, etc. They don’t need to learn about this world, because they already know. A good way to describe a wasted life, as far as I’m concerned. Religious people already know things, with no more proof than some words in an old book. In short, they’re crazy."

"I am vehemently anti-religion. That is, organized religion. I despise them all. I try to despise them equally, but lately Islam has shot to the top of my hate list, for obvious reasons. I don’t give a shit what they do in their own squalid little dictatorships, but they seem to want to export “Submission” to the whole world, and they are willing to kill the likes of Salman Rushdie and those Danish cartoonists for insulting Islam. They are basically living somewhere around the 8th Century, and I often wish I had a time machine to send them back there. (Yes, I know there are moderates. So why don’t they do something about the zealots?) So when I mention religion at all in my stories, the practitioners are usually doing something nutty. About as nutty as praying five times a day facing Mecca, saying a rosary, handling deadly snakes, or speaking in tongues."

"She looked at me askance. “Of course I bribed him, Victor. You’d be amazed to know how cheaply. Does that bother you?” “Yes,” I admitted. “I don’t like bribery.” “I’m indifferent to it. It happens, like gravity. It may not be admirable, but it gets things done.”"

"I had kept a straight face under worse provocation, so I trust I did well enough then."

"Buildings were just the world's furniture, and he didn't care how it was arranged."

"There was something at the core of the world of business that refused to adjust to children in the board room, while appearing to make every effort to accommodate the working mother."

"Semantic content zero, nonsense quotient high."

"I didn't become rich, but I was usually comfortable. That is a social disease, the symptom of which is the ability to ignore it while your society develops weeping pustules and has its brains eaten out by radioactive maggots."

"Why is it that once having decided what I must do, I'm afraid to reexamine my decision? Maybe because the original decision cost me so much that I didn’t want to go through it again."

"What they had going certainly came as near as anyone ever has in this imperfect world to a sane, rational way for people to exist without warfare and with a minimum of politics. In the end, those two old dinosaurs are the only ways humans have yet discovered to be social animals. Yes, I do see war as a way of living with one another; by imposing your will on another in terms so unmistakable that the opponent has to either knuckle under to you, die, or beat your brains out. And if that’s a solution to anything, I'd rather live without solutions. Politics is not much better. The only thing going for it is that it occasionally succeeds in substituting talk for fists."

"They had a good picture of the world as it is, not the rosy misconceptions so many other utopians labor under. They did the jobs that needed doing."

"They understood the basic principles of morals: that nothing is moral always, and anything is moral under the right circumstances."

"They were testing ways whereby people didn't have to live in Chicago. It was a wonder to me. I had thought Chicago was inevitable, like diarrhea."

"She was already putting her distance between herself and this woman she would kill. She was becoming an object, something she was going to do something unpleasant to; not a person with a right to live."

"Thou shalt not screw around with things you do not understand."

"Just because Beethoven doesn’t sound like currently popular art doesn’t mean his music is worthless."

"There were worlds in the jewel. There was ancient Barsoom of my childhood fairy tales; there was Middle Earth with brooding castles and sentient forests. The jewel was a window on something unimaginable, a place where there were no questions and no emotions but a vast awareness."

"It’s unpleasant to find that what you had thought of as moral scruples suddenly seem not quite so important in the face of a stack of money."

"I thought his lack of curiosity must be monumental, but I was wrong. It turned out that he had some queer notions about the morality of the whole process, ideas he had gotten from some weirdly aberrant religion in his childhood. I had heard of the cult, as you can hardly avoid it if you know any history. It had said little about ethics, being more interested in arbitrary regulations."

"I’m decrepit, but I ain’t senile."

""In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman."

"Like plugging into life-support equipment, I view apologizing as a dangerous vice that can take over your whole life if you give in to it."

"There’s always a way to work out your problems if you’re only take a look at them and then do what needs to be done. For instance, when I found that three mornings in a row I had shut off my new alarm and gone back to sleep, I put the switch in the kitchen and tied it in to the coffee-maker. When you’re up and have the coffee perking, it’s too late to go back to sleep."

"I threw the kitchen sink at him but he went to the bathroom and got his tub."

"Jeff Gannon: In your denunciations of the Abu Ghraib photos, you've used words like "sickening," "disgusting" and "reprehensible." Will you have any adjectives left to adequately describe the pictures from Saddam's rape rooms and torture chambers? And will Americans ever see those images? Scott McClellan: I'm glad you brought that up, Jeff, because the President talks about that often."

"Q: But if you stand out strongly trying to let the Arab world know that this is wrong and then you have the proverbial spokesperson for the conservative party saying this, doesn't that send a mixed message? Scott McClellan: The President's views have been very -- have been made very clear. Go ahead."

"Jeff Gannon: Since there have been so many questions about what the President was doing over 30 years ago, what is it that he did after his honorable discharge from the National Guard? Did he make speeches alongside Jane Fonda, denouncing America's racist war in Vietnam? Did he testify before Congress that American troops committed war crimes in Vietnam? And did he throw somebody else's medals at the White House to protest a war America was still fighting? What was he doing after he was honorably discharged? Scott McClellan: We've already commented on some of his views relating back to that period the other day."

"What Happened, I'll say it again, a Rosetta Stone for understanding the last seven years."

