"The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is---it must be something you cannot possibly do!"
---Henry Moore
****
"I think the comparison between the slot machine and an altar makes a lot of sense---both places are wishing wells, a roll of the dice; better luck next time."
---Alissa Bennett
****
"The past is right here, the present is over yonder, fading rapidly."
---Jim Reed
****
"Survival of the fittest isn't quite the entire story. Survival is actually whoever remains standing, fit or not."
---Jim Reed
****
"My most effective camouflage is claiming ADD."
---Jim Reed
****
"If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you."
--Stephen Wright
****
"A man's got to have a code, a creed to live by, no matter his job."
--John Wayne
****
"He who has been treated as the devil recognizes
the devil when they meet."
--James Baldwin
****
"It's often painful to watch young people being young."
--Sofi Stambo
****
"You're never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream."
--C.S. Lewis
****
"All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them."
--Erma Bombeck
****
"Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it."
--James Baldwin
****
"To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice."
--Confucius
****
"The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves."
--Victor Hugo
****
"It took us so long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
--Kurt Vonnegut
****
"Start every day off with a smile and get it over with."
--W.C. Fields
****
"The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief."
--William Shakespeare
****
"Money couldn't buy friends, but you got a better class of enemy."
--Spike Milligan
****
"My first advice on how not to grow old would be to choose your ancestors carefully."
--Bertrand Russell
****
"My best birth control now is just leave the lights on."
--Joan Rivers
****
"All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door."
--Albert Camus
****
"Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass...it's about learning to dance in the rain."
--Vivian Greene
****
"Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy."
--Guillaume Apollinaire
****
"A sad truth is the real ending of any poem occurs where the reader stops reading it."
--Billy Collins
****
"One must work with time and not against it."
--Ursula K. Le Guin
****
"May you live every day of your life."
--Jonathan Swift
****
"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
****
"Am I too old to see the fairies dance? I cannot find them anymore."
--Langston Hughes
****
"Am I a hedonist? I don't feel like a herdonist."
--Jim Reed
****
"What kind of food am I? What do I know of life?"
--Jim Reed
****
"We are only whistlers passing through a graveyard, with our ears tied close and our eyes shut fast."
--Clarence Darrow
****
"To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes."
--Akira Kurosawa
****
"If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door."
--Milton Berle
****
"When you win, nothing hurts."
--Joe Namath
****
"It's important to think. It's what separates us from lentils."
--Jeff Bridges
****
"You can't teach a dog anything unless you know more than the dog."
--Groucho Marx
****
"I once met an unkempt philosopher who touted the concept of free swill."
--Jim Reed
****
"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method."
--Herman Melville
****
"Once you give up your integrity everything else is a piece of cake."
--Larry Hagman
****
"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues."
--William Shakespeare
****
"It suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and tough-minded people...do both exist."
--William James
****
"The man who creates the music is dealing with the roar arising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air."
--James Baldwin
****
"What is whale breath like? Did Jonah mention this?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Did Robinson Crusoe hanker for a Diet Coke?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Did Jesus' stomach ever growl?"
--Jim Reed
****
"I know too much about the things I don't want to know too much about, and I'll never know enough about the things I really want to know everything about."
--Jim Reed
****
"You take the risk, because what if you didn't do it?"
--Don Harland
****
"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write."
--Stephen King
****
"I resolve not to use the word resolve more than twice on this page."
--Jim Reed
****
"Being different is easier than making a difference."
--Jim Reed
****
"I tend to underplay my exaggerations. But there I go, exaggerating again."
--Jim Reed
****
"I like to brag about my humility."
--Jim Reed
****
"He tends to take statues for granite."
--Jim Reed
****
"The world is divided between silent chewers and loud smackers."
--Jim Reed
****
"She was at a loss for silence."
--Jim Reed
****
"The dots facing down on the dice are just as important as the dots facing up."
--Jim Reed
****
"Being kind and loving and caring really matters. The truths constantly change and disguise themselves, but being kind and loving and caring always counts."
--Jim Reed
****
"Today I will fix breakfast, tomorrow I will prepare breakfast."
--Jim Reed
****
"I'm gonna go get some pizza. Tomorrow I will simply order pizza."
--Jim Reed
****
"Isn't being reincarnated simply re-gifting a life?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Everything happens for no particular reason."
--Jim Reed
****
"We cannot see things as they are, we see things as we are."
--Anais Nin
****
"Sometimes you can learn more about a person by watching how they talk to a waiter, than by asking some profound question about their philosophy of life."
--David Brooks
****
"A galoot is someone who does not know what a galoot is."
--Jim Reed
****
"I'd like to gather some artists' collages and turn them into magazines."
--Jim Reed
****
"A great conversation is between two people who think the other is wrong. A bad conversation is between those who think something is wrong with you."
--Micah Goodman
****
"What if nobody was President and we all promised real hard just to be cool."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"In case you have trouble finding me, here's my info:
• Latitude: 41.667676 • Longitude: 70.076036."
--Jim Reed
****
"Rated 'I' for immature audiences only."
--Jim Reed
****
“Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain consciousness.”
--Ray Bradbury
****
"I'm a simple guy. Even when you underestimate me you are overestimating me."
--Jim Reed
****
"Everything is years ago or yesterday. After a time the times between things seem to matter less. Just a ribbon of blips."
--Jim Reed
****
"The more sensitive among us learn to lie in order to benefit others."
--Jim Reed
****
"It was one of those Tweetie Pie-in-the-Coal-Mine situations."
--Jim Reed
****
"Profusely equals exactly how many?"
--Jim Reed
****
"In sleep you have no age."
--Reb Messikh
****
"Would you rather be a shrinking violet or a shirking violet?
--Jim Reed
****
"No one reads introductions anyway. (Admit it. You're not reading this, are you?)"
--Neil Gaiman
****
"Learn the rules before you break them. Learn to draw, then break the rules of drawing. Learn to craft a story and then show people things they've never seen before in ways they've never seen."
--Neil Gaiman
****
"Intelligence, wit, judgement, and the other talents of the mind, however they may be named, or courage, resolution, perseverance, as qualities of temperament, are undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects; but these gifts of nature may also become extremely bad and mischievous if the will which is to make use of them, and which, therefore, constitutes what is called character, is not good."
--Immanuel Kant
****
"A gun may be used to retrieve an apple from a high branch, in order to satisfy hunger. A gun may also be used to rob a convenience store, in order to satisfy hunger. Same gun. Moral certitude is confusing."
--Jim Reed
****
"How does a snail know when it has a runny nose?"
--Jim Reed
****
"She's the kind of a girl that men forget to introduce to their wives."
--Bob Sloan & Steven Guarnaccia
****
"I look forward to the day First Place comes in Second."
--Jim Reed
****
“Are Harris Famous Roach Tablets marketed solely to famous roaches?”
--Jim Reed
****
“A trash can is actually a time capsule.”
--Jim Reed
****
“How do graduates of the DUI School celebrate?”
--Jim Reed
****
“An optimist sees the glass as half full. What is a person who sees the glass and wants to know who drank half the water?”
--Jim Reed
****
"I just realized that sooner is sooner than sooner or later."
--Jim Reed
****
"What happens when King Midas scratches his head?"
--Jim Reed
****
"How does the Invisible Man shave?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Two kinds of people populate the world: on-timers and tardiers."
--Jim Reed
****
"Boarding the asylum elevator he found himself ascending into madness."
--Jim Reed
****
"When eating a doughnut, meditate upon the significance of the hole, for without it, you’re merely munching on a patty of cooked dough."
--Jim Reed
****
"Always begin the day by awakening—otherwise the night will just keep extending itself."
--Jim Reed
****
"When applauding, you get a better sound by using both hands."
--Jim Reed
****
"You can stand alone in a forest and tell a joke, but you’ll never know whether it’s funny."
--Jim Reed
****
"Try never to be in more than one place at once."
--Jim Reed
****
“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
- Isaac Asimov
****
“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”
- Dr. Seuss
****
"It's a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it."
Kurt Vonnegut
****
“Reason cannot defeat emotion, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion.”
--Baruch Spinoza
****
"I shoved my cousin. She was holding a book entitled PUSHKIN."
--Jim Reed
****
"Must be hard to live with a person who narrates the world in one continuous and unending statement. Eventually, your ears begin to hurt."
--Jim Reed
****
"Human beings must involve themselves in the anguish of other human beings. This, I submit to you, is not a political thesis at all. It is simply an expression of what I would hope might be ultimately a simple humanity for humanity's sake."
- Rod Serling
****
"Failure is an opportunity." --Lao Tzu
****
"The Left is always on the side of the weak."
--Malcolm Muggeridge
****
"Love…let us explain love…love is, er, well, love is, you know, love is, Yikes! Love is, hoo boy. Love is, geez, ohhhh, ohhhhkay, ok."
--Jim Reed
****
"He is every other inch a gentleman."
--Rebecca West
****
"The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum."
--Havelock Ellis
****
"She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say 'when'."
--P.G. Wodehouse
****
"We are an imperfect species in many ways. Just look around. But strangely enough, we are also such a beautiful species when we once in a blue moon actually do something healing or helpful or unselfishly honest."
--Jim Reed
****
"A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist."
--Arthur Koestler
****
"When I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it's because we are still able to recognize one."
--Flannery O'Connor
****
"Forever--is composed of Nows."
--Emily Dickinson
****
"True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
****
"You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have."
--Maya Angelou
****
"A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others have thrown at him."
--David Brinkley
****
"My brother gave me a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover just before I left for my honeymoon in 1959. The marriage didn't last but the honeymoon was memorable."
--Judy Blume
****
"At my bookshop a couple purchases some nudity-and-sex-related books. As they leave I wish them a good weekend. I guess they might really have a good weekend...or at least a memorable one."
--Jim Reed
****
Let us have wine and women,
Mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda-water the day after."
--Lord Byron
****
What Hope Is
a cup
of stars
--Irene Latham
****
"He found himself out of context so he ordered a fresh supply."
--Jim Reed
****
"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know."
--Diane Arbus
****
"Go to the Devil or the Church Will Get You.
Go to Church or the Devil Will Get You."
--Jim Reed
****
"Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us."
--Oscar Wilde
****
"Silent gratitude isn't very much use to anyone."
--Gertrude Stein
****
"Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
All other Life is living Death, a world where none but Phantoms dwell,
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel-bell."
--Richard Burton
****
"Virtue is its own punishment."
--Nick & Wilann Powers
****
"Navels are as important as supernovae, as much a part of the cosmos as love letters and sweet peas, daggers and gin, gondolas and gazebos...cuticles and, well, navels."
--Jim Reed
****
"Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer, but wish we didn't."
--Erica Jong
****
"The best way to cheer yourself up is to cheer everybody else up."
--Mark Twain
****
"Patience is a virtue that carries a lot of wait."
--McAn Ltd.
****
"I think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: a man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself."
--Rod Serling
****
"Which statement is an exaggeration? 1. I always exaggerate. 2. I never exaggerate."
--Jim Reed
****
"Just who is Les Miserables and why did they write a book about him?"
--Jim Reed
****
"If I had a pet dog named Gingerly, the neighbors could say, 'I see Jim is walking Gingerly these days.'"
--Jim Reed
****
"People say they are getting their affairs in order. In order to what?"
--Jim Reed
****
I named my car Sentimental, so that people could watch me waxing Sentimental."
--Jim Reed
****
"Which sounds more menacing? 1. A time capsule. 2. A timed capsule."
--Jim Reed
****
"How big is ample room?"
--Jim Reed
****
"I just saw this sign:
NO PROBATION OR PAROLE PARKING."
--Jim Reed
****
"Sometimes I'm wishy, other times I'm washy."
--Jim Reed
****
"Could a sarcastic old-time golf pro be called Sam Snide?"
--Jim Reed
.
****
"Do you know a literary carpenter called James Joist?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Would a jaded prima donna be rightfully called Maria Callous?
--Jim Reed
****
"It is high time we re-invented the wheel."
--Jim Reed
****
EMPLOYEES ONLY BEHIND SHOWCASE
(Aren't they allowed anywhere else in the store?)
****
"Did a crackpot inventor create the Crock Pot?"
--Jim Reed
****
"The IRS-dodger is an anti-taxxer."
--Jim Reed
****
"The only people who should be allowed to do jokes about old people are old people."
--Jim Reed
****
"I just said my first sooth."
--Jim Reed
****
"Novelists, whatever else they may be besides, are also children talking to children---in the dark."
--Bernard De Voto
****
"There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader."
--Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin
****
"If you deny climate change, you will die. If you believe in climate change, you will die more meaningfully."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"Just who were those four fathers who founded our country?
--Jim Reed
****
"I averted my eyes from your gaze for fear that I might
tumble into them and never find my way out. This did
not work. I am now a happy prisoner within that gaze."
--Jim Reed
****
"Haven't we always lived in a post-apocalyptic world?
Don't we always live in a pre-apocalyptic world?"
--Jim Reed
****
"We have had to take on faith the unproven events
of unproven years. For all the reality of ruins and scrolls
and tablets, we fear that much of what we read has
been made up. Artifacts may be no more than created
symbols. Artificial skeletons thrown together to fit
imaginary closets. The reality even of the immediate
past is irretrievable."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"It's the small things that are hard to do."
--John B. Flannagan
****
"You're only young once, but you can be immature indefinitely."
--Beaulah Collins
****
"Forgive me, fodder, for I am merely detritus."
--Jim Reed
****
"Crime does not pay---enough."
--Clayton Rawson
****
"The voice of the intellect is a soft one,
but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
Ultimately, after endless rebuffs, it succeeds.
This is one of the few points in which one may
be optimistic about the future of mankind. "
--Sigmund Freud
****
"How many ouchies equal a boo-boo?"
--Jim Reed
****
"When you stop wondering, dogma begins to set like concrete. Then, the cement begins to bind. Your imagination freeze-frames."
--Jim Reed
****
"I've never seen carbon dating. Is it celibate?"
--Jim Reed
****
"The cowboy author was named Lariat Laureate."
--Jim Reed
****
"Mr. Annoying was seldom self-correcting, but forever you-correcting."
--Jim Reed
****
"The shop sign reads: THE UNIFORM PEOPLE. What--are they clones?"
--Jim Reed
****
"The clerk displayed an enthusiastic reluctance to assist the customer."
--Jim Reed
****
"The Past is a different country...they do things differently there."
--Jim Reed
****
"George Washington's first inaugural address lasted 90 seconds. If a politician cannot tell a lie, there's little else left to say."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."
--Samuel Johnson
****
"Cast your doubts upon the waters. Watch how they sink to oblivion."
--Jim Reed
****
"Books and tombstones are hard evidence that we were here."
--Jim Reed
****
"Where do words unspoken hang out?"
--Jim Reed
****
"A book about plant propagation, complete with graphic illustrations, should be labeled ADULT CONTENT."
--Jim Reed
****
"I have a photogenic mind. Only pretty thoughts allowed."
--Jim Reed
****
"You should have seen the one who got away...not a mark on him."
--Jim Reed
****
"When you become elderly you start hiding little problems from friends and family, because you don't want them deciding that you are becoming feeble or may be unable to take care of yourself. Every mistake you made fifty years ago was just another mistake, but now it's like 'Ohhh, it's the beginning of the end for grandpa. He's going down the tubes!'"
--Jim Reed
****
"The big dumpster sign reads INDEPENDENT WASTE. Isn't all waste independent? Or is there a conspiracy?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Is indoor plumbing an in-house outhouse?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Why a NOW OPEN sign when they are not now open? Why not a NOW CLOSED sign?"
--Jim Reed
****
"The serial talker is a maximumilist."
--Jim Reed
****
"She wished me a prune good morning when I actually craved an avocado good morning."
--Jim Reed
****
"The sign reads WE APPRECIATE YOUR PATIENCE AS WE HAVE LIMITED STAFF WORKING. Are they apologizing for ability-challenged employees? Maybe CAUTION--LIMITED STAFF AHEAD."
--Jim Reed
****
"The headline reads, FORMER BLACK PILOT RUNS FOR OFFICE. How does one become formerly Black?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Someday, as my hair recedes, I'll have a three-strand comb-over. That would be a great name for a music group, THREE-STRAND COMB-OVER."
--Jim Reed
****
"My glove compartment is full. I need a fast-food-wrapping compartment."
--Jim Reed
****
"The sign reads, NO STUDENT PARKING. How can they tell?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them."
--George Eliot.
****
"Hermeneutics means radical thinking without transcendental justification: attending to the ruptures and irregularities in existence before the metaphysics of presence has a chance to smooth them over."
--John Caputo
"Huh?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Should fake leather be re-named genuine Naugahyde?
Should real leather be re-named fake Naugahyde?"
--Jim Reed
****
"The most terrifying fact is the one we'll do almost anything to deny: We are on our own."
--Jim Reed
****
"Scratching begets itching."
--Jim Reed
****
"Flatulence is the great leveler."
--Jim Reed
****
"People who seem to ignore you are in fact keenly aware of you."
--Jim Reed
****
"Life is the creative act. The great canvas is all the things you do with that life."
--Bono
****
"My mother loved children. She would have given anything if I had been one."
--Groucho Marx
****
"A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know."
--H.L. Mencken
****
"The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."
--Willie Nelson
****
"If you forgive your enemies, it messes up their heads."
--Willie Nelson
****
"Human beings reveal their character most clearly by what they find ridiculous."
--Goethe
****
"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
--Toni Morrison
****
"Insurrectionists forever await The Word."
--Jim Reed
****
"I never throw anything away because I can never find it."
--Jim Reed
****
"My hairline has been voted most likely to recede."
--Jim Reed
****
"I just performed a miracle. I turned wine into water."
--Jim Reed
****
"In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer."
--Mark Twain
****
"How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!"
--Tennyson
****
Nothing Gold Can Stay "Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay." --Robert Frost
****
"Ponyboy, I've been thinking about . that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant, you're gold when you're a kid, like green. When you're a kid everything's new, dawn. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony, that's gold. Keep it that way; it's a good way to be."
--Johnny Cade
****
"As I lock up for the evening I sometimes get the feeling that there is someone lingering in the shadows. Perhaps just echoes of customers past."
