Actual Failure Rate

Famous quotes containing the words actual, failure and/or rate:

    Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

    ... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
    to escape writing of the worst thing of all—
    not the crimes of other, not even our own death,
    but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
    so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
    mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    You are more than entitled not to know what the word ‘performative’ means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favor, it is not a profound word.
    —J.L. (John Langshaw)