"Here's the thing about Scott McClellan. His performance on the podium suggested he was totally incompetent. He was really badly suited to that job. He hated the public attention and being in front of the cameras. But behind the scenes, well, I've known Scott since 1999, 2000. He actually was inside the circle of trust. That's why his comments are so damning and so critical here, because he did have walk-in access -- something that Tony Snow never did; and Dana Perino would be hard-pressed to have the same kind of relationship."

"My impression is... that this is, what I would call from the Watergate days, a modified, limited hangout, and I say that because, not because he was malevolent in his desire to put it out there, but press secretaries know very little in the big picture of what's happening at the White House. They're pretty much told what the policymakers and what the other political people in the White House would want them to know so they don't compromise themselves and they can try to be as honest as possible when they're out there briefing the press. So that's why I think it's pretty limited, but yet fascinating for what it is, and he certainly does nail a few things down. … I think I've read all the memoirs of everybody who's served at the White House at one time or another, going all the way back as early as I could find them, and this is a very unusual one. My situation was of course testimony. I was under oath; there was an intense investigation going on. This is really not in the same context. I can't really think of anything quite similar. I was thinking of press secretaries. The only one who's become anywhere similar was Ford's press secretary, who resigned over the pardon in his disquiet with the pardon, Jerald terHorst, where he said that he was unhappy with what was going on. Ron Nessen, too, was to a degree fairly frank, but he'd left office. When I look back at all press secretaries, this is probably about the only time I can think of a press secretary coming forward while the President was still there, and laying out some of the ugly truth."

"I don't want to get too fulsome on you. I don't think you're going to be dining out on the book for the rest of your life, but I think this is a primary document of American history. I'm very impressed with it and I think at some point people will be teaching history classes based on it. … This may be the most revealing look at any sitting President since John Dean was sworn in by the Erwin Committee in 1973."

"...I could not say honestly today that this administration does not believe in torture, does not engage in torture."

"I was part of this propaganda campaign, absolutely."

"We had higher standards at the White House. The president said he was going to restore honor and integrity. He said we were going to set the highest of standards. We didn't live up to that. When it became known that his top adviser had been involved, then the bar was moved."

"I think the president should have stood by his word, and that meant Karl should have left. [...] I think the president should have stood by the word that we said, which was that if you were involved in this in any way, then you would no longer be in this administration. And Karl was involved in it."

"I heard Bush say, "You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don't remember." I remember thinking to myself, How can that be? How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine? It didn't make a lot of sense."

"I do not believe that the President was in any way directly involved in the leaking of her identity, but that was a very disillusioning moment for me when I found out when it initially hit the press, and I was in North Carolina, if I remember correctly, and a reporter shouted out to the President, "Is it true that you authorized the secret leaking of this classified information?" We walked onto Air Force One, and the Presidents asks, "What was the reporter asking?", and I said, "He asserted that you were the one who authorized Scooty Libby leaking this information," and he said, "Yeah, I did.""

"I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood. It would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the President effectively. I didn't learn that what I'd said was untrue until the media began to figure it out almost two years later. … Neither, I believe, did President Bush. he too had been deceived, and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who know the truth -- including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney -- allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie."

"As a Texas loyalist who followed Bush to Washington with great hope and personal affection and as a proud member of his administration, I was all too ready to give him and his highly experienced foreign policy advisers the benefit of the doubt on Iraq. Unfortunately, subsequent events have showed that our willingness to trust the judgment of Bush and his team was misplaced."

"As I have heard Bush say, only a wartime president is likely to achieve greatness, in part because the epochal upheavals of war provide the opportunity for transformative change of the kind Bush hoped to achieve. In Iraq, Bush saw his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness."

"In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

"Q: ...would he possibly stand under a sign that says "Mission Accomplished" today as he did three years ago? Scott McClellan: Well, Peter, I think that there are some Democrats that refuse to recognize the important milestone achieved by the formation of a national unity government. And there is an effort simply to distract attention away from the real progress that is being made by misrepresenting and distorting the past. And that really does nothing to help advance our goal of achieving victory in Iraq. Q: Scott, simple yes or no question, could the President stand under a sign that says -- Scott McClellan: No, see, this is -- this is a way that -- Q: It has nothing to do with Democrats. Scott McClellan: Sure it does. Q: I'm asking you, based on a reporter's curiosity, could he stand under a sign again that says, "Mission Accomplished"? Scott McClellan: Now, Peter, Democrats have tried to raise this issue, and, like I said, misrepresenting and distorting the past -- Q: This is not -- Scott McClellan: -- which is what they're doing, does nothing to advance the goal of victory in Iraq. Q: I mean, it's a historical fact that we're all taking notice of -- Scott McClellan: Well, I think the focus ought to be on achieving victory in Iraq and the progress that's being made, and that's where it is. And you know exactly the Democrats are trying to distort the past. Q: Let me ask it another way: Has the mission been accomplished? Scott McClellan: Next question. Q: Has the mission been accomplished? Scott McClellan: We're on the way to accomplishing the mission and achieving victory."

"I'm sorry, who?"

"No, you don't want the American people to hear what the facts are, Helen, and I'm going to tell them the facts."

"That's accurate."

"This relationship is built on trust, and you know very well that I have worked hard to earn the trust of the people in this room, and I think I've earned it -- and I think I've earned it with the American people."