--Jim Reed
****
"Someday upon a time, er, once upon a time other than right now, uh, thrice upon a time ago...we were young and clueless. But we knew everything, didn't we?
--Jim Reed
****
"If i didn't know it was today I'd swear it's tomorrow."
--Jim Reed
****
"As humans we tend to confuse logic with emotion...emotion with logic."
--Jim Reed
****
"Suppose your dreams could socialize with my dreams. Suppose your imaginary friends met my imaginary friends. Suppose your shadow could dance with my shadow. Just suppose."
--Jim Reed
****
"Santa is Satan spelled inside-out."
--George Carlin
****
"Don't look for every moment to be a 10. Sometimes you have to celebrate the fours, fives and sixes."br --Sarah Wildman
****
"I was not instructed, so I was able to keep my freedom."br --Cecilia Vicuna
****
"We are visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety or one hundred years at the very most. During that period, we must try to do something good, something useful, with our lives. If you contribute to other people's happiness,you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life."br --H.H. The 14th Dalai Lama
****
"A boaster boasted boastfully he could do this and that; his friends then said: "Sir Boaster, pray stop your silly chat! If you can do these marvels all, no need to talk, my man; just do for us these wondrous things that now you say you can!"
--Aesop
****
"You get to a point in life where you can't help but look old."
--Jim Reed
****
"I love living in my past."
--Jim Reed
****
"One of the most useless questions you can ask a kid is, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?'' The more useful question is: 'What are you good at?'"
--Temple Grandin
****
"I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing."
--Herman Melville
****
"The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves."
--Mark Twain
****
"You know you're not a kid anymore when your best friend is dating someone half his age...and isn't breaking any laws."
--Jeff Foxworthy
****
"While others are fasting I seem to be slowing."
--Jim Reed
****
"Why cynicism is bad and skepticism is good. Cynicism is attributing the worst motives to people. Skepticism is looking for the truth."
--Penn Jillette
****
"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
--Oscar Wilde
****
"I work. I get on my bus and I ride my bus to the next date. And then I get back on the bus after the show and ride to the next date. Simple as that."
--Loretta Lynn
****
"If you have a skeleton in your closet, take it out and dance with it."
--Carolyn MacKenzie
****
"Droning on and on, she found herself at a loss for silence."
--Jim Reed
****
"How quickly we dismiss the idea that a carrot might have a soul."
--Jim Reed
****
"As a species we know how to think logically but we have no idea how to act logically...our emotions always get ahead of us, or behind us."
--Jim Reed
****
"It is almost impossible to distinguish between playacting and true feelings...feelings are developed through the actions we take."
--Jean-Paul Sartre
****
"Beauty is only soul deep."
--Jim Reed
****
"The meek shall inherit the leftovers."
--Jim Reed
****
"Look out how you use proud words.
When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back.
They wear long boots, hard boots; they walk off proud; they can't hear you calling.
Look out how you use proud words."
--Carl Sandburg
****
"I am not a writer except when I write."
--Juan Carlos Onettiquote
****
"I am not a carpenter except when I carp."
--Jim Reed
****
"When do we get to cash in all this daylight we've been saving?"
--Argus Hamilton
****
"Everything is later than you think."
--Jim Reed
****
"I have a new philosophy: I'm only going to dread one day at a time."
--Charles Schulz
****
"Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?"
--Harold Pinter
****
"Secret: what we tell everybody to tell nobody."
--Ambrose Bierce
****
"I've been on a constant diet for the last two decades. I've lost a total of 789 pounds. By all accounts I should be hanging from a charm bracelet."
--Erma Bombeck
****
"Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."
--Werner von Braun
****
"She was a sore for sighted eyes."
--Jim Reed
****
"The candy man does not mints his words."
--Jim Reed
****
"She used to ride in the whey back of the milk truck."
--Jim Reed
****
"The art of composition cannot actually be taught, style is as personal as handwriting, and talent itself is a non-transferable gift."
--Arthur Schwartz
****
"Retired officers write autobiographies. Enlisted men write confessions."
--Martin Grimes
****
"from what we cannot hold the stars are made"
-W.S. Merwin
****
"Life is a constant melding of flesh and physics."
--Jim Reed
****
"Children are not merely people: they are the only really living people that have been left to us in an over-weary world...."
--Kenneth Grahame
****
"Everything is more than it seems."
--Jim Reed
****
"Please don't talk while I am interrupting."
--Todd Rockefeller
****
"Those who lose their mittens do not get pie. Even when they find their mittens, they still may not get pie."
--Jim Reed
****
"Sometimes, the sky really is falling."
--Jim Reed
****
"Things do not sell for what they are worth, they sell for what they go for."
--Jim Reed
****
"An outgoing smile is no indication whether there will be an incoming one."
--Jim Reed
****
"A smile may not be your umbrella on a rainy rainy day, but it can help you have fun getting soaked."
--Jim Reed
****
"One gesture is worth an entire rant."
--Jim Reed
****
"Tell someone you love them today---even if it's true."
--Jim Reed
****
"A book...is a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years."
--Carl Sagan
****
"Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first."
--Charles de Gaulle --Richard Nixon
****
"If there were no sins, there wouldn't be art."
--Andre Dubus --Richard Nixon
****
One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been."
--Sophocles
****
"from what we cannot hold the stars are made"
-W.S. Merwin
****
"I have a new philosophy: I'm only going to dread one day at a time."
--Charles Schulz
****
"Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?"
--Harold Pinter
****
"Secret: what we tell everybody to tell nobody."
--Ambrose Bierce
****
"I've been on a constant diet for the last two decades. I've lost a total of 789 pounds. By all accounts I should be hanging from a charm bracelet."
--Erma Bombeck
****
"Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."
--Werner von Braun
****
"She was a sore for sighted eyes."
--Jim Reed
****
"The candy man does not mints his words."
--Jim Reed
****
"She used to ride in the whey back of the milk truck."
--Jim Reed
****
"The art of composition cannot actually be taught, style is as personal as handwriting, and talent itself is a non-transferable gift."
--Arthur Schwartz
****
"Retired officers write autobiographies. Enlisted men write confessions."
--Martin Grimes
****
"Just be yourself is the worst advice you can give some people."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"As she matured with advancing years, Sarah Muffet learned the error of her wheys."
--Jim Reed
****
"The business conference was suddenly overtaken by a serge of suits."
--Jim Reed
****
"We writers are not competent to determine what is important and what is unimportant, so we should get out of the way of what we write and allow other readers and other generations to conduct the critiques. We are merely taking dictation from our innards."
--Jim Reed
****
"When a fugitive, would you rather be at large or on the loose?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Embrace the outdoor nighttime. Once your eyes begin accepting the handiwork of the heavens, you’ll begin to hear the stars. They will speak to you, tell you stories, impart their philosophies and ideas, cause you to grin ear to ear, make you shed a tear in wonder."
--Jim Reed
****
"Road trip! Free at last, I’m on the highway again, reading the signs and billboards and neons and campaigns, marvelling at all those words, words, words that frame my life."
--Jim Reed
****
“I walked into the first place that had a FREE ESTIMATE sign out front and asked the clerk to estimate the mean distance of the Earth to the Sun.”
--Jim Reed
****
"I needed some quiet time so I put on a recording of my favorite mime songs."
--Jim Reed
****
“That feeling of hopelessness only serves your masters.”
--Mort Sahl
****
"Anyone you meet is a 'representative' of themselves until they make themselves known. Then they begin to make sense."
--Viola Davis
****
"I don't want to know what I don't want to know."
--Jim Reed
****
"Alimony is like paying installments on a car after you've totaled it."
--Mike Peters
****
"I like to spend moments with all the people I am."
--Jim Reed
****
"Wherever I am, I always ask myself, What am I missing?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Most human behavior is one part bluster."
--Jim Reed
****
"I'm not as full of myself as I used to be, but I could still use some leakage."
--Jim Reed
****
"Innocent citizens were killed. What about guilty citizens? Were they spared?"
--Jim Reed
****
"He lived just long enough to die."
--Jim Reed
****
"Gratitude makes optimism sustainable."
--Michael J. Fox
****
"Life is a series of peaks and valleys, and it is a fool's errand to try to flatten them out."
--Charles M. Blow
****
"I was afraid to be alone with my pain, because in the quiet, it got loud."
--Charles M. Blow
****
"I am santaclaustrophobic."
--Jim Reed
****
"I hold that the essential trait of a literary classic is if it so textured one can re-read it and usually find something new.
--Henry Alford
****
"Delusions of grandeur make me feel a lot better about myself."
--Jane Wagner
****
"Turn it over to Customer Relations. You don't want to be wasting your time dealing with customers."
--Banker to Employee
****
"I do not want to become so immersed in my daily life that I can no longer see it."
--Jim Reed
****
"She found herself to be at a loss for silence."
--Jim Reed
****
"Not knowing how to mince words, he simply chopped them."
--Jim Reed
****
"Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right."
--Henry Ford
****
"On New Year's Day, all barbeque places are close. It is the National Day for Happy Pigs."
--Jim Reed
****
"Tell someone you love them today, even if it's true."
--Jim Reed
****
"Stomach-coating over-the-counter pills are the equivalent of steering column sealant."
--Jim Reed
****
"One properly-enacted gesture is worth an entire rant."
--Jim Reed
****
"She has no knowledge of her power to influence others. Therefore her influence spreads."
--Jim Reed
****
"She was like a breath of stale air."
--Jim Reed
****
"Are you revved up for the morning and ready to go in?"
--Liz Reed
****
"Naw, I'll just go in."
--Jim Reed
****
"Some people stop listening even before they start listening."
--Jim Reed
****
"Writers are always interrogating the parrots."
--Jim Reed
****
“Write from the point of view of the crazy person.”
--Jim Reed
****
“Try writing exactly what you know will offend or chase away the reader. Then, make it so powerful that readers will return to it and adopt it as THE THING to read.”
--Jim Reed
****
"She was aged to imperfection."
--Jim Reed
****
"Does iceberg lettuce hide nine tenths of its meaning from us?"
--Jim Reed
****
"The curious thing about writers is, some are better at connecting their innards to words and images we mere readers can understand. Some require lessons and practice. Some are born fully formed. If the writing is good, you won’t be able to tell whether it took two minutes or two years to construct that sentence."
--Jim Reed
****
"If you have a better dream to dream, go dream it. Count what you do as more important than what we 'experts' or gurus say. You are your own importance."
--Jim Reed
****
"The truth of writing is that it must be somehow palatable. That is, if you want readers."
--Jim Reed
****
“Once you learn how to write the silences, you begin your most important journey as an author.”
--Jim Reed
****
"Youth has its time, middle age has its time, and so does being an elder. It has its ripeness and its beauty. And somehow we've got to make that sexy."
--Ruby Dee
****
"O call back yesterday, bid time return."
--William Shakespeare
****
"At my age I continue living as if I am going to continue living."
--Jim Reed
****
"Someday sooner than later I will be a faint shadow in someone's fond memory."
--Jim Reed
****
"The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing."
--Tom Stoppard
****
"Our life is the creation of our mind."
--The Dhammapada
****
"I wish to go through life not having to deal with life."
--Jim Reed
****
"At least snails never use salty language."
--Jim Reed
****
"The ghoulish neighbor each year planted his creep myrtles."
--Jim Reed
****
"He that wants money, means and content is without three good friends."
--Shakespeare
****
"When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, 'To know one's self,' and what was easy, "To advise another."
--Diogenes
****
"You can only find so much beauty of worth as you carry."
--Emerson
****
"It is better to wear out than to rust out."
--Bishop Cumberland
****
"To have what we want, is riches; but to be able to do without, is power."
--George Macdonald
****
"From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings."
--Helen Hayes
****
"Forever is the rest of my life. Period."
--Jim Reed
****
"The truth is good, but interesting is better."
--Christopher Walken
****
"I want a ringtone that shouts, Squirrel! Squirrel!"
--Jim Reed
****
"Through reading, I keep my encroaching world at bay by immersing myself in other people's worlds."
--Jim Reed
****
BREAKING NEWS
Who is breaking it and how did this happen?
--Jim Reed
****
"Caress a book today."
--Jim Reed
****
STAY SIX FEET APART
Apart from what?
--Jim Reed
****
"Her expert tease distracted me every time."
--Jim Reed
****
"Is your expertise more expertisey than my expertise?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Things I say today that seemed hackneyed thirty years ago now seem like fresh thoughts for those who are younger and have not read and experienced the same things I have. This means I can re-cycle old material and bring it to a new audience. Why am I wasting my time on new and original thoughts when I can dredge up oldies?"
--Jim Reed
****
"There are writers who write their way away from clarity and understanding, using words that sound alike but have different meanings, without once considering the reader, using acronyms without considering the reader, using terms that mean nothing to the reader."
--Jim Reed
****
"The chip is part of the biography of the cup."
--Jim Reed
****
"When you kiss a dollar bill it doesn't kiss you back."
--from song, ENJOY YOURSELF
****
"Too much time and never enough books."
--Jim Reed
****
"He has learned to stink outside the box."
--Jim Reed
****
"To the writer: Write right, right now! Practice the Write Right Rite daily."
--Jim Reed
****
"That public speaker's grammar is peccable."
--Jim Reed
****
"I wonder whether my patent leather shoes are patented. If so, should they be re-named patented leather shoes?"
--Jim Reed
****
"The endless chatterer is a borer of bad news."
--Jim Reed
****
"Don't delegate your life to others. You are in charge. Own that."
--Jim Reed
****
"I'm living in the safe version of the past."
--Jim Reed
****
"Will you love me just the way I am not?"
--Jim Reed
****
"When someone calls out of the blue for no special reason, other than to check on you, that's a special gift."
--Jim Reed
****
"The secret to happiness is lowering your expectations."
--Garfield
****
"Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms."
--G.K. Chesterton
****
"In the long run---we'll all be dead."
--John Maynard Keynes
****
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
--Viktor Frankl
****
"Anybody can live a life. What's really hard is to pause and actually take notice of a life."
--Jim Reed
****
"An editorial seeks to promote action. An analysis seeks to promote understanding."
--Howard K. Smith
****
"When writing, make your fiction read as if it's actually happening."
--Jim Reed
****
"My hope for all of us is that 'the miles we go before we sleep' will be filled with all the feelings that come from deep caring--delight, sadness, joy, wisdom--and that in all the endings of our life, we will be able to see the new beginnings."
--Fred Rogers
****
"Often when you think you're at the end of something, you're at the beginning of something else."
--Fred Rogers
****
"Sometime they will give a war and nobody will come."
--Carl Sandburg
****
"An exciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie." --Aldous Huxley
****
“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
--Gandhi
****
"If you can mince words, can you also dice them?"
--Jim Reed
****
"I'm headed for the leather store. Does this mean I am leatherbound?"
--Jim Reed
****
"The big Sinatra debate: Doobee or a not-Doobee."
--Jim Reed
****
"An unskilled martial artist is basically a ninjacompoop."
--Jim Reed
****
"The injured lounge lizard had suffered a slipped disco."
--Jim Reed
****
'She was busy picking lints and nits."
--Jim Reed
****
"What everyone thinks but dares not say: Where's the escape clause? I'm searching for the exception to the rule. Why can't I be the exception?"
--Jim Reed
****
"He had his child's Altoids removed. It was like taking candy from a baby."
--Jim Reed
****
Young Superman flexed his Altoids. He seemed curiously strong."
--Jim Reed
****
"Did Babe Ruth ever eat a Baby Ruth?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Does a watch with an expansion band tell flextime?"
--Jim Reed
****
"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
--Jesus
****
"I am always becoming. Always one moment short of became."
--Jim Reed
****
"I never met a person who did not inspire me."
--Jim Reed
****
"I never met a book that wasn't worth examining."
--Jim Reed
****
"Find the good, and praise it."
--Alex Haley
****
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
--Joan Didion
****
"Love is easier said than done."
--Jim Reed
****
"Books are weapons of self-respect, as well as of self-defense."
--Christopher Hitchens
****
"Golf ball-size hail wouldn't be nearly as destructive if golf balls were made smaller." --Argus Hamilton
****
"After I'm dressed, I feel denuded."
-- Jim Reed
****
"I seem to be an allusion."
-- Jim Reed
****
"I know some delusional people. I even know a couple of illusional ones.
-- Jim Reed
****
"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
--Mark Twain
****
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.”
–John Lewis
****
"Do the people choose good representatives?…No, generally they elect men of their own capacity, and flatterers. I haven't the slightest doubt of the advantage that would accrue from limiting the suffrage. The choices would certainly be much better. But it is in the nature of things, in a 'democratic' state, that the qualifications be broadened steadily and irresistibly, until the whole world can vote."
--Alexis de Tocqueville
****
"The cares of the day loosen their hold, the memories of childhood Christmases loom sweetly, the echoes of distant family and friends diminish, and for just a moment, just a moment, the world takes time to bless her heart."
--Jim Reed, from his story "The Blessing of Shiny Quarters"
****
"In-between is a place." --Jim Reed
****
"When is the last time you found a piece of pork in a can of pork and beans?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Better well-read than dead."
--Jim Reed
****
"Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts."
--Ray Bradbury
****
" The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances."
--Robert Louis Stevenson
****
"The most important thing...about creativity is that it is not the result that counts. It is the moment that you create (with your hands or in your head) that counts."
--Astrid van der Hulst & Irene Smith
****
"Happiness is the longing for repetition."
--Milan kundera
****
"There's a man who leads a life of danger.
To everyone he meets he stays a stranger.
With every move he makes,
Another change he takes.
Odds are he won't live to see tomorrow.
Secret Agent Man
Secret Agent Man
They've given you a number.
And tak-en 'way your name."
--P.F. Sloan
****
"Others have given you things to remember,
All that I have is a song..."
--Grantland Rice
****
"Come, lettuce, adore him."
--Jim Reed
****
"Not exactly what I had in mind."
--Jim Reed's epitaph
****
"This is as good as it gets, at least for this crystal-clear one-of-a-kind moment in time."
--Jim Reed
****
"I am suspicious of any situation that smugly folds its arms and defiantly says to me, 'You don’t have to wonder any more. Just consult me–I know all the answers. Depend upon me to resume your thinking for you.'”
