Archive for Quotes

Quotes of the Week

“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”

--Darwin

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

--Maya Angelou

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
--Arthur Ashe

“A river without islands is like a woman without hair. She may be good and pure, but one doesn't fall in love with her very often.”

--Mark Twain

“How churlish, then, to blame one’s parents for providing precisely what every parent hopes to offer! How disgustingly improper to hold against them just that loving attentiveness which is every father and mother’s ideal!”

--Salman Rushdie The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“Just before he reaches the door he looks back and says something to me. I can’t hear him for the wind. What? I say. He yells, Are we having fun? He laughs at the look on my face, then turns and takes his place in the door, and jumps, and is gone.”

--Tobias Wolff “Last Shot”

“And I keep thinking tomorrow is coming today

So I am endlessly waiting.”

--Counting Crows “St. Robinson in His Cadillac Dreams”

A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:

There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

--Alexander Pope

If you get down and you quarrel everyday

You’re saying prayers to the devils, I say.

Why not help one another on the way

Make it much easier.

Say you just can't live that negative way
If you know what I mean
Make way for the positive day

Cause it's a new day.

--Vincent Ford & Bob Marley, “Positive Vibrations”

“And in the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

--John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Don't gain the world and lose your soul, wisdom is better than silver and gold.”

--Bob Marley

“You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you’ve been feeling bad.”

--William Least-Heat Moon, Blue Highways

“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But I repeat myself.”

--Mark Twain

“A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.”

--Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

“So was I once a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig’s having lashed across it open.”

--Robert Frost, “Birches”

“The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

--Jack London

“People say I’m crazy doing what I’m doing.

They give me all kinds of warnings to save me from ruin…

I just have to let it go.”

--John Lennon, “Watching the Wheels Go Round”

“Don’t eat your fortune”

-- My fortune cookie

“I can’t believe the news today,

I can’t close my eyes and make it go away.”

-- U2, “Sunday Bloody Sunday”

“The flotillas of the dead sailed around the world on underwater rivers...As a storm-tossed ship founders and sinks...it must reach a depth where the water below it is just viscous enough to stop its fall...But the voyages still continue...because there are currents under the ocean and so the dead ships with their skeleton crews sail on around the world, over sunken cities and between drowned mountains....”

-- Terry Pratchett, from Going Postal

“We have met the enemy and they is us.”

--Robert Kelly

There can be a brilliance of irreducibility, of a thing not being puffed up or constructed to become value beyond itself, but being whittled and worn down to its essence, like the one crystal of a gem.”

--Rick Bass, Brown Dog of the Yaak

“Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.”

--Mark Twain

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning –

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!

--Kurt Vonnegut

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

--Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

--Johann Wolfgang Goethe

You are what you love, not what loves you. I decided that a long time ago.

--Charlie Kaufman, “Adapation”

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

--Oscar Wilde

“Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.”

--Cameron Crowe, “Vanilla Sky”

“When you resist fear you’re only keeping it alive. It’s like trying to hold a beach ball under water. The more you fight it, the more pressure you’re building up.”

--Gary Mack, David Casstevens, Mind Gym

“...the only barometer you have is your heart...when you spot your flower, you can’t let anything get in your way.”

--Charlie Kaufman, “Adaptation”

“The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory.”

--Paul Fix

“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

--J.K. Rowling

“Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.”

--James Bryant Conant