Quote

The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.

Walter Kirn

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Walter Kirn
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: August 3
Novelist
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Make
Potent
Draw
Draws
Level
Levels
Virtue
Lines
Indefensible
Even
Negotiable

More quotes by Walter Kirn

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I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn - small, tasty delights - and I like to gorge on them now and then.
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Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?
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Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.
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Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.
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At the beginning of a novel, a writer needs confidence, but after that what's required is persistence. These traits sound similar. They aren't. Confidence is what politicians, seducers and currency speculators have, but persistence is a quality found in termites. It's the blind drive to keep on working that persists after confidence breaks down.
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What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?
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Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
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Requesting permission from someone to be honest is really a way of accusing the other person of being so demanding or overbearing that you couldn't be honest all along.
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You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.
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A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.
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The market is the only critic that matters.
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Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn
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I preferred that my bad dreams be vague.
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I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.
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Love is a powerful painkiller.
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When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?
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The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialise alone.
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Some strangers become more important to you than family, maybe because you're not expected to love them. You can leave them whenever you want to. They can, too. Every moment together is a choice.
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Spirit was a by-product of activity, like the reflection from a spinning fan blade, and our souls in the end did not reside within us but flowed outward from our movements.
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The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.
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