--Jim Reed
****
"I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M. So as not to be dead."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"One must wager on the future. To save the life of a single child, no effort is superfluous. To make a tired old man smile is to perform an essential task. To defeat injustice and misfortune, if only for one instant, for a single victim, is to invent a new reason to hope."
--Elie Wiesel
****
"Live every day as though it's your last 'cause one day you'll be right."
--Benny Hill
****
"He was always sticking his nose into forbidden places. He had a deviant septum."
--Jim Reed
****
"Why is Saran Wrap out to get me?"
--Jim Reed
****
"WARNING
This quote may contain
thoughts and ideas."
--Jim Reed
****
"Go your own way."
--Irene Latham
****
"Each day dawns without prior approval."
--Jim Reed
****
"Some people aren't happy being happy."
--Jim Reed
****
"Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet and they have to touch it to be sure."
--George Carlin
****
"Does a 'W' really count if it is in reality just an upside-down 'M'?
--Jim Reed
****
"Working in the haunted house helped her eek out a living."
--Jim Reed
****
"The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity."
--George Orwell
****
"So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information."
--George Orwell
****
“That feeling of hopelessness only serves your masters.”
-- Mort Sahl
****
"How nourishing silence can be."
--Fred Rogers
****
"Unto children in their glee,
All the year is Christmas-tide!"
--Lewis Carroll
****
"It is a great ability to be able to conceal one's ability."
--Rochefoucauld
****
"Music is the one art we all have inside."
--Fred Rogers
****
"To have joy one must share it."
--Lord Byron
****
"My goal today is to learn from the mistakes of people who followed my advice."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"When it comes to learning, indulging your curiosity is just as important as paying attention. After all, isn't curiosity really just another form of attention? Following your curiosity instead of swatting it away is one of the best ways I know to feel connected to more than what's right in front of you."
--Rachel del Valle
****
"When setting the table for dinner guests one must be careful to put aside all cutlery damaged by the garbage disposal."
--Jim Reed
****
"I know all about audiences, they believe everything you say, except when you are telling the truth."
--Mark Twain
****
"I would tell them, 'Remember that everybody who was born has to die, so calm down.' They laughed. If you get more stressed, you'll die faster. So, you better laugh."
--Juan Sanchez Bernal
****
"But the army had no use for boys twelve and thirteen and before I had a chance in another war the desire to kill people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away."
--Mark Twain
****
"Living is life-threatening."
--Jim Reed
****
"The right word is worth a thousand pictures."
--Jim Reed
****
"Whenever I read a poem that moves me, I know I'm not alone in the world."
--Gregory Orr
****
"They're selling like hotcakes. As in, hotcakes don't sell very well."
--Jim Reed
****
"What we play is life."
--Louis Armstrong
****
"It’s 96 degrees outside. On the sidewalk a hot dog is eating a discarded hot dog. Is that something I need to ponder?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Life is a long wait."
--Jim Reed
****
"The world is peopled with people people and non-people people."
--Jim Reed
****
"The best freedom we can hope for is freedom on a leash."
--Jim Reed
****
"Move gently if move you must In this lonely place."
--W.B. Yeats
****
"People have said, 'Don't cry,' to other people for years and years, and all it has ever meant is, 'I'm too uncomfortable when you show your feelings. Don't cry.' I'd rather have them say, 'Go ahead and cry. I'm here to be with you."
--Fred Rogers
****
"Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options."
--Thomas Sowell
****
"A vizier is like a brassiere, only more uplifting."
--Jim Reed
****
"Every day is eventually yesterday."
--Jim Reed
****
"The nicest thing about money is that it never clashes with anything you're wearing."
--Al Rosenstein
****
"There's one thing you can say about baldness---it's neat!"
--Myron Chhen
****
"When you can, always advise people to do what you see they really want to do. Doing what they want to do, they may succeed; doing what they don't want to do, they won't."
--James Gould Cozzens
****
“Bravery comes along as a gradual accumulation of discipline”
--Buzz Aldrin
****
"The more one listens to ordinary conversations the more apparent it becomes that the reasoning faculties of the brain take little part in the direction of the vocal organs."
--Edgar Rice Burroughs
****
“May you never be the reason why someone who loved to sing, doesn’t anymore."
--Sharouk Mustafa Ibrahim
****
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
--Albert Einstein
****
"Don't believe everything you think."
--BJ Miller
****
"The grand essentials of happiness are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for."
--Allan K. Chalmers
****
"My optimism rests on a glad belief in the preponderance of good, and a willing effort always to co-operate with the good, that it may prevail."
--Helen Keller
****
"Never, ever do an artistic favor for a friend. Loan friends money, be there for them in every other way, but don't do them any artistic favors, because you've got to have one area of your life where there's no room for compromise."
--John Cassavetes
****
"The fewer dogmas, the fewer disputes; and the fewer disputes, the fewer misfortunes: if this is not true, I am mistaken."
--Voltaire
****
"The stubborn shall inherit the Earth."
--Jim Reed
****
"He always looked for new ways to live down to his own standards."
--Jim Reed
****
"Last week seems like a week ago."
--Jim Reed
****
"I remember yesterday like it was yesterday."
--Jim Reed
****
"Only one thing matters---holding and being held closely by those you love who love you."
--Jim Reed
****
"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
--Niels Bohr
****
"The best things in life are pricey."
--Jim Reed
****
"My type of person is the one who builds a fallout shelter with a doorbell."
--Dick Gregory
****
"Done beats Perfect every time."
--Jeannie Feldman
****
"We are what we remember of ourselves."
--Michael Anderson
****
"Every castle has a dungeon."
--Cynthia Copeland Lewis
****
"Happiness is a form of Courage."
--George Holbrook Jackson
****
"If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."
--Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
****
"That one great novel I thought I had in me turned out to be gas."
--Jeff Stahler
****
"Books are the stuff of dreams. I cannot imagine life without dreams and books."
--Jim Reed
****
"For me, all people are divided into two groups--those who laugh, and those who smile."
--Vladimir Nabokov
****
"When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high...but won't that obscure your vision?"
--Jim Reed
****
"We all make our choices based on who we are at the moment."
--Angela Bassett
****
"Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention."
--Howard Rheingold
****
"The hardest task an artist faces is not just to achieve self-expression; that almost comes by definition even if it's difficult to hone that self-expression into something good enough to be art."
--Ralph J. Gleason
****
"A purse is but a rag unless you have something in it."
--Herman Melville
****
"I have affixed to me the dust of countless ages. Who am I to disturb history?"
--Pig-Pen
****
"Sucking your thumb without a blanket is like eating a cone without ice cream!"
--Linus
****
"Ignorance is the parent of fear."
--Herman Melville
****
“Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.”
--Carl Sandburg
****
"The most difficult accomplishment each day is for me to try to live up to my own standards."
--Jim Reed
****
"I may be hated when I leave office but I won't be broke."
--Huey P. Long
****
"With great power comes great electricity bill."
--Ben Kayatta
****
"The child is in me still...and sometimes not so still."
--Fred Rogers
****
"By the time a man begins to smell himself, everyone else has been smelling him for three days."
--Confucius
****
"Want to know how to make God laugh? Tell him your plans."
--Robert Altman
****
"You are a story. You are a living book. I must and will turn your pages, even when you’re not looking. Keep on reading, keep on writing. You may discover that the most delightful story of all is you."
--Jim Reed
****
"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."
--Winston Churchill
****
"The problem now is that we know everything about everything except what's going on."
--Lucy Van Pelt
****
"Important things should be written down---if you have the time and the strength."
--Mel Brooks
****
"Don't go into any water where your feet can't touch the bottom."
--Mel Brooks
****
"A jester unemployed is nobody’s fool!"
--Norman Panama & Melvin Frank
****
"Everytime we say goodbye, I wonder why a little
Why the Gods above me, who must be in the know
Think so little of me, they allow you to go."
--Cole Porter
****
"What will the preachers do when the devil is saved?"
--Dave Gardner
****
"There is only one thing evil cannot stand, and that is forgiveness."
--William Orr
****
“Assume a virtue, if you have it not.” --Hamlet
****
"...for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves..."
--Mark Twain
****
"WARNING This quote may contain thoughts and ideas."
--Jim Reed
****
"Each moment is a different everything."
--Jim Reed
****
"THE WRITER IS A TRAPEZE ARTIST MAKING THE OBSERVER THINK, 'I COULD DO THAT!'"
--Jim Reed
****
"Every moment is its own final moment, every moment is a beginning."
--Jim Reed
****
"Never am I less alone than when I am by myself, never am I more active than when I do nothing."
--Cato
****
"You can't let people you don't know decide who you are."
--Nikki Giovanni
****
"If you start to think about your moral and physical condition, you usually find that you are sick."
--Goethe
****
"You don't sweat much for a fat girl."
--Goober Pyle (George Lindsey)
****
"Experience is not what happens to you, it's what you do with what happens to you."
--Aldous Huxley
****
"There are never wanting some persons of violent and undertaking natures, who, so they may have power and business, will take it at any cost."
--Francis Bacon
****
"All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest."
--Arthur C. Clarke
****
"It's part of life, physically or psychologically, to help another human. I am just part of that."
--Jean Le Cam
****
"I think it's a fact of life that personalities don't change much. Throughout your life, there you are."
--Paul McCartney
****
“I’ve been things and seen places.”
--Mae West
****
“Anything that can’t be done in bed isn’t worth doing at all.”
--Groucho Marx
****
"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake."
--Ernest Hemingway
****
"Literature only instructs as it delights."
--John Dryden
****
" 'Cause you're black, folks think you lack
They laugh at you, and scorn you too
What did I do to be so black and blue?"
--Fats Waller
****
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I
thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish
things. Then, after a while I looked around and thought, ‘Well this
sucks,’ and went and dug back out all my childish things.”
--Joey McClure
****
"People have their own story, and not everything they do is about you. It just happened to you; it wasn't about you."
--Nedra Tawwab
****
"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact."
--Sherlock Holmes
****
"People don't care about what you know, unless they know that you care."
--Theodore Roosevelt
****
"Every one of us is an artist by default, reinventing the world each time we remember something."
--Ben Brantley
****
"I'm only an expert when I'm not around people who know more than I do."
--Jim Reed
****
"Before I succumb to impulse, I ask myself, Am I better than this?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Sometimes it is helpful to pause, stop the flurry and flow of daily activity, and ask myself, Am I being worthy of life?"
--Jim Reed
****
"I look forward to the wonderful possibility that I might awaken tomorrow morning."
--Jim Reed
****
"I have to remember that I don't have to barter my worth. I was just born with it."
--Viola Davis
****
"You say, 'That smells delicious.' Do you ever say, 'That tastes fragrant.'?"
--Jim Reed
****
"What is mind? No matter, what is matter? Nevermind."
--Thomas Hewitt Key
****
"Do not accept a single statement herein made without first proving it. Never apply a single rule herein stated without first from personal application and tests ascertaining its truth; for out of skepticism, criticism, and inquiry come analytical argument and research; and out of argument, growth of knowledge."
--Gerald Elton Fosbroke
****
"The grins of the people are the nightmares of the dictators."
--Liu Xiaobo
****
"Every joke is a tiny revolution.'
--George Orwell
****
"I love me just the way I should have been."
--Jim Reed
****
"I am the only person I know who is just like me."
--Jim Reed
****
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
--Edmund Burke
****
"Light a candle for the Devil too: you never know."
--Russian proverb
****
"Life has taught me the world is NOT full of idiots, but they are strategically placed so that you come across one every day."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles."
--Audrey Hepburn
****
"I don't mind dying, I mind dying with unkept promises."
--J.B.S. Haldane
****
“Prejudice is a natural reaction to the unknown. Racism is a premeditated sickness.”
--Albert Woodfox
****
“I’ve been things and seen places.”
--Mae West
****
“Anything that can’t be done in bed isn’t worth doing at all.” --Groucho Marx
****
"All I really wanted to do was give people the relief of laughing."
--Kurt Vonnegut
****
"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."
--James Michener
****
"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once."
--Charles Lamb
****
"You ought never to do wrong when people are looking."
--Mark Twain
****
“An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”
--Gandhi
****
“Bless me, Father, for I have sneezed.”
--Jim Reed
****
“I am always having depressing experiences, but I never give them outward expression. It’s as bad as looking one’s age.”
--Saki
****
“Great events have incalculable consequences.”
--Victor Hugo
****
“Even if you do paint your masterpiece, what will you do then? Well, obviously you have to paint another masterpiece.”
--Bob Dylan
****
“You must promise not to understand me. When you try to understand me it spoils everything.”
--J.M. Coetzee
****
“If somebody doesn’t agree with your talent, if somebody doesn’t agree with your dreams or your wants, it doesn’t make them a hater. It makes them a person who thinks differently.”
--Kevin Hart
****
“All books reveal perfection, by what they are or what they are not.”
--Christopher Moore
****
"The secret of Christmas is not the things you do at Christmas time but the Christmas things you do all year through."
--James Van Heusen & Sammy Cahn
****
“Little brooks could not flow, without rain from the sky;
Nor a poet get on without dreams.”
--Dorothy Parker
****
“I keep a diary to provide evidence to myself that my brain is still functioning, to prove I’m alive, so to speak.”
--Jim Reed
****
“We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.”
--Samuel Johnson
****
“The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.”
--Fran Lebowitz
****
“It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.”
--A. J. Holmes
****
“A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world: everyone you meet is your mirror.”
--Ken Keyes Jr.
****
“To others we are not ourselves but a performer in their lives cast for a part we do not even know that we are playing.”
--Elizabeth Bibesco
****
“A committee of one gets things done.”
--Joe Ryan
****
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”
--Winston S. Churchill
****
“A variety of nothing is superior to a monotony of something.”
--J. P. F. Richter
****
“Won’t you come into my garden? I would like my roses to see you.”
--Richard S. Sheridan
****
“Look for the ridiculous in everything, and you will find it.”
--Jules Renard
****
“Egoist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.”
--Ambrose Bierce
****
“Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.”
--Michel de Montaigne
****
“You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.”
--Beverly Sills
****
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
--Arthur Conan Doyle
****
"In those years, people will say
we lost track of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I"
--Adrienne Rich
****
"To whom it may concern. Dear Whom:"
--Snoopy
****
"No one can dub you with dignity, that's yours to claim."
--Odetta Holmes
****
"The best jazz says, 'Gonna live forever; don't believe in death.'"
--Ray Bradbury
****
"We must earn life once it has been awarded us."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"All prayers work. It's just that sometimes we don't like the answer."
--Val Kilmer
****
"Covering your face is a symbol that you belong to a civilization and that you're not necessarily a superbeing whose contrarianism can outthink a virus."
--John Hodgman
****
"Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say that my glory was I had such friends."
--William Butler Yeats
****
"You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand."
--E. O. Wilson
****
"Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say that my glory was I had such friends."
--William Butler Yeats
****
"I'm terrible at keeping secrets. Damn it---I wasn't supposed to tell you that!"
--Stephen Colbert
****
"We are visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety or one hundred years at the very most. During that period, we must try to do something good, something useful, with our lives. If you contribute to other people's happiness, you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life."
--Dalai Lama
****
"I seek, in the reading of books, only to please myself by an irreproachable diversion; or if I study, it is for no other science than what treats of the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to live and die well."
--Montaigne
****
"Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of."
--Robert Benchley
****
"An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward."
--Herman Melville
****
"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear---not absence of fear."
--Mark Twain
****
"Our sanity is sculpted by what we do all day."
--Jim Reed
****
"He eschewed the jungle method of attempting to commit intellectual mayhem upon any of his listeners who might fail to share his opinions."
--Clarence Cason
****
"Don't be afraid of anyone who knows more than you, they are future you and that's okay.
--Jess Parsons
****
"Daydreaming is a tremendously powerful tool for exploring all kinds of possible worlds without committing ourselves to them or getting into trouble."
--Jerome Singer
****
"Some people think that friends are always happy, always having fun. Well that's not true---friends often have hard times and sad times. But friends can come together again and again and build a stronger and stronger friendship between each other."
--Fred Rogers
****
"We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the Earth."
--John Lubbock
****
"Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
****
"A work of art can never be taken for granted, and so forgotten; neither can it ever be disproved and therefore thrown aside. Science is soon out of date, art is not."
--Aldous Huxley
****
"Every cloud has a silver lining and every plate of vegetable soup is filled with vegetables."
--W. C. Fields
****
"For the first time I feel like I'm skatin' on thick ice."
--Rod McKuen
****
“When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.”
--Will Rogers
****
"I wonder whether my own shadow is scared of me."
--Jim Reed
****
"Somewhere in my past is at least one flea I've hurt."
--Jim Reed
****
"We are all tangled up with myth and hope and dread and beautiful lies and dormant truths."
--Jim Reed
****
“There are darknesses in life and there are lights. You are one of the lights.”
--Bram Stoker
****
"I can out-shallow you anytime."
--Jim Reed
****
"A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul."
--Aldous Huxley
****
"The person who can't dance says the band can't play."
--Yiddish proverb
****
"The Truth Shall Make You Fret."
--Terry Pratchett
****
"Isn't it strange how much we know if only we ask ourselves instead of somebody else?"
--Robert Bloch
****
"What was the good of having power if you were too wise to use it."
--Ursula K. Le Guin
****
I've found that raising my voice is the next best thing to being right.
--Argus Hamilton
****
"It's always later than you think."
--Jim Reed
****
"There is a new question to every answer."
--Yiddish proverb
****
"I can't do everything at once. I can't even do one thing at once."
--Jim Reed
****
"After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so---have found that none of these finally satisfy or permanently wear---what remains? Nature remains."
--Walt Whitman
****
"If we don't change direction soon, we'll wind up where we're going."
--Irwin Corey
****
"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility."
--James Thurber
****
“But such is the nature of man that as soon as you begin to force him to do a thing, from that moment he begins to seek ways by which he can avoid doing the thing you are trying to force upon him."
William Crawford Gorgas
****
“Fear makes come true that which one is afraid of.”
Viktor E. Frankl
****
"Everything’s irrelevant
Except the ears of elephants
They’re ear elephant"
--Joey McClure
****
"For a person who doesn't know much, he sure doesn't know much."
--Jim Reed
****
"You can't not know what you know, and you can't unfeel what you feel."
--Lily Burana
****
"I hope reincarnation will allow me to make the mistakes I never got around to making in this current life."
--Jim Reed
****
"There is nothing not to write about."
--Jim Reed
****
"This is true of all old men, that the recent past is misted, while distant scenes of memory are clear and brightly coloured."
--Mary Stewart
****
"You've got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
--Thelonious Monk
****
"Enough is seldom enough."
--Jim Reed
****
"Music is a conspiracy to commit beauty."
--Jose Abreu
****
"We should indeed keep calm in the face of difference and live our lives in a state of inclusion and wonder at the diversity of humanity."
--George Takei
****
“Each day, try to find something not to be annoyed by.”
--Jim Reed
****
"I don't know everything. I only know what I know. As for the rest, you can take it from here."
--Jim Reed
****
"I'm not a complete idiot. Some parts are missing."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"Few novels written to a formula have any life. That is because real novels are written from the solar plexus."
--Doris Lessing
****
“Surround yourself with the dreamers and the doers, the believers and thinkers, but most of all, surround yourself with those who see the greatness within you, even when you don’t see it yourself.”
--Edmund Lee
****
"The tasks that have been entrusted to us are often difficult. Almost everything that matters is difficult, and everything matters."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
****
"it is better to be part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty"
--Don Marquis
****
"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"
--Kurt Vonnegut
****
"Gentlemen, I have just completed my new novel. It is so good, I am not even going to send it to you. Why don't you just come and get it?"
--Snoopy
****
"I taught millions to read but not one to sin."
--Noah Webster
****
"I can tell people are judgmental just by looking at them."
--Jackie Muckenfuss
****
"It has been many years since I first occurred."
--Jim Reed
****
"We must make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish."
--George Washington
****
"This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans just arrived.."
--Richard Powers
****
"The atomic bomb is a new weapon of great destructive power. It resembles bombs of the more conventional type and so far as its explosive effect is the result of the rapid liberation of a large quantity of energy in a relatively small space. But it differs from other bombs in three important respects. First, the amount of energy released by an atomic bomb is a thousand and more times as great as that produced by the most powerful TNT bombs; second, the explosion of the bomb is accompanied by highly-penetrating, and deleterious, invisible rays, in addition to intense light, heat and light; and third, emitting radiations capable of producing harmful consequences in living organisms."
--J. O. Hirschfelder
****
"What moves me most in a work of literature is recognition. When I must stop my reading and say to myself: Yes, this is true. It is just like this. I knew, but I did not know that I knew until I read it here."
--Hjavier Marias
****
"I think, therefore I might be."
--Jim Reed
****
"I never get nowhere but I pay my own fare all the way."
--Nelson Algren (spoken by his fictitious character, Frankie Machine)
****
"We live in a society whose bums and tramps are better men than the preachers and the politicians and the otherwise respectables."
--Norman Podhoretz
****
"The rest smelled musty, smelled of the dust of government offices into which the life of a man sinks as into a quicksand."
--Antoine du Saint-Exupery
****
As a pilot contemplating the spectacle of clouds over mountains, "I was beginning to realize that a spectacle has no meaning except as seen through the glass of a culture, a civilization, a craft."
--Antoine du Saint-Exupery
****
"Learn to milk whatever success you had. You can keep doing the same thing over and over as long as you have a sense of humor about not having a new idea."
--John Waters
****
"We humans know many more truths than any other animal, but we also believe in much more nonsense. We are both the smartest and the most gullible inhabitants of planet Earth."
--Yuval Noah Harari
****
"Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth."
--Ursula K. Le Guin
****
"Natasha: THE SKY IS RED
Ronnie: I WISH THERE WEREN'T THESE STREETLIGHTS, THEN WE COULD REALLY SEE THE SKY
Natasha: I WISH THE SKY WAS DOWN HERE
Ronnie: AND THEN WE COULD FLY ON IT
Natasha: I WOULD LIE ON IT"
--R.D. Laing
****
"Temptation is always so...tempting."
--Jim Reed
****
"My enemy cannot take this moment from me. It's the one thing my enemy cannot take. For the moment is already gone, too late to steal."
--Jim Reed
****
"This present moment, short as it is, is a part of eternity, and the dearest part, since it is our own inalienably."
--Mary Shelley
****
"I'll read anything, including the back of a cereal box. Why would you limit yourself? You never know when you'll chance upon something wonderful."
--Ruth Reichl
****
"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid."
--Benjamin Franklin
****
"If precocious is a word, why isn't postcocious a word?"
--Jim Reed
****
"If you keep an open mind won't your thoughts tumble out?"
--Jim Reed
****
"The time comes in the life of each of us when we realize that death awaits us as it awaits others, that we will receive at the end neither preference nor exemption."
--William March
****
"Why is this thus? What is the reason of this thusness?"
--Artemus Ward
****
"They drink with impunity, or anybody who invites them."
--Artemus Ward
****
"To die would be an awfully big adventure."
--J.M. Barrie
****
"Be virtuous and you will be eccentric."
--Mark Twain
****
"Might there not be some power in gentleness we dream not of?"
--Stephen Phillips
****
"A little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness of fools."
--John Ruskin
****
"He has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful."
--Sydney Smith
****
"The desire for writing grows with writing."
--Erasmus
****
"Riches increase to a monstrous extent; yet there is always something, I know not what, wanting to our still imperfect fortune."
--Horace
****
"First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity."
--George Bernard Shaw
****
Haiku:
"Achoo! Gesundheit!
I just sneezed some poetry!
Achoo! Gesundheit!"
****
“Surround yourself with the dreamers and the doers, the believers and thinkers, but most of all, surround yourself with those who see the greatness within you, even when you don’t see it yourself.”
--Edmund Lee
****
"A diamond ain't nothin' but a piece o' coal that's stuck with it."
--Dave Gardner
****
"Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely."
--Yuval Noah Harari
****
"Don't take Twitter seriously. If you ignore it on Twitter it didn't happen. It's like going into a toilet stall and arguing with graffiti. If you don't go there, it doesn't exist."
--Ricky Gervais
****
"Climb every molehill."
--Jim Reed
****
"Your life is actually defined by how you make use of your moment of greatest adversity."
--David Brooks
****
“Dreams, books, are each a world.”
--Wordsworth
****
"It ain't braggin' if you really done it."
--Dizzy Dean
****
"The popularity of a book affords no certain test of its greatness: that, as readers grow in numbers, there will ever be an increasing demand for books that can be enjoyed without effort; that a truly great book is a rare production and always will be; that the excessive literary activity of an age may add to the number of highly cultivated authors, without adding much to the list of those who are destined to live."
--Andrew James Miller
****
"So much information and misinformation swirl by so quickly that it's easy to confuse the two and even easier to convince yourself of whatever it is you PREFER to believe."
--Frank Bruni
****
"When I leave for work in the morning, my son gives me a running hug. So I'll walk out the door and even though I have the whole wonderful day ahead of me, I know for a fact that I've already had the best part of my day."
--Seth Meyers
****
"Politicians just gonna answer the question they wish you'd asked and they're going to say it the way they practiced it and oftentimes it's something they've said a bunch so there's the lack of crackle you want during an interview."
--Seth Meyers
****
"I never won an argument with my wife. The one time I thought I did, I found out the argument wasn't over yet."
--Jimmy Carter
****
"In this day and age, if you talk about anything you're misinterpreted into something else. So if I was a god, I'd be the god of tolerance. Not a vengeful god."
--Ian McShane
****
"Success is believing in yourself, then convincing everyone else that you're right."
--Kermit the Frog
****
"People are not supposed to be stupid."
--Marie Peerson
****
“Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.”
--Edward R. Murrow
****
“When you rest you rust.”
--Joshua Johnson’s grandmother
****
“The wondrous thing about being human—the beauty and banality of it—is that we all tend to dwell on the same handful of elemental struggles, joys and sorrows.”
--Maria Popova
****
"Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong."
--Russell Baker
****
"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."
—Andy Warhol
****
"History never repeats itself, but it often rhymes."
--Mark Twain
****
"History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another."
--Max Beerbohm
****
"Politics doesn't have to be uncivil and nasty."
--George H.W. Bush
****
The purpose of all my writing is to pose the question, “Is this just me?"
--Jim Reed
****
"One of those truly magical things that human beings can do together is to create harmony, to create a third thing that wasn't there before the two decided to cooperate."
--John C. Reilly
****
"I can't believe it's been a year since I didn't become a better person."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"If you are doing all the talking, you are boring somebody."
--Helen Gurley Brown
****
"Winning an argument does not mean one has convinced one's opponent."
--Chinese proverb
****
"At the end of every year, I add up the time I have spent on the phone on hold and subtract it from my age. I don't count that time as really living."
--Rita Rudner
****
"Poetry before sleep is essential, like flossing the word-loving parts of the brain."
--Barbara Kingsolver
****
"The first sigh of love is the last of wisdom."
--Antoine Bret
****
"A book...is a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years."
--Carl Sagan
--Richard Nixon
****
"Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first."
--Charles de Gaulle
--Richard Nixon
****
"If there were no sins, there wouldn't be art."
--Andre Dubus
--Richard Nixon
****
"Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself."
--Richard Nixon
****
"There is no future like the present."
--Jim Reed
****
"One day I will write a book about things not meant for what they will become."
--Jim Reed
****
"I may not have always said what they would have liked for me to say, but they knew it was was meant in good nature."
--Will Rogers
****
"Of course a writer must not let his Title interfere with what he is writing about."
--Will Rogers
****
"She seemed a thing immortal, out of space, as if the heavenly, perfected creature had been sent down to earth, in scorn of nature."
--Geoffrey Chaucer
****
"I can make amazingly bad fried eggs, and in spite of what people tell me about this method and that, I continue to make amazingly bad fried eggs; tough, with edges like some kind of dirty starched lace,and a taste part sulphur and part singed newspaper."
--MFK Fisher
****
"You can't roller skate in a buffalo herd but you can be happy if you've a mind to."
--Roger Miller
****
"Let's face it, the Wild West would have had a lot less shootings if the architects had made the towns big enough for everybody."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"I know you feel like you're displaced, like you don't belong anywhere, but the truth is you belong to all the places you're from and all the places you'll go, and they all belong to you."
--Maya Salam
****
"The Internet--whose idea was it to to put all the idiots on earth in touch with each other?"
P.J. O'Rourke
****
"In an atmosphere of liberty, artists and patrons are free to think the unthinkable and create the audacious; they are free to make both horrendous mistakes and glorious celebrations."
--Ronald Reagan
****
"An apparently intractable fact of life is that our thoughts are inaccessible to one another. Our skulls are like space helmets; we are trapped in our heads, unable to convey the quiddity of our sensations."
--Jason Pontin
****
"Jazz will endure as long as people listen with their feet instead of their ears."
--John Phillip Sousa
****
"I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past."
--Patrick Henry
****
"We never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough."
--William Blake
****
"If you make people think they're thinking they'll love you. If you really make them think, they'll hate you."
--Don Marquis
****
"Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it."
--Ernest Holmes
****
"There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative person having nothing to communicate."
--Jonathan Swift
****
"A single conversation across the table with a wise person is worth a month's study of books."
--Chinese proverb
****
"It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds."
--James Russell Lowell
****
"Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatest which does not bow before children."
--Kahlil Gibran
****
"There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."
--Bill Clinton
****
"Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."
--Clifford Geertz
****
"I plan to die happy. Except for the dying part."
--Jim Reed
****
"It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past."
--C.S. Lewis
****
"Never slap a man who's chewing tobacco."
--Will Rogers
****
"Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort."
--John Ruskin
****
"As I grow older I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do."
--Andrew Carnegie
****
"Education is that which remains when one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
--Albert Einstein
****
"Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away."
--Geothe
****
"I've never doubted that humanity is a privilege, even if we, as the animals who think, are also the creatures who agitate, plot and fantasize."
--Pico Ayer
****
"Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is free to combat it."
--Thomas Jefferson
****
"The greatest danger in turbulent times is not the turbulence, but to act with yesterday's logic."
--Peter Drucker
****
"People usually run amok because walking amok would take too long."
--Chronicle Books
****
"If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
--Lewis Carroll
****
"Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds."
--William Shakespeare
****
"If you find yourself in a powder keg, the last thing you want to be is a struck match." --Christopher Solomon
****
"I like to brag about not being a braggart."
--Jim Reed
****
"I'm hungry now, but snacktime is later, so why can't later be now?"
--Mo Rocca
****
"It's never too late to give up."
--Garfield
****
"Write down your thoughts and feelings and inspirations. They just might mean something to your reader. Refrain from making judgments about what you write. You the writer are not competent to determine what is important and what is unimportant, so get out of the way of what you write and allow others to absorb or critique. You are merely taking dictation from your innards. Let it out. Let it happen!"
--Jim Reed
****
“If you haven’t any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.”
—Bob Hope
****
"Moral elevation gains strength when it is scarce."
--David Brooks
****
"Books are a uniquely portable magic."
--Stephen King
****
"My idea of hell is being stuck somewhere without a book."
--Craig Johnson
****
"The great thing about the future is that you can't be wrong about it in the present."
--Scott Adams
****
"There is no idea so bad that it cannot be made to look brilliant with the proper application of fonts and color."
--Scott Adams
****
"Honesty is always the best policy for people who have already given their notice and will never need a job reference."
--Scott Adams
****
"There's no need for any writer to make the world a funny place. It is a funny place."
--Richard Russo
****
"To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle" — Walt Whitman
****
"Sitting quietly, doing nothing. Spring comes, and grass grows by itself." --Zenrin Kushu
****
"Your True home is in the here and the now."
--Thich Nhat Hanh
****
“Filling time is about all we do, whether or not we actually do anything.”
--Jim Reed
****
”Time is ephemeral but strangely real–no other unit of measure makes as much sense.”
--Jim Reed
****
“One task of the writer is to record all the disappearing reference points.”
--Jim Reed
****
“As I have traversed all these years, with myself as traveling companion, having never deserted Me, isn’t it about time i made friends with Me?”
--Jim Reed
****
“How many years will it take for you to become the person you always were?”
--Jim Reed
****
“I can’t get very far without my body.”
--Jim Reed
****
“What it is possible for me to become is beneath my hopes.”
--Jim Reed
****
“I seem to rely upon other people to make me feel bad. Why can’t I just feel bad on my own?”
--Jim Reed
****
“I believe in special moments and the disconnected interstices that come between them.”
--Jim Reed
****
“The flash of inspiration is the only truth, the only beauty, worth recording.”
--Jim Reed
****
“To pay appropriate homage to life it is important to thank Goodness whenever possible. Thank Goodness!”
--Jim Reed
****
" If my mind wanders, it can't get far because it is tethered to the body bag within which I reside."
--Jim Reed
****
"Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once."
--John Wheeler
****
"There is a big difference between being ignorant and being stupid."
--Sonia Sotomayor
****
"I'm an optimist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way."
--Carl Sandburg
****
"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading."
--Lao Tzu
****
"Would that I had been born fully grown, fully mature. Bid misspent time return!"
--Jim Reed
****
"I lived half my life in the atmosphere driven by Soviet propaganda. The golden principle was: If you repeat a lie a hundred times it becomes the truth."
---Vera Jourova
****
"Holy Mother, I pray you to grant me enough fish that I may eat and feed my family, have sufficient left to give some away, and then enough more so that those who need may steal from me."
--Prayer of a Provencal fisherman
****
"The more we erode language, the more we erode complex thought and the easier we are to control."
--Ramin Bahrani
****
"In the life of every one there is a limited number of unhappy experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in long years after they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was served by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life."
--James Weldon Johnson
****
"I just hope my epitaph isn't: She did the bare minimum."
--Paula Poundstone
****
"An actual physical object is worthy of preservation because it is there to remind us of what happened when, what happened where, and what when and where felt like in the palm of a hand."
--Jim Reed
****
"No occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often."
--Mark Twain
****
"What do I have that I can let people take away without hurting? What can I give that I still keep?"
--Ray Bradbury
****
"Wisdom imparted by the wind would be called a wind advisory."
--Jim Reed
****
"Innocent bystanders. Where is the proof they are innocent? "
--Jim Reed
****
"Nothing is on the level."
--David Mamet
****
"My greatest hope is that Science will find Cheese Curls to be a sure path to a healthy life."
--Jim Reed
****
"He eschewed his standards and took the Leap of Unfaithfulness."
--Jim Reed
****
"It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."
--Oscar Wilde
****
"Ray Bradbury taught me to re-read stuff as often as I wanted. Double your pleasure, double your fun. I felt that all would be revealed in his stories."
--Luis Alberto Urrea
****
"I run screaming when I see an Ayn Rand book creeping up the alley looking for victims."
--Luis Alberto Urrea
****
"Unfortunately you are in a hurry, in a hurry, no doubt, to go and do things which you would much better leave undone. People are always in a hurry, and leave the moment when they ought to be arriving."
--Marcel Proust
****
"Everyone has a story. Nobody's cardboard."
--Margaret Bowman
****
“Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.”
--Octavia E. Butler
****
"To the perfectionist, even things that are not worth doing are worth doing well."
--Ashleigh Brilliant
****
"No correspondence is intended between any institutions or characters in this book and any real institutions or people, living, dead, or wandering the night in ghostly torment."
--Douglas Adams
****
“You can lead a leopard to water…but you can’t make him change his spots in the middle of the stream.”
--Jim Pate
****
"There are several customary ways to pronounce the word "Uranus." Both "YOOR-ah-nus" and "your-AY-nus" are acceptable. Astronomers tend to vary their pronunciation based on the maturity level of their audience."
--Dean Regas
****
"To write is human, to edit is divine."
--Stephen King
****
"Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light"
--Denis Johnson
****
"I think all this talk about age is foolish. Every time I'm one year older, everyone else is too."
--Gloria Swanson
****
"Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young."
--Fred Astaire
****
"Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been."
--Mark Twain
****
"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
--Mark Twain
****
"Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form."
--Andre Maurois
****
"Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it has fresh peaches in it."
--Alice Walker
****
"Half of our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save."
--Will Rogers
****
"He decided to live forever, or die in the attempt."
--Joseph Heller
****
"You're only young once, but you can be immature all your life."
--Germaine Greer
****
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
--Martin Luther King Jr.
****
"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a butterfly."
--Burges Johnson
****
"You can stimulate your hair by using castor oil three ounces, brandy one ounce. The brandy will no doubt fly right to your head, and either greatly assist your hair or it will reconcile you to your lot."
--Edgar Wilson Nye
****
"Wagner's music is not half as bad as it sounds."
--Edgar Wilson Nye
****
"To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching."
--Henri Frederic Amiel
****
"Music is the most direct and untrammeled exponent of human emotion."
--Fritz Kreisler
****
"To be great, you have to find a giant who will let you stand on his shoulders."
--Richard Pryor
****
"It reminded me of the irretrievable moment in childhood when we have not a care in the world."
--Jason Segal
****
"While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
--Eugene V. Debs
****
" It says in the Bible that God made man in one day, and it shows."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"I remember being in a church and listening to Jesse Jackson say that you can't get into heaven without a permission slip from the poor."
--Michael Moore
****
"I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do."
--Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul)
****
"You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth."
--Evan Esar
****
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
--Kurt Vonnegut
****
"What is it I know that I have yet to learn?"
--Jim Reed
****
"If you speak the unspeakable, it isn't."
--Jim Reed
****
"I am the last Me standing."
--Jim Reed
****
"Filling time is anything we do or do not do."
--Jim Reed
****
"If you build it, there is no telling whether anybody will come."
--Jim Reed
****
"Sooner or later is way too early."
--Jim Reed
****
"I learned the great secret of the show business—knowing when to get off. It's the fellow who knows when to quit that the audience wants more of."
--Will Rogers
****
"Sometimes I think books are the only friends worth having."
--Bill Watterson
****
"If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while."
--Tom Lehrer
****
"NOT knowing when the dawn will come I open every door."
--Emily Dickinson
****
"I am a second-hand vegetarian in that I eat cows, and cows eat grass."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"I write, not for children, but for the child-like, whether they be five, or fifty, or seventy-five."
--George MacDonald
****
"Equality is pure ideology, not inductively derived from nature, but a product of humankind's loftier impulses to free itself from brute, natural conditions."
--E. Culpepper Clark
****
"There goes the neighborhood."
--Rodney Dangerfield's epitaph
****
"Her words do show her wit incomparable."
--William Shakespeare
****
"You were born under a charitable star."
--William Shakespeare
****
"My salad days, when I was green in judgment."
--William Shakespeare
****
"I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: 'No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.'"
--Eleanor Roosevelt
****
"Her shallowness ran deep."
--Jim Reed
****
"To create a class of things means automatically creating another class which are not those things."
--Jay Haley
****
"I'm so skeptical I'm skeptical about my skepticism."
--Jim Reed
****
"What you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations."
--Saul Steinberg
****
"A relationship becomes psychopathological when one of the two people will maneuver to circumscribe the other's behavior while indicating he is not."
--Jay Haley
****
"If you wish to learn from the theoretical physicist anything about the methods which he uses, I would give you the following piece of advice: Don't listen to his words, examine his achievements, for to discover in that field the constructions of his imagination appears so necessary and so natural that he is apt to treat them not as the creations of his thoughts but as given realities."
--Albert Einstein
****
"No-one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it to any one else."
--Charles Dickens
****
"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."
--Confucius
****
"True friends visit us in prosperity only when invited, but in adversity they come without invitation."
--Theophrastus
****
"My books quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind."
--Montaigne
****
"Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns. I am thankful that thorns have roses."
--Alphonse Karr
****
"The most wily and fearsome of your enemies is going to turn out to be your self."
--Bono
****
"Finish what you write. Don't join a writer's club and sit around having coffee while reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it."
--Jerry Pournelle
****
"Never does a man portray his own character more vividly than in his manner of portraying another's."
--Jean Paul Richter
****
"Error is none the better for being common, nor truth the worse for having lain neglected."
--John Locke?
****
"If but my faults could trick and please my wits, I'd rather seem a fool at ease than to be wise and rage."
--Horace
****
"What good is the knowledge of things if by it we lose the repose and tranquility we should enjoy without it?"
--Montaigne
****
"Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject."
--Montaigne
****
"Things observed always come together in the brain with a delay, so that we basically live in the past. Everything we see has already happened."
--Karl Ove Knausgaard
****
"The greater part of poetry is about the stars; and very justly, for they are themselves the most classical of poets."
--Robert Louis Stevenson
****
"The best that is in us is better than we can understand."
--Robert Louis Stevenson
****
"The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer."
--Steve Martin
****
"No man is useless while he has a friend."
--Robert Louis Stevenson
****
"There is no relationship between being smart and being wise."
--Jordan Peterson
****
"I have gone back to paper, savoring each page and continuing to love that the books displayed on my bookshelves chart the journey of my life."
--Jane Green
****
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
--Douglas Adams
****
"Jealousy is a secret avowal of inferiority."
--Jean Baptiste Massillon
****
"What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior."
--Walt Whitman
****
"What moves me most in a work of literature is the writing itself. I'm always moved by beautiful writing by someone who catches the music
and the poetry of a moment. It doesn't really matter to me what the subject is, or even what happens, just that it's beautifully done."
--Don Winslow
****
"Private intolerance can go only as far as the indifference of the majority of the citizens of a free country will allow it to go,
and no further, whereas official intolerance is practically almighty."
--Hendrik van Loon
****
"I don't think there is any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it."
--Nick Laird
****
"To know one place exhaustively is to glimpse the cosmos."
--Thoreau
****
"There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others."
--Jane Austen
****
"What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
****
"Love is not thinking, but being."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
****
"The only way we'll ever know what it's like to be you is if you work your best at being you as often as you can, and keep
reminding yourself that's where home is."
--Bill Murray
****
"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the
Internet, we know this is not true."
--Robert Wilensky
****
"We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter."
--Denis Diderot
****
"To see a World in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."
--William Blake
****
"MIND YOUR HEAD" --British sign over low doorway
****
"People don't know what they want until you show it to them."
--Steve Jobs
****
"A play by Shakespeare moves through time, measures action against motive and shows us consequence. We might enter the theater in
rash spirits, but we leave it consumed by thought."
--Howard Jacobson
****
"So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your tv set away,
And in its place you can install,
A lovely bookshelf on the wall."
--Roald Dahl
****
"Remember that no matter how selfish, how cruel, how unfeeling you have been today, every time you take a breath, you make a flower happy."
--Mort Sahl
****
"If you've never been bad, how will you know when you're being good?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Live every day like it's your last, and one day you'll be right."
--Woody Allen
****
"Try to be useful to somebody and try to be kind."
-Barack Obama
****
"The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two."
--Dashiell Hammett
****
"If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair."
--Shirley Chisholm
****
"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
--Mark Twain
****
"The tapestry of life's story is woven with the threads of life's ties ever joining and breaking."
--Rabindranath Tagore
****
"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know."
--Sai
****
"The place is here. The Way leads everywhere."
-Dogen Zenji
****
"The only reason you mock something is when it doesn't live up to the ideal."
-Jon Stewart
****
"The one thing that doesn't bide by majority rule is a person's conscience."
-Atticus Finch
****
"I take a simple view of living. It is keep your eyes open and get on with it."
--Laurence Olivier
****
"Life…is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be."
--Jose Ortega y Gasset
****
"Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head."
--Mark Twain
****
"What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?"
--Rousseau
****
"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious."
--Brendan Gill
****
"A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth."
--Niels Bohr
****
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
--Pablo Picasso
****
"Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself."
--Chinese Proverb
****
"I write fiction because it is a beautiful place to hide."
--Jami Attenburg
****
"Why do people only have flights of fancy? Can't one occasionally enjoy a seavoyage of fancy or a hike of fancy?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Acceptance is the only real test of a civilized world."
--Jim Reed
****
"Not all those who wander are lost."
--J.R.R. Tolkien
****
"To perceive an object abstractly means NOT to perceive some aspects of it. It clearly implies selection of some attributes, rejection of other attributes, creation or distortion of still others. We make it what we wish. We create it."
-Abraham Maslow
****
"The normal adjustment of the average, common sense, well-adjusted person implies a continued successful rejection of much of the depths of human nature, both conative and cognitive. To adjust well to the world of reality means a splitting of the person. It means that the person turns his back on much in himself because it is dangerous…by so doing, he loses a great deal too, for these depths are also the source of all his joys, his ability to play, to love, to laugh, and, most important…to be creative. By protecting himself against the hell within himself, he also cuts himself off from the heaven within."
-Abraham Maslow
****
A LOVE STORY
by Erich Beagle
"Do you love me?" she asked.
"Of course," he said.
"Do you really love me?" she asked.
"Of course," he said.
"Do you really really love me?" she asked.
"No," he said.
"Do you love me?" she asked.
"Of course," he said.
So she asked no more.
--Snoopy
****
"The role of fiction is to rehearse one's life."
--Lois Lowry
****
"You can't go home again because nobody else is where you are now."
--Jim Reed
****
"Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age."
--Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
****
"Some of us are here on earth to make sure the books survive even if we don't."
--Jim Reed
****
"A book that is shut, is but a Block."
--Thomas Fuller
****
"The heart perceives that which the eye cannot see."
--Algazali
****
"Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else."
--Will Rogers
****
"The most completely lost of all days is that on which one has not laughed."
--Sebastien Chamfort
****
(1) Nobody can ever get too much approval
(2)No matter how much you want or need, they, whoever they are, don't want to
let you get away with it, whatever it is.
(3)Sometimes you get away with it.
--John Leonard
****
"The curse of youth is that they think they have time."
--Jim Reed
****
"All I need is a nice bed and a private jet."
--Jim Gaffigan
****
"Of all the Duddies I know, I am the Fuddiest."
--Jim Reed
****
"Life is 100% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it."
- Dennis P. Kimbro
****
"Make laughs, not points."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"Far be it from me (it is not really my place) to do battle with someone who holds the power of daily ticketry."
--Jim Reed
****
"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."
--Teddy Roosevelt
****
"If a man does away with his traditional way of living and throws away his good customs, he had better first make certain that he has something of value to replace them."
--Basuto proverb
****
"Even the worst of us is the best mankind has got--for something."
--Jonathan Gash
****
"We are all the world's greatest. The only question for each of us is the world's greatest what."
--Jonathan Gash
****
"Carbonation is the greatest invention since gravy."
--Harlan Sanders
****
"The camera is an instrument to teach people how to see without a camera."
--Dorothea Lange
****
"I can't go on. I'll go on."
--Samuel Beckett
****
"I am a frantic multitasker...I do many things poorly, all at once."
--Ayelet Waldman
****
"The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything."
--George Bernard Shaw
****
"The past is always more pleasant because it isn't here."
--Jack Valenti
****
"Old age lacks the heavy banquet, the loaded table, and the oft-filled cup. Therefore it also lacks drunkenness, indigestion, and a loss of sleep."
--Cicero
****
"We grow old of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover too late that the only things we never regret are our mistakes."
--Oscar Wilde
****
"Other people were young once, just like you...they broke their hearts over things that now seem trivial. But they were their own hearts, and they had the right to meddle with them in their own way."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
****
"We cannot insure success, but we can deserve it."
--John Adams
****
"I can resist everything except temptation."
--Oscar Wilde
****
"My favorite animal is steak."
--Fran Lebowitz
****
"You can fool too many people, too much of the time."
James Thurber
****
"People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for."
--Harper Lee
****
"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."
--Leonard Cohen
****
"I think there should be laughs in everything. Sometimes, it's a slammed door, a pie in the face or just a recognition of our frailties."
--Alan Rickman
****
"A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men."
--Willy Wonka
****
"A play is fiction--and fiction is fact distorted into truth."
--Edward Albee
****
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
--Umberto Eco
****
"Any good idea can be twisted into a bad one by the snarkies of society."
--Jim Reed
****
"Our fellow travelers are watching us, so we must set inspiring standards of behavior. If we fail to do this, what good are we?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Living a kindly life is difficult. Difficult is the only way anything good ever gets done."
--Jim Reed
****
"I cannot keep my hands off books or my mind off the beauty of words and stories."
--Jim Reed
****
"Don't deny the enemy's existence, just show the ethos that the enemy does not matter, has no effect, exerts zero control…over your innate ability to chuckle."
--Jim Reed
****
"The present does not have much heft, since it is either immediately in the past or immediately about to happen."
--Jim Reed
****
"We can't interrupt books; we can only interrupt ourselves while reading them."
--Will Schwalbe
****
"Books demand that we briefly put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else's."
--Will Schwalbe
****
"The world today does not understand, in man or woman, the need to be alone."
--Anne Morrow Lindbergh
****
"O what fun it is to write."
--Jim Reed
****
"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."
--Warren Bennis
****
"The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes-all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers."
--Rod Serling
****
"We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."
--Mark Vonnegut
****
"My job as a reporter is not to know what I think."
--Gwen Ifill
****
"The highest rung of what's possible is far beyond the world you can see."
--Trevor Noah
****
"The universe is made up of protons, neutrons, electrons and morons."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"Never check an interesting fact."
--Howard Hughes
****
"Rage is a form of dishonesty because it precludes the reflection that leads to truth."
--Roger Cohen
****
"Failure is a badge of honor. It means you risked failure."
--Sarah Silverman
****
"I'd like to be a medium fish in an insignificant pond. Wait! Isn't that what I am?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been."
-David Bowie
****
"What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn."
--Hillel
****
"Nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all."
-Jean-Paul Sartre
****
"Be so good they can't ignore you."
--Steve Martin
****
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
--Jack London
****
"If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments."
--Steven Wright
****
"There is only now."
--George Balanchine
****
"Everywhere I have sought rest and found it not except sitting apart in a nook with a little book."
--Thomas Kempis
****
"Even massive empires begin with just a pair of hands."
--Jeremy Sorese
****
"What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading a book which everyone else is reading."
--Alice James
****
"I'm not going anywhere. I've already been where I'm going."
--Jim Reed
****
"We daydreamers are guilty of wistful thinking."
--Jim Reed
****
"Our future is shaped by our past...so be very careful what you do in your past."
--Ziggy
****
"When laughing children chase after fireflies, they are not pursuing beetles but catching wonder."
--David George Haskell
****
"Live one day at a time. If you try to live seven days at a time, the week will be over before you know it."
--Sally Brown
****
"The best grace is the consciousness that we have earned our dinner."
--John Ruskin
****
"Cheer up. Life isn't everything."
--Mike Nichols
****
"See, that's the thing that really sucks about death--no forwarding address."
--Carol Leifer
****
"Never put your baby's length on a birth announcement. It's a baby, not a marlin."
--Carol Leifer
****
"Every time you hear yourself making some blanket statement like, "I'm very insecure…I need a lot of attention and reassurance," I'd suggest that you add these three words, "up until now."
Every time you do that, you're making a break with the past. You're giving yourself permission to change."
--Anita Goldstein
****
"Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction."
--Harry Truman
****
"I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time."
--E. B. White
****
"There are two kinds of light-the glow that illumines and the glare that obscures."
--James Thurber
****
"Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy to a friend."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
****
"Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it."
--William Arthur Ward
****
"A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out."
--Eudora Welty
****
"A man will go out with a woman if she's really different from other women...the difference being she'll go out with him."
--Alfred E. Neuman
****
"The suburbs are where they cut down all the trees and then name the streets after them."
--Alfred E. Neuman
****
"The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit."
--John D. MacDonald
****
"The early bird who gets the worm works for somebody who comes in late and owns the worm farm."
--Travis McGee (John D. MacDonald)
****
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."
--Voltaire
****
"Comparison is the thief of joy."
--Theodore Roosevelt
****
"At seventy-seven it is time to be earnest."
--Samuel Johnson
****
"Every noble activity makes room for itself."
--Emerson
****
"Beware of the fury of a patient man."
--Dryden
****
"Ah! If you only knew the peace there is in an accepted sorrow."
--Mme. Guion
****
"If you have lived a day, you have seen everything."
--Montaigne
****
"Either men journey to the stars, there to take fresh root--or they perish to no apparent purpose, a mere incident in time's eternity."
--James Strong
****
"Freedom of choice consists in always being able to choose otherwise, no matter what one has chosen earlier."
--Mortimer Adler
****
"Poets are born--not paid."
--Lord Dewar
****
"I hate scarce smiles; I love laughing."
--William Blake
****
"Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind."
--Samuel Ullman
****
"Americans love to drink coffee all day because it keeps them awake until it's time to get drunk."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"Write it in your heart that every day is the best day of the year."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
****
"Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
--Mark Twain
****
"It is only possible to live happily-ever-after on a day-to-day basis."
--Margaret Bonnano
****
"Religion will not endure when it endows God with whiskers."
--Walter Karig
****
"The following preface to this book should be skipped entirely. It is boring, full of irrelevant details and allusions to persons and places (most of them perished) nobody ever heard of, and having nothing to do with this story."
--Walter Karig
****
"All grown-ups were once children, but only a few of them remember it."
--Antoine de Saint Exupery
****
"It takes a long time to grow young."
--Pablo Picasso
****
"All kids need is a little help, a little hope, and somebody who believes in them."
--Magic Johnson
****
"Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it's tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them."
--Antoine de Saint Exupery
****
"What if you examined a work of art as carefully as you read a book? What if you glanced through the pages of a book as quickly as you viewed a work of art?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."
--Roald Dahl
****
CHRIS FARLEY UNWITTINGLY CHANGES MY LIFE FOREVER
By Sarah Silverman
My stint at Saturday Night Live was quick and painful…But it was a singular experience I wouldn't trade. And there was at least one moment that continues to have a positive effect on my mental health on a daily basis. Chris Farley and I had gotten to rehearsal early. We sat side by side, legs dangling off the edge of the main stage of the studio. "Can you believe this?"
he asked. "Can you believe we're sitting on the same stage that John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd were on? PERFORMING on the same stage they PERFORMED on?" He teemed with all the excitement and thrill and wonder that I should have had as a first-year SNL-er. So far from jaded-something he never seemed to become-Chris was downright awestruck, even three years into his tenure at SNL, in the thick of becoming a comedy legend. I was taken aback by Chris's ability to be so earnest and joyful. Me, I'd been too gripped by fear to feel anything else. This quiet, coincidental moment with Chris made me realize, "I'd better feel this NOW," and it remains a kind of mantra for me. This was surely not a defining moment for Chris-he was most likely passing the time, filling in an awkward encounter with a newbie with some friendly words, but it meant the world to me and has made the rest of my life a better place. And it's because of him that I now sit on the set of my own TV show between takes and yell, "You guys!! Can you believe this?? We're making a real TV show!! This is going to be on TELEVISION!" They laugh at me, but I mean it. It's a joy.
****
"What is a great novel, really, but a world entire into which the reader sinks, to emerge, hours later, blinking, into a real life that seems somehow less real than what is on the page?"
--Anna Quindlen
****
"We are Love
We are One We are how we treat each other when the day is done. We are Peace We are War We are how we treat each other and Nothing More."
--Alternate Routes
****
*
"Leaders who don't listen will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing to say."
--Andy Stanley
****
Guys, "we (women) think it's wonderful when you surprise us with a surprise we have already planned for you to surprise us with."
--Ellie Kemper
****
"I can't take a well-tanned person seriously."
--Cleveland Amory
****
"I'm an idealist: I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way."
--Carl Sandburg
****
"It's not that I'm afraid to die. It's just that I don't want to be there when it happens."
--Woody Allen
****
"I found people looked better when they laughed."
--Mort Sahl
****
"Laryngitis is God's gift to people who know everything."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"My philosophy is that anything worth doing is too hard."
--Scott Adams
****
"Writing forces me to ignore the obvious and concentrate on the important."
--Jim Reed
****
"You're in pretty good shape for the shape you are in."
--Dr. Seuss
****
"I still climb Mount Everest just as often as I used to."
--Dr. Seuss
****
"Dealing in subjects that are over your head keeps you from having to duck."
--Jim Reed
****
"Some people persist in telling me all manner of things on a don't-need-to-know basis."
--Jim Reed
****
"People are tougher than they appear, and far more frail than they act."
--Jim Reed
****
"Most of what happens in our lives takes place in our absence."
--Salman Rushdie
****
"Many very fine writers are intimidated when they have to write the way people really talk. Actually it's quite easy. Simply lower your IQ by fifty and start typing!"
--Steve Martin
****
"As things get worse, poetry gets better, because it becomes more necessary."
--Eileen Myles
****
"A million candles have burned themselves out. Still I read on."
--Edgar Allan Poe
****
"A woman who is looking for a husband has never had one."
--Lillian Vernon
****
"All life is six-to-five against, just enough to keep you interested."
--Damon Runyon and Peter Maas
****
"I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize."
--Steven Wright
****
"As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people."
--P.G. Wodehouse
****
"Maybe creating itself is all the fun the universe gets."
--Don Marquis
****
"Everyone has talent; what is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads."
--Erica Jong
****
"Every solution of a problem is a new problem."
--Goethe
****
"We can never know completely what we do not love."
--Aldous Huxley
****
"To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of ignorance."
--A. Bronson Alcott
****
"A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless."
--May Sarton
****
"On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."
--George Orwell
****
"Faith which does not doubt is a dead faith."
--Miguel de Unamuno
****
"Facts do not cease to exist just because they are ignored."
--Aldous Huxley
****
"One man's folly is another man's wife."
--Helen Rowland
****
"You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone."
--John Ciardi
****
"To achieve great things we must live as if we were never going to die."
--Marquis de Vauvenargues
****
"I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it."
--Mitch Hedberg
****
"You know there is a problem with the education system when you realize that out of the three R's, only one begins with an R."
--Dennis Miller
****
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
--Martin Luther King Jr.
****
"The two most powerful days in your life are the day you are born and the day you discover why."
--Boniface Mwangi
****
"Sleeping is like being dead without the commitment."
--Karen Quan
****
*
"A real friend is one who will tell you of your faults and follies in prosperity, and assist you with his hand and heart in adversity."
--Horace Smith
****
"Friendship is one soul in two bodies."
--Pythagoras
****
"Friendship consists in forgetting what one gives, and remembering what one receives."
--Dumas fils
****
"The magic of words is that they outlive you. They persevere even if you don't."
--Jim Reed
****
"Do the right thing right now. Hug your family, lend a hand to someone in pain, stay out of other people's belief systems and dogmas, look to your immediate circumstances for peace and kindness."
--Jim Reed
****
"Thus through half-belief, we are often doomed to repeat that very past we should have learned from."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."
--Robertson Davies
****
"I'm for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniel's."
--Frank Sinatra
****
"I'm too old to grow up."
--Amos Halftrack
****
"Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."
--Mark Twain
****
"Real historical understanding is not achieved by the subordination of the past to the present, but rather by our making the past our present and attempting to see life with the eyes of another century than our own."
--Herbert Butterfield
****
"I've always been terrified of getting used to something that is actually killing
me---a relationship or a job. But in those cases, you can count on a friend to say something. The Internet is different, because all my friends are in the same relationship."
--Miranda July
****
"Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep."
--Fran Lebowitz
****
"Tonight's forecast: Dark. Continued dark tonight turning to partly light in the morning."
--George Carlin
****
"Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience--unless they are still up."
--Ellen Goodman
****
"People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall."
--Thomas Merton
****
"What good is happiness if you can't buy money with it?"
--Dean Martin
****
"Freedom of the press...is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to."
--Hannen Swaffer
****
"The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me."
--Goethe
****
"Blessed are the cracked; for it is they who let in the light."
--Groucho Marx
****
*
"Which comes first, the fried chicken or the fried egg?"
--Davey Williams
****
"You should never do too much of one thing. You have to leave people saying, 'If she had done even more it would have been better.' Let them suffer!"
--Sophia Loren
****
"If you're going to pursue something, you should start where you might be the luckiest...you can call it character, you can call it perseverance, but if you want to get lucky, stay at it."
--Tom Selleck
****
"Deceased Veterans didn't die for me, they just died instead of me."
--Jim Reed
****
"Happiness? That's nothing more than health and a poor memory."
--Albert Schweitzer
****
"Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian."
--Lee Simonson
****
"Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects."
--Will Rogers
****
"When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."
--Mark Twain
****
"I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom."
--Anatole France
****
"When I am dead, I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read."
--Hilaire Belloc
****
"When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad things you did do---well, that's memoirs."
--Will Rogers
****
"It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say."
--Sholem Asch
****
"The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."
--Anais Nin
****
"It takes a long time to become young."
--Pablo Picasso
****
"Life is short, break the rules. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that makes you smile."
--Mark Twain
****
"Get a pet for your children. It teaches them to love something. This is much easier than teaching them to love each other."
--Phyllis Diller
****
"Keep your nose clean so you can smell a phony."
--Bob & Ray
****
"Things never were 'the way they used to be.' Things never will be 'the way it's going to be someday.' Things are always just the way they are for the time being. And the time being is always in motion."
--Alexander Evangeli Xenopouloudakis
****
"I have noticed that nothing I never said ever did me any harm."
--Calvin Coolidge
****
"Pain is deeper than all thought, laughter is higher than all pain."
--Elbert Hubbard
****
"If you're a bird, be an early bird--but if you're a worm, sleep late."
--Shel Silverstein
****
"To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic."
--Albert Schweitzer
****
"Generally speaking the question of who's crazy and who's not crazy is decided by the person with the key."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"You (humans) are at your very best when things are worst."
--Starman
****
"For the soundest of evolutionary reasons man appears at his best when times are worst."
--Robert Ardrey
****
"There ain't no answer.
There ain't going to be any answer.
There never has been an answer.
That's the answer."
--Gertrude Stein
****
"You have to learn to get up from the table when love is no longer being served."
--Nina Simone
****
"If you know how to read, you have it in your power to magnify yourself, to multiply the ways in which you exist, to make your life full, significant and interesting."
--Aldous Huxley
****
"My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger."
--Billy Connolly
****
"Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering - because you can't take it in all at once."
--Audrey Hepburn
****
"In war the result is never final. The defeated state often considers the outcome merely as a transitory evil, for which a remedy may still be found."
--Carl von Clausewitz
****
"I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."
--Dylan Thomas
****
"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."
--Jorge Luis Borges
****
"Just purchased the Large Hadron Collider. Support says I should talk to the adminstrator; the administrator says I should call support."
--Steve Martin
****
"Look for a lovely thing and you will find it, It is not far---It never will be far."
--Sara Teasdale
****
"Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous."
--Anais Nin
****
"I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing."
--Anais Nin
****
"I really love the stage...Why, if I had to work for nothing, I'd quit tomorrow."
--Bob Hope
****
"The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you."
--B. B. King
****
*
"Would a barrel of monkeys be fun or just uncomfortable for the monkeys?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Do trifles only come in meres?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Ever needed to have your hackles lowered?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Have leaping fish been told to go jump in the air?"
--Jim Reed
****
"If you see water spots on a glass that's half full, are you being pessimistic?"
--Jim Reed
****
"If you don't know why there's no sun up in the sky, have you considered it might be nighttime?"
--Jim Reed
****
"On a cloudy day you can see not quite forever."
--Jim Reed
****
"Does Freddy Kruger own a nail clipper? Would he associate with the likes of Edward Scissorhands? Or Captain Hook?"
--Jim Reed
****
"If a dream is a wish your heart makes, does a nightmare count, too?"
--Jim Reed
****
"I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius, and we're skeptical."
--Arthur C. Clarke
****
"The tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach."
--Benjamin E. Mays
****
"The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge."
--Daniel J. Boorstin
****
"All growth is a leap in the dark."
--Henry Miller
****
"It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it's the journey that matters, in the end."
--Ursula K. Le Guin
****
"In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra."
--Fran Lebowitz
****
"The basis of all good human behavior is kindness."
--Eleanor Roosevelt
****
"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken."
---Terry Pratchett
****
"The world will be here, with or without us, until the sun dies, 5 billion years hence. At that point, the sun's atmosphere will have expanded to engulf the entire orbits of Mercury, Venus, and Earth, which will have become charred embers spiraling, one by one, to the crucible that is the sun's core. Have a nice day."
---Neil deGrasse Tyson
****
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved."
---Leonard Nimoy
****
"If I read the self-same poem 1000 times, what? If I saw a passing smile one time and one time only--enough for one lifetime? If I saw you the rest of my life, would it be enough?"
---Jim Reed
****
"Gaze at this blank page. Don't touch it. Make no marks thereon. Appreciate its stare. Long for its intrinsic peace."
---Jim Reed
****
"Everyone would have thought him fit to rule if only he never had."
---Tacitus
****
A fellow who argues with a drunk is abusing an absent man."
---Horace
****
"You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat."
---Renoir
****
"The silence of a stupid man looks like wisdom."
---Syrus
****
"What differentiates us from animals is our capacity to restrain ourselves."
---Damian Szifron
****
"This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last."
---Oscar Wilde
****
"Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only."
---Samuel Butler
****
"That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time."
---John Stuart Mill
****
"I play golf every chance I get. The world needs more laughter."
---Bob Hope
****
"The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf---it's almost a law."
--H.G. Wells
****
"I see people as the nucleus of a great idea that hasn't come to be yet."
---Richard Pryor
****
"The consciousness of being perfectly dressed may bestow a peace such as religion cannot give."
---Herbert Spencer
****
"I had the evening to kill but it didn't want to die, and fought back."
---Jack Benny
****
"I count it a mistake of our mistaken democracy, that every man who can read print is allowed to believe that he can read all that is printed."
---D.H. Lawrence
****
"The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness."
---William Saroyan
****
"I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed."
---Mark Twain
****
"The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change---that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out."
---Robert Louis Stevenson
****
"We shouldn't retire, not in our profession. There's no such thing. We want to drop dead onstage."
--Christopher Plummer
****
"I have a hard time recognizing that I'm 84. I'm in complete denial, which I think is extremely useful."
--Frederick Wiseman
****
"I'm still trying to grow up, bit by bit by bit. I kid you not. Even at the age of what it is I am, I'm still trying to grow up."
--Jim Reed
****
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
--Eleanor Roosevelt
****
"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose."
--Dr. Seuss
****
"The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues."
--Elizabeth Taylor
****
"The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights."
--Craig Johnson
****
"Luck exists. It happens. But you have to give it a chance to happen."
--Jack Finney
****
"Be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit."
--Albert Schweitzer
****
"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity."
--Cicero
****
"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?"
--Bill Watterson
****
"To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous."
--Socrates
****
"I believe in Manifest Density."
--Jim Reed
****
"I'm a great believer that faith is nice but doubt gets you an education."
--John Lahr
****
"It was not a bosom to repose upon, but it was a capital bosom to hang jewels upon."
-Charles Dickens
****
"Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option."
--Maya Angelou
****
"As in my other works of fiction: All persons living and dead are purely coincidental, and should not be construed. No names have been changed to protect the innocent. Angels protect the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine."
--Kurt Vonnegut
****
"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
--Franz Kafka
****
"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody might be looking."
--H.L. Mencken
****
"People is all everything is, all it has ever been, all it can ever be."
--William Saroyan
****
"The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation."
--Bertrand Russell
****
"I must lay on the first stroke of paint. After that, I insist that the canvas do half the work."
--James Brooks
****
"Creative people have thoughts unlike those of the general population because they have been culled or feel they have been culled from the general population."
--Kurt Vonnegut
****
"Whatever the future may hold for literature in classrooms, uncounted millions of Americans will continue to meditate with books in perfect privacy, escaping from their own weary minds for at least a little while, leaving no record of having done so in the form of a term paper or three credit hours toward a baccalaureate."
--Kurt Vonnegut
****
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
--Ferris Bueller
****
"To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe."
--William James
****
"I sent my soul through the invisible, Some secret of that after life to spell; And by and by my soul returned to me, And Answered: I myself am Heaven and Hell."
--Omar Khayyam
****
"Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits."
--Robert Louis Stevenson
****
"We literally call out what others say or think of us."
--Charles Brodie Patterson
****
"Greatly begin! though thou hast time but for a line, be that sublime."
--James Russell Lowell
****
"Whoever has two loaves of bread, let him trade one for a narcissus; for bread is nourishment for the body, but the narcissus is nourishment for the soul."
--Mohammed
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"We do not remember days. We remember moments."
--Cesare Pavese
****
"Do something worth living for, worth dying for; do something to show you have a mind, and a heart, and a soul within you."
--Dean Stanley
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"A man is likely to mind his own business, when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business."
--Eric Hoffer
****
"I doubt I'm a skeptic."
--Jim Reed
****
"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
--Anais Nin
****
"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
--Samuel Johnson
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"I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason."
--Hugo Cabret (a character created by Brian Selznick)
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"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits."
--Albert Einstein
****
"The more uncertain people are, the more they defend their ideas."
--Susan Weinschenk
****
"5 TRAITS OF UNSUCCESSFUL PEOPLE: Sloth, lack of focus, lack of follow through..."
--Paula Poundstone
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1. Nobody perceives anything with total accuracy.
2. No two people perceive the same thing identically.
3. Few perceive what difference it makes...or care.
--Marshall's Universal Laws
"No matter what happens, there is always somebody who knew it would."
--Man's Law
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"The number of Tweets to the editor is inversely proportional to the importance of the subject."
--Update to Marcus's Law
****
"No good deed goes unpunished."
--Clare Boothe Luce
****
"There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else."
--James Thurber
****
"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us."
--Helen Keller
****
"The best way to predict the future is to create it."
--Abraham Lincoln
****
"Something never to say to Hannibal Lector: Eat your heart out!"
--Jim Reed
****
"The lance has never blunted the pen, nor the pen the lance."
--Miguel de Cervantes Saalvedra
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"Sometimes, life is hard. Other times, you're paying the babysitter."
--Rusty Herrin
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"It always seemed obvious to me that a desired thing, as soon as you actually had it, led to your wanting something else."
--Paul Zahl
****
"Bad news travels at the speed of light, good news travels like molasses."
--Tracy Morgan
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"Our chief want in life is someone to make us do what we can."
--Emerson
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"Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks."
--Doug Larson
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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
--Margaret Mead
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"You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough."
--Joseph E. Levine
****
"The purpose of satire is to attack people more powerful than you are."
--Martin Rowson
****
"If ancient books were lost or ceased to be, then lost would be the key of memory."
--Geoffrey Chaucer
****
"Treasure this day and treasure yourself. Truly, neither will ever happen again."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"Without great solitude, no serious work is possible."
--Pablo Picasso
****
"The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life."
--Muhammad Ali
****
"How old would you be if you didn't know how old you was?"
--Satchel Paige
****
"Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement...let me go upstairs and check."
--M.C. Escher
****
In N,Y, seeing President Truman riding in a motorcade, I said to Fred Allen, "Truman looks sick."
Fred said, "He caught it from the country."
--Carl Reiner
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"What is a writer, anyway? Just a human being who takes pen or typewriter and makes certain marks on paper. The work of a weaver or a carpenter is just as useful."
--P.L.Travers
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"It is not that the artist is a special kind of person but that every person is a special kind of artist."
--Ananda Coomaraswamy
****
"I hate quotation. Tell me what you know."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
****
"The Academy Awards aired the other night. One thing never changes year after year. It's hilarious how Oscar winners always look up to the rafters to thank God as if God couldn't get better seats."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"I think with the best writing you actually feel the writer's joy, the writer's vision, or something like that. God, it's a strange way to make a living. It's a child's activity, really."
--Stephen King
****
"Ignorance breeds courage."
--Bill Watterson
****
"Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?"
--Thornton Wilder
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"While there is one soul in prison, I am not free."
--Eugene Debs
****
"To find that light within---that's the genius of poetry."
--Julie Harris
****
"For me success is having the respect and love of people who truly know you."
--Judi Dench
****
"All large problems begin as small problems that go unrecognized or uncorrected or both."
--Morris Hackney
****
"It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things."
--Georgia O'Keeffe
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"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
--Cicero
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"Love is---I know not what; which comes---I know not whence; which is formed---I know not how; which enchants---I know not by what; and which ends---I know not when or why."
--Madeleine de Scuderi
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"To give birth to a desire, to nourish it, to develop it, to increase it, to satisfy it: this is a whole poem."
--Balzac
****
"The hand never tires of writing when the heart dictates."
--Ninon de Lenchos
****
"All our opinions, sentiments, principles, prejudices, religious beliefs, are really but the result of birthplace."
--J. De Finod
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"To select well among old things is almost equal to inventing new ones."
--Nicolas Charles Joseph Trublet
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"All truths are not to be uttered; still it is always good to hear them."
--Mme. du Deffand
****
"Should we condemn ourselves to ignorance to preserve hope? --Emile Souvestre
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"Poets are like birds: the least thing makes them sing."
--François-René de Chateaubriand
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"Poetry is the sister of sorrow. Every man that suffers and weeps is a poet; every tear is a verse, and every heart a poem."
--Marc Andre
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"In order to do great things, we should live as though we were never to die."
--Luc de Clapiers
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"If you can only be good at one thing, be good at lying...Because if you're good at lying, you're good at everything."
--@GSElevator
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"A cigarette is like a squirrel, it's completely harmless until you put one in your mouth and light it on fire."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"If you live long enough, anything is possible."
--John McCain
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"When you're younger, you have everything---you have the flexibility, you have no fear. But you don't savor every step, every movement of every fingertip, every beat of the music. I feel like I'm tasting food for the first time."
--Elizabeth Roxas-Dobrish
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"The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets."
--Will Rogers
****
"A great thing about me is I almost always have a pocket of crumpled tissues."
--Sarah Silverman
****
"Do not be critics, you people. I beg you. I was a critic, and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them."
--David Eggers
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"As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison."
--Nelson Mandela
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"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."
--C.G. Jung
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"They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods."
--Edith Wharton
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"No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love..."
--Nelson Mandela
****
"The beauty of jazz is that, at its best, it's nonjudgmental."
--Herbie Hancock
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"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."
--C.S. Lewis
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"Last week I started a club. The membership is limited to four men; its name is The Human Race. It will lunch at my house twice a month, and its business will be to discuss the rest of the race. It is privileged to examine, criticise, and discuss any matter that concerns the race, and do it freely. In the matter of subjects and manner of treatment, there are no limitations. The reason that certain tender subjects are avoided and forbidden in all other clubs is because those clubs consist of more than four members. Whenever the human race assembles to a number exceeding four, it cannot stand free speech. It is the self-admiring boast of England and America that in those countries a man is free to talk out his opinions, let them be of what complexion they may, but this is one of the human race's hypocrisies; there has never been any such thing as free speech in any country, and there is no such thing as free speech in England or America when more than four persons are present; and not then, except the four are all of one political and religious creed. Whenever our club meets, its first duty will be to synopsize the performances of mankind as reported in the newspapers for the previous fortnight, and then discuss such of these performances as shall require our most urgent attention. After this stern duty shall have been accomplished the talk may wander whither it shall choose."
--Mark Twain
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" I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. They are the real heroes, and so are the families and friends who have stood by them."
--Christopher Reeve
****
"Miracles, if fact, do not break the laws of nature."
--C.S. Lewis
****
"One of these portions of the universe is thine own…which, however little, contributes to the whole."
--Plato
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"Never argue with stupid people. They will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."
--Mark Twain
****
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."
--George R.R. Martin
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"There exists no more difficult art than living."
--Seneca
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"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
--Albert Einstein
****
"There is something so comforting, so magical, about the (ordered-out) meal simply arriving, already smelling like itself, laid out like a road map to satisfaction."
--Lena Dunham
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"When you truly believe in something, everything around you is its proof."
--Jim Reed
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"You do this because you like it, you think what you're making is beautiful. And if you think it's beautiful, maybe they think it's beautiful."
--Lou Reed, on what motivates artists
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ELMORE LEONARD ON WRITING
1. Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2. Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's ''Sweet Thursday,'' but it's O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: ''I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.''
3. Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ''she asseverated,'' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ''said'' . . . . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ''full of rape and adverbs.''
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6. Never use the words ''suddenly'' or ''all hell broke loose.'' This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ''suddenly'' tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ''Close Range.''
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's ''Hills Like White Elephants'' what do the ''American and the girl with him'' look like? ''She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.'' That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things. Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
And finally:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue. My most important rule is one that sums up the previous 10.
** If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. **
Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)
If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight.
What Steinbeck did in ''Sweet Thursday'' was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. ''Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts'' is one, ''Lousy Wednesday'' another. The third chapter is titled ''Hooptedoodle 1'' and the 38th chapter ''Hooptedoodle 2'' as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: ''Here's where you'll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won't get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.''
''Sweet Thursday'' came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I've never forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.
--Elmore Leonard
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1. Never Quit.
2. Be Yourself.
3. Don't Put Too Much Flour in Your Brownies.
--Katharine Hepburn
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"My task...is...to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm - all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."
--Joseph Conrad
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"When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes."
--Erasmus
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"To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark."
--Victor Hugo
****
"Possessing high self-esteem does not require talent."
--Jim Reed
****
"May peace and peace and peace be everywhere."
--The Upanishads
****
"Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats."
--Voltaire
****
"Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand---and melting like a snowflake."
--Francis Bacon
****
"Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you."
--Oscar Wilde
****
"Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in two seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"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
****
"Hold on to what is good, even if it's a handful of earth. Hold on to what you believe, even if it's a tree that stands by itself. Hold on to what you must do, even if it's a long way from here. Hold on to my hand, even if someday I'll be gone away from you."
--Pueblo Indian prayer
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"To be nobody but yourself in a world that's doing its best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting."
--e.e. cummings
****
"I do believe that what we do, you and I, is important work. Stories are how we pass along our knowledge and wisdom, our history and hopes, our legends and myths. When we tell stories and put them on paper or stage or screen, we are working as preservationists. And I think that's worthwhile ."
--Robert Inman
****
"Stalking is when two people go for a long and romantic walk together and only one of them knows it."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
****
"No wise man ever wished to be younger."
--Jonathan Swift
****
"The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything."
--Walter Bagehot
****
"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all corners."
--Virginia Woolf
****
"I'm making money in my spare time by working."
--Steve Martin
****
"The historian is a kind of prophet---but only a prophet of the past."
--John Lukacs
****
"Good government is that government which not only assures the survival of the republic, but also honors the individual, even when it refuses to flatter him."
--Bill Moyers
****
"A poet's job is not to write about love. A poet's job is not to write about flowers. A poet must write about the plight and pain of the people."
--Matiullah Turab
****
"Why if a person can't remember that he has told a story 1,129 times, can he remember the story unvarying in each syllable & facial gesture?"
--Joyce Carol Oates
****
"What's right is what's left if you do everything else wrong."
--Robin Williams
****
"I would rather be able to appreciate things I cannot have than to have things I am not able to appreciate."
--Elbert Hubbard
****
"I get in fewer arguments when I'm alone."
--Paula Poundstone
****
"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."
--Gore Vidal
****
"We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong. We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom."
--Stephen Vincent Benet
****
"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window."
--Raymond Chandler
****
"Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you're alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have."
--Mark Vonnegut
****
"It's so hard to stay mad. It's literally not fun. How do people do it."
--Sarah Silverman
****
"All things that are, are equally removed from being nothing."
--John Donne
****
"You are as good as the best thing you've ever done."
--Billy Wilder
****
"When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before."
--Mae West
****
"My psychiatrist told me I was crazy and I said I want a second opinion. He said okay, you're ugly, too."
--Rodney Dangerfield
****
"Luck is being ready for the chance."
--Frank Dobie
****
"Any group, any race, any world that does not run to seize the future and shape it is doomed to dust away in the grave, in the past."
--Ray Bradbury, paraphrasing Arnold Toynbee
****
"I saw the movie, I missed the book."
---Jonathan Winters.
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"One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time."
--Graham Greene
****
"I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on, I go into another room and read a good book."
--Groucho Marx
****
"Only by love is life made real."
---Sara Teasdale
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"That which you believe becomes your world."
--Richard Matheson
****
"Alcohol is no refuge from the hot tides of life but only seems as if it might be."
--Philip Wylie
****
And a woman I used to know
Who loved one man from her youth,
Against the strength of the fates
Fighting in somber pride,
Never spoke of this thing,
But hearing his name by chance,
A light would pass over her face.
--Sara Teasdale
****
"If there's one thing I've learned along the way, it's that all our personal successes shine a little less brightly if we fail at family. That's what matters most."
--Barack Obama
****
"I will not permit any man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him."
--Booker T. Washington
****
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."
--Shakespeare
****
"I love eating California raisins...but those little sunglasses get stuck between my teeth."
--Mike Peters
****
"He told me to put it where the sun don't shine, so I hid it under the carpet."
--Jim Reed
****
"Well, it's only a paper moon shining down from a cardboard sky..."
So...they had recreational pharmaceuticals back then, too?
--Jim Reed
****
"You can't have everything. Where would you put it?"
--Steven Wright
****
"I could never contemplate suicide. I have so many houseplants."
--Christopher Davis
****
*
"Starting today, our goals will be replaced by stretch goals. Stretch goals are like stretch pants. It's a way of signaling surrender."
--Scott Adams
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"If a pickpocket meets a saint, he sees only his pockets."
--Kegley
****
"Every person has a scheme that will not work."
--Howe's Law
****
"There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, hire someone, or forbid your kids to do it."
--Monta Crane
****
"Ignorance is a perfectly reasonable position to take in a conversation. I don't know everything you do. If I did, why would I bother talking to you?"
--Craig Ferguson
****
"Courage and boldness are qualities that cannot possibly be in those who are exempt from danger."
--Montaigne
****
"Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions never lie to you."
--Roger Ebert
****
"What is happiness? It's a moment before you need more happiness."
--Don Draper
****
"Painting is easy to do when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do."
--Edgar Degas
****
"It's ill-becoming for an old broad to sing about how bad she wants it. But occasionally we do."
--Lena Horne
****
"Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony."
--Guillaulme Apollinaire
****
"As children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror..."
--Lucretius
****
"We also know how cruel the truth is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling."
--Henri Poincare
****
"Instant gratification takes too long."
--Carrie Fisher
****
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."
--Sherlock Holmes
****
"Do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up, but you don't give up."
--Chuck Yeager
****
"A bull in just about any shop is gonna be a mess."
--Sarah Silverman
****
"Life gives you the test first, then the lesson."
--Derek Hutton
****
"Worrying does not empty tomorrow of its troubles; it empties today of its strength."
--J.R.R. Tolkien
****
"We also know how cruel the truth is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling."
--Henri Poincare
****
"My motto: Unless someone has the courtesy to ask me what time it is, I won't give them the time of day."
--Steve Martin
****
"It is better to pay the power bill than to curse the darkness."
--Jim Reed
****
"We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth."
--Erich Maria Remarque
****
"Nothing more predisposes someone in our favour than to let him rob you a little."
--W. Somerset Maugham
****
"To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life."
--Eric Hoffer
****
"Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said."
--Mel Brook
****
s
"Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing."
--Ralph Richardson
****
"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
--Woody Allen
****
"Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him."
--Lord Chesterfield
****
"Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers--and never succeeding."
--Marc Chagall
****
"Some people say the garbage is half full. Some say it's half empty. I say it's completely empty."
--Grimmy
****
"A human is both a mystery looking for a mind and a mind looking for a mystery."
--Joel Fry
****
"They understand but little who understand only what can be explained."
--Marie Ebner Eschenbach
****
"While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness is not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful."
--H.G. Wells
****
"Well, I object to all this sex on the Television. I mean I keep falling off."
--Graham Chapman
****
"If you can tickle yourself, you can laugh when you please."
--Russian proverb
****
"Anyone who says money can't buy happiness doesn't know where to shop."
--Eunice Wentworth "Lovey" Howell
****
"If you don't think too good, don't think too much."
--Ted Williams
****
"I listen to the voices."
--William Faulkner
****
"If a word were misspelled in the dictionary, how would we know?"
--Ziggy
****
"Tomorrow is the day after the first day of the rest of your life."
--Jim Reed
****
"Reality is nothing but a collective hunch."
--Lily Tomlin
****
"There is no greater illusion than that age brings a simplification of life. On the contrary, it accumulates obligations."
--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
****
"Those who take time to explain their creative work are not busy doing their creative work."
--Jim Reed
****
"It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
****
"Now I rewrite more and more severely, and I take great pleasure in cutting thousands of words out of first drafts; I think that's a pleasure worth learning as early as possible in one's career, not least because realizing that one can do it helps one relax into writing the first draft in which it's better to have too much material for later shaping than not enough."
--Ramsey Campbell
****
"The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are right."
--Mark Twain
****
"The most identifiable trait of Anglo-Saxons is that we always mistake a short memory for a clear conscience."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"Dreams, books, are each a world."
--Wordsworth
****
"Too low they build who build beneath the stars."
--Edward Young
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"Comedy is in my blood. Too bad it's not in my act."
--Rodney Dangerfield
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"One lives in the hope of becoming a memory."
--Antonio Porchia
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"Silences make the real conversation between friends. Not the saying, but never needing to say is what counts."
--Margaret Lee Runbeck
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"Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember."
--Oscar Levant
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"I remember things the way they should have been."
--Truman Capote
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"Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out-it's the grain of sand in your shoe."
-Robert Service
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"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
-Mark Twain
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"We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages-stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us."
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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"When a man comes to me, I accept him at his best, not at his worst. Why make so much ado? When a man washes his hands before paying a visit, and you receive him in that clean state, you do not thereby stand surety for his always having been clean in the past."
-Confucius
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"As soon as you feel too old to do a thing, do it."
--Margaret Deland
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"Imitation is the sincerest form of insult."
--Elbert Hubbard
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"Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing."
--Edmond Burke
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"A poet more than 30 years old is simply an overgrown child."
--H.L. Mencken
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"Old men love to give good advice; it consoles them for being able no longer to set a bad example."
--Rochefoucald
****
"If you cannot find a companion equal to or better than yourself, journey alone. Do not travel with a fool."
--Buddha (Dhammapada)
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"Tact consists of knowing how far we may go too far."
--Jean Cocteau
****
"The past is not dead. It isn't even past!"
--William Faulkner
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"There is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration."
--Steve Martin
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"We have learned the answers, all the answers: It is the question that we do not know."
--Archibald MacLeish
****
"It is one of our jobs, as journalists, to be hated. But it is not enough to be merely hated. It is also important to be hated for the right reasons."
--Gerald Hannon
****
"If one tells the truth, one is sure sooner or later to be found out."
--Oscar Wilde
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"Shall I tell you what true knowledge is? When you know, to know that you know, and when you do not know, to know that you do not know--that is true knowledge."
--Confucius
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"It's the good girls who keep the diaries; the bad girls never have the time."
--Tallulah Bankhead
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"I notice that in spite of the frightful lies you have printed about me, I still believe everything you say about other people."
--Robert Maynard Hutchins
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"A word is the taste our tongue has of eternity; that's why I speak."
--Rosario Castellanos
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"I just put my feet in the air and move them around."
--Fred Astaire
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"We are tolerant enough of those who do not agree with us, provided only they are sufficiently miserable."
--David Grayson
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"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."
--T.S. Eliot
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"To write a love letter we must begin without knowing what we intend to say, and end without knowing what we have written."
--Jean Jacques Rousseau
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"Two wrongs make a casserole."
--Bunny Hoest & John Reiner
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"Each one sees what he carries in his heart."
--Goethe
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"The only thing better than singing is more singing."
--Ella Fitzgerald
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"Art…is a force which blows the roof off the cave where we crouch imprisoned."
--Ernest Hello
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"If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
--Voltaire
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"The older I get, the more convinced I am that the space between people who are trying their best to understand each other is hallowed ground."
--Fred Rogers
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"Money may buy the husk of many things, but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite, medicine but not health, acquaintances but not friends, servants but not faithfulness, days of joy but not peace or happiness."
--Henrik Ibsen
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"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either."
--Robert Graves
****
"Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write."
--Elie Wiesel
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"Too much of a good thing can be wonderful."
--Mae West
****
"Silence the artist and you have silenced the most articulate voice the people have."
--Katharine Hepburn
****
"From the solemn gloom of the temple children run out to sit in the dust, God watches them play and forgets the priest."
--Rabindranath Tagore
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"What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world."
--Albert Einstein
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"Poetry is not made out of the understanding. The question of common sense is always: 'What is it good for?' a question which would abolish the rose, and be triumphantly answered by the cabbage."
--James Russell Lowell
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"It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation."
--John Stuart Mill
****
"Where words fail, music speaks."
--Hans Christian Andersen
****
"I grant your point, but not because I agree with you. I'm under sedation."
--Charles Saxon
****
"Anybody who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined."
--Robert Bloch
****
"Of late, I have no friends; I must be doing something right."
--Somerset Maugham
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"It's really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or what your audience needs."
--Erica Jong
****
"Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is always dangerous."
--Alan Barth
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"We are all here for a spell; get all the good laughs you can."
--Will Rogers
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"A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking."
--Steven Wright
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"The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art-because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over what I've done-is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae."
--Kurt Vonnegut
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"Would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!"
--Gotthold Lessing
****
"Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world."
--Desmond Tutu
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"Part of the pleasure of being alive is the knowledge that you're not dead yet."
--George Carlin
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"To travel is to take a journey into yourself."
--Danny Kaye
****
"Words themselves become beings, sentences become...natural vegetation to be guided by the gardener's hands."
--Eric Sevareid
*
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"I got an hourglass figure, but it's later than you think."
--Minnie Pearl
****
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
--Antoine de Saint Exupery
****
"Being a newspaper columnist is like being married to a nymphomaniac. It's great for the first two weeks."
--Lewis Grizzard
****
"If the doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster."
--Isaac Asimov
****
"Art, music, and philosophy are merely poignant examples of what we might have been had not the priests and traders gotten hold of us."
--George Carlin
****
"How vain painting is--we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don't admire at all."
--Blaise Pascal
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"The surest way to wake up and smell the roses every day is to go to sleep face down in the flower bed."
--Argus Hamilton
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"All bad art is the result of good intentions."
--Oscar Wilde
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"How many ne'er set foot beyond themselves!"
--Omar Khayyam
****
"We have no art. Everything we do is art."
--Balinese saying
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"Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises."
--Samuel Butler
****
"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself."
--Truman Capote
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"History...is nothing other than a collection of the lives of people, some of them great, some of them ordinary...nothing other than a collection of what people have done in challenging circumstances and how they have risen to those circumstances."
--Artur Davis
****
"You will find poetry nowhere, unless you bring some with you."
--Joseph Joubert
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"Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo."
--Don Marquis
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"The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
--William Faulkner
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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
--Dr. Seuss
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"Live one day at a time, unless you can figure out how to live two."
--Dik Browne
****
"If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves."
--Lillian Hellman
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"It is no longer a question of where civilization began, but if it ever did!"
--Alfred E. Neuman
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"I take exception to your 'time travel is possible' statement, as I have only been able to go five minutes back into the past AT MOST, and since Jane Seymour was not there, it hardly seemed worth it."
--Chris McCaleb
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"At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning."
--William Safire
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"When you see a good man, think of emulating him; when you see a bad man, examine your own heart."
--Confucius
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"Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words--the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered."
--J. Michael Straczynski
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"A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn't be."
--Robert Quillen
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"I'm an optimal behaviorist, which means behaving to the top of my genetics every day. After a few hundred days of optimal behavior, optimal striving at the top of my genes and chromosomes, you can't help but FEEL optimistic!"
--Ray Bradbury
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"I will look at any additional evidence to confirm the opinion to which I have already come."
--Hugh Molson
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"Get yourself a notebook and write in it EVERY night for two weeks. Then stop if you can. If you can't, you're a writer."
--Charles Ghigna
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"Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for."
--Ray Bradbury
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"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry."
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong."
--Richard Feynman
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"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."
--Juan Ramon Jimenez
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"Enough is enough, and too much is plenty."
--Bugs Bunny
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"The more controlled, limited and tormented art is, the freer it is."
--Igor Stravinsky
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"Sharon Stone has the kind of face I'd leave my wife for. Since I'm not married, I'll have to leave someone else's wife."
--Buck Henry
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"Has any psychological experiment yielded a more delightful suggestion than this one: that there is a part of the mind without ambition or information, which nonetheless is expert on what is beautiful?"
--Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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"Nothing happens unless first a dream."
--Carl Sandburg
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"Understanding physics is child's play when compared to understanding child's play."
--Albert Einstein
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"When I consider the gizzard of a cockroach, how wonderfully it is made, something of the immensity and imagination of the universe bursts in upon me with startling clarity. But to consider the gizzard alone is to be partial and in the interest of science I must avoid that at all costs."
--Otis Calloway
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"You can taste a word."
--Pearl Bailey
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"What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?"
--Mike Peters
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"Live in contact with dreams, and you will get something of their charm; live in contact with facts, and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country where the facts were not brutal, and the dreams not unreal."
--George Bernard Shaw
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"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry."
--Mark Strand
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"He who speaks the truth should have one foot in the stirrup."
--Hindu proverb
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"Copy editors don't object to being called anal retentive, they just debate whether the term should be hyphenated."
--Alex MacLeod
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"How truly wise, perhaps, it was my dollars were so few, for if my purse were full, then I would never know if you had married me for riches, or because my eyes were blue!"
--Louise Shaw
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"My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated, but not signed."
--Christopher Morley
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"I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery."
--Billy Collins
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"If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living."
--Yiddish proverb
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"Life is easier to take than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable."
--Kathleen Norris
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"Everything has been thought of before, but the difficulty is to think of it again."
--Goethe
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"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
--Ray Bradbury
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"The profession of writing is nothing else but a violent, indestructible passion. When it has once entered people's heads it never leaves them."
--George Sand
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"No two identical parts are alike."
--Beach's Law
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"Agriculture is a very fine thing, because you get such an unmistakable answer as to whether you're making a fool of yourself or hitting the mark."
--Goethe
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"Am I beautiful? I think it must be the rose. My hair--it only weighs me down. My eyes--I only see with them. My lips--they only help me to speak. Of what use is it to be beautiful?"
--Karel Capek (spoken by the robot Helena in "R.U.R.")
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"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."
--H. G. Wells
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"Women aren't as mere as they used to be."
--Walt Kelly
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"Comedy is tragedy revisited."
--Phyllis Diller
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"The past is close kin to pain, and it is near to happiness."
--Howell Vines
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"A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music."
--Soren Kierkegaard
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"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. And then you win."
--Mahatma Gandhi
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"Beauty is in the heart of the beholder."
--H. G. Wells
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"Plagiarists have, at least, the merit of preservation."
--Benjamin Disraeli
****
"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible."
--Elie Wiesel
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"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously."
--Hubert H. Humphrey
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"Brief let me be. The fewer words the better prayer."
--Martin Luther
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"Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are going to throw it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out."
--Brenda Ueland
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"If you took all the dill pickles eaten in America in one month and laid them end to end...people would think you were some kind of nut."
--Homer and Jethro
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"Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing."
--T. H. Huxley
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"What Carl Sagan envisioned we could become: Conscious, wise, compassionate, energetically curious, eternally skeptical, immune to the manipulations and intimidations of the powerful, free of the walls that imprison and divide us; awe-inspired by the beauty of an ever-broadening identification horizon, welcoming of its expansion; no longer stunted by the old primate hierarchies, but instead, proud of our capacity to care for each other and to discern our tiny, utterly decentralized place in the fabric of nature, space and time; secure enough at last to embrace the wonder inherent in this reality, awakened to our responsibilities as a link in the generations past and future, at peace with our self-knowledge, alert to a heightened and consequential sense of the sacred; long-term thinkers, solid citizens of the planet and the cosmos; as Carl was; fully alive, completely connected."
--Ann Druyan
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"It is useless to send armies against ideas."
--Georg Brandes
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"I might as well be myself. Everyone else is taken."
--Oliver Stone
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"The art of a thing is, first, its aim, and next, its manner of accomplishment."
--C.N. Bovee
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"Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time."
--Thomas Carlyle
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"Ambiguity is invariant."
--Hartz's Uncertainty Principle
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"Society is now one polished horde, Form'd of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored."
--Lord Byron
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"It is not too much to ask of Americans that they not be censors, that they run the risk of being deeply wounded by ideas so that we may all be free. If we are wounded by an ugly idea, we must count it as part of the cost of freedom and, like American heroes in days gone by, bravely carry on."
--Kurt Vonnegut
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"Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power."
-- George Bernard Shaw
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"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly."
-- Michel de Montaigne
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"And if I should live to be the last leaf upon the tree in the Spring, let men smile, as I do now, at the old forsaken bough where I cling."
--Oliver Wendell Holmes
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"Understanding is the least important thing when it comes to digging jazz...because, like anything else, jazz is a form of entertainment. It is created to be enjoyed, not understood like you read a blueprint."
--Cannonball Adderley
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"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues."
--William Shakespeare
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"Where lucidity reigns, a scale of values becomes unnecessary."
--Albert Camus
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"You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give."
?Edward O. Wilson
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"It's a good thing we have gravity, or else when birds died they'd just stay right up there. Hunters would be all confused."
--Stephen Wright
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"More than anything else, I'd like to be an old man with a good face, like Hitchcock or Picasso."
--Sean Connery
****
"Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it' 'Supposing it didn't,' said Pooh. After careful thought Piglet was comforted by this."
--A. Milne
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"A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
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"Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
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"When ignorance gets started it knows no bounds."
--Will Rogers
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"Things ain't what they used to be and never were."
--Will Rogers
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"There is a natural hootchy-kootchy motion to a goldfish."
--Walt Disney
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"Learn to laugh at your troubles and you'll never run out of things to laugh at."
--Walt Kelly
****
"Look alive. Here comes a buzzard."
--Walt Kelly
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"Now is the time for all good men to come to."
--Walt Kelly
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"The best break anybody ever gets is in bein' alive in the first place. An' you don't unnerstan' what a perfect deal it is until you realizes that you ain't gone be stuck with it forever, either." (Porkypine)
--Walt Kelly
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"The happiness of society is the end of government."
--Walt Kelly
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"There's no easy quick way out, we're gonna have to live through our whole lives, win, lose, or draw."
--Walt Kelly
****
"Don't believe something just because you didn't read it in the papers. Wait until you haven't seen it on television."
--Walt Kelly
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"God is not dead - he is merely unemployed."
--Walt Kelly
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"Having lost sight of our objectives, we redoubled our efforts."
--Walt Kelly
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"If I could only write, I'd write a nasty letter to the mayor, if he could only read."
--Walt Kelly
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"Be true to your teeth and they won't be false to you."
--Soupy Sales
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"Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony."
--Guillaume Apollinaire
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"Worrying does not empty tomorrow of its troubles; it empties today of its strength."
--JRR Tolkien
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"The books I buy I like to read. The books I read I like to buy."
--Thomas Hutchinson
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"Over the past weeks, I've been the glad recipient of Jim Reed's wisdom. "Dad's Tweed Coat" definitely fulfills your sub-title goals of sharing wisdoms, comforts, and joys. Thank you for the gift!"
--Joe Elmore
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DAD'S TWEED COAT -- it is excellent. Good writing, fine imagery. I will always treasure my autographed copy. --C. Terry Cline Jr.
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"As children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror. --Lucretius
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"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."
--Sherlock Holmes
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"Only the educated are free."
--Epictetus
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"We also know how cruel the truth is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling."
--Henri Poincare
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"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mystery."
--Albert Einstein
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"Nothing is interesting if you are not interested."
--Helen MacInnes
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"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
--Albert Einstein
****
Many years ago a very wise man named Bernard Baruch took me aside and put his arm around my shoulder. "Harpo, my boy," he said, "I'm going to give you three pieces of advice, three things you should always remember."
My heart jumped and I glowed with expectation. I was going to hear the magic password to a rich, full life from the master himself. "Yes, sir?"
I said. And he told me the three things. I regret I've forgotten what they are.
--Harpo Marx
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"The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age."
--Lucille Ball
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"I don't know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
--Isaac Newton
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"Show me a good loser and I'll show you an idiot."
--Leo Durocher
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"Life is full of miracles, but they're not always the ones we pray for."
--Eve Arden
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"I still have two abiding passions. One is my model railway, the other---women. But at the age of eighty-nine, I find I am getting just a little too old for model railways."
--Pierre Monteux
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"The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been."
--Madeleine L'Engle
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"I am an old man and I have known many troubles, but most of them never happened."
--Mark Twain
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"One must wager on the future. To save the life of a single child, no effort is superfluous. To make a tired old man smile is to perform an essential task. To defeat injustice and misfortune, if only for one instant, for a single victim, is to invent a new reason to hope."
--Elie Wiesel
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"Once upon a time, Chuang Chou dreamt that he was a butterfly, fluttering happily like a butterfly. He was conscious only of his happiness as a butterfly, unaware that he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he awakened, and there he was, veritably Chuang Chou himself. Now he does not know whether the butterfly is a dream of Chuang Chou or whether Chuang Chou is a dream of the butterfly."
--Chuange-Tzu
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"Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities."
--Bernard Berenson
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"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free."
--Frederick Douglass
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"A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim."
- George Santayana
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"Rain is similar to music, except that it falls down instead of up. Music falls up."
--Davey Williams
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"Writing consists of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair."
--Mary Heaton Vorse
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"I merely took the energy required to pout, and wrote some blues."
--Duke Ellington
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"Rules are for established things, like the pieces and positions of a game. Men and women are not established things; they're experiments, all of them."
--H.G. Wells
****
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
--Dr. Seuss
****
"Growing old is easy, you just have to live long enough."
--Groucho Marx
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"If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that, if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances."
--Winston S. Churchill
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"Most things work fine till they break down."
--Jim Reed
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"Where does the fist go when you open your hand?"
--Jim Reed
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"Once he misplaced his comparative analysis skills, he felt disallusioned."
--Jim Reed
****
"E-books offer "a more austere, direct engagement with words...what's more, no dictator can burn one."
--Tim Parks
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"I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex."
--Fred Rogers
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"With all them computers, people ain't even gonna need books no more."
--Mumbled by a browsing customer at Reed Books/The Museum of Fond Memories
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"Tried to give up lint for Lent, but now pollen has replaced it."
--Jim Reed
****
"When was the last time you saw anybody exeunt? Those were the days."
--Jim Reed
****
"A baby is god's opinion that the world should go on."
--Carl Sandburg
****
"There is only one name for any child, and that name is All Children."
--Carl Sandburg
****
"Look, please, look to the children The Children they know. In their eyes are the answers we seek. And their hearts feel the way to go."
--Chuck Mangione
****
"Ever true and unswerving, Become as a little child once more."
--Lao Tsu
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"The bells that the children could hear were inside them."
--Dylan Thomas
****
"The child... Lifts his tiny hand and longs to touch the sky. The child thinks that he cannot reach it. When he holds it in his hand."
--Manuel Bandeira
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"Now I shall endeavor to make that which is divine in me rise up to that which is divine in the universe."
--Plotinus
****
"This bookstore is a foster home for fond memories, awaiting your adoption and nurture."
--Jim Reed
****
"May you love books more than your mother! May its beauty stand before you. Scribedom is the greatest of all callings. There's nothing like it in the land."
--From a manuscript in the ancient Egyptian city of Itj-towy, quoted by space archaeologist Sarah Parcak
****
"I'm proud of being modest."
--Jim Reed
****
"I never give them hell. I just tell the truth, and they think it is hell."
--Harry Truman
****
"Keep violence in the mind where it belongs."
--Brian Aldiss
****
"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."
--William James
****
"You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
****
"Never do to-day what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done."
--Aaron Burr
****
"I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All I care to know is that a man is a human being--that is enough for me: he can't be any worse."
--Mark Twain
****
"When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
--Jonathan Swift
****
"Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote."
--George Jean Nathan
****
"Flattery is all right--if you don't inhale."
--Adlai Stevenson
****
"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
---Ralph Waldo Emerson
****
"Life is not about what happens to you, but about what you do with what happens to you."
--Chelsea Clinton
****
"I know we have a purpose, I just don't know what it is."
--Jim Reed
****
"There's only one way to change a woman's mind...agree with her."
--Snuffy Smith
****
"One day seven years ago I found myself saying to myself--I can't live where I want to--I can't go where I want to go--I can't do what I want to--I can't even say what I want to...I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to."
--Georgia O'Keeffe
****
"The task of the artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know."
--Alexander Solzhenitsyn
****
"There is no point asserting and reasserting what the heart cannot believe."
--Alexander Solzhenitsyn
****
"One word of truth outweighs the world."
--Alexander Solzhenitsyn
****
"Sometimes the impossible allows itself the luxury of happening."
--Charlie Chan
****
" Each particle of matter is an immensity; each leaf a world; each insect an inexplicable compendium."
--Lavater
****
"Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."
--George Bernard Shaw
****
"Why should we not all live in peace and harmony? We look up at the same stars, we are fellow-passengers on the same planet and dwell beneath the same sky. What matters it along which road each individual endeavors to find the ultimate truth? The riddle of existence is too great that there should be only one road leading to an answer."
--Quintus Aurelius Symmachus
****
"Any topic is equally fertile for me. A fly will serve my purpose…Let me begin with whatever subject I please, for all subjects are linked with one another."
--Montaigne
****
"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."
-- Albert Einstein
****
"Tomorrow is the day after the first day of the rest of your life."
--Jim Reed
****
"Let the wife make her husband glad to come home and let him make her sorry to see him leave."
--Martin Luther
****
"Love is the expansion of two natures in such a fashion that each includes the other, each is enriched by the other."
--Felix Adler
****
"My love is like a storybook story But it's as real as the feelings I feel."
--Mark Knopfler
****
"What on earth would a man do with himself if something did not stand in his way?"
--H.G. Wells
****
"Happiness is the sense that one matters."
--Samuel Shoemaker
****
"What you can become, you are already."
--Friedrich Hebbel
****
"The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them."
--George Bernard Shaw
****
"Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause."
--Victor Hugo
****
"Don't tell your friends about your indigestion; "How are you?"
is a greeting, not a question."
--Arthur Guiterman
****
"All we can do is make the best of our friends, love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad."
--Thomas Jefferson
****
"Do something wonderful, someone may imitate it."
--Albert Schweitzer
****
"If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner."
--Tallulah Bankhead
****
"I generally avoid temptation, unless I can't resist it."
--Mae West
****
"My Protestant work ethic made me a bundle, but my Puritanical guilt complex won't let me enjoy it."
--Henry Martin
****
"Any zookeeper will tell you that it is easy to get the lion and the lamb to lie down together, just bring in a new lamb every morning."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"The lion and the lamb shall lie down together but the lamb won't get much sleep."
--Woody Allen
****
"Hypocrites always make me want to say one thing and do the opposite."
--Jim Reed
****
"The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."
--John Milton
****
"It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
****
"In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." --Albert Camus
****
"I might have a terrible job, but at least I don't have any job security."
--Scott Adams
****
"The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep."
--W.C. Fields
****
"Too low they build who build beneath the stars."
--Edward Young
****
"Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults."
--Benjamin Franklin
****
"A good life is long enough."
--Benjamin Franklin
****
"What would it be like to read a book from end to beginning?"
--Jim Reed
****
"You're boring me. Get off my yawn!"
--Jim Reed
****
"I'm a member of the repressed majority."
--Jim Reed
****
"This incarnation is not exactly what I had in mind. May I have the next life, please?"
--Jim Reed
****
"You don't really want to know what's inside my brain 'cause you don't know where it's been."
--Jim Reed
****
"So little time and so little to do."
--Oscar Levant
****
"Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character."
--Oscar Levant
****
"The distinction between past, present, and future has only the significance of a stubborn illusion."
--Albert Enstein
****
"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
-- Jack Kerouac
****
"Whenever I think of the past, it brings back memories."
--Steven Wright
****
"Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?"
--Francois de La Rochefoucauld
****
"One lives in the hope of becoming a memory."
--Antonio Porchia
****
"When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change."
--Paulo Coelho
****
"It would appear that, in order to assure a just verdict in an action for adultery, the jury should be composed of six men and six women, and-in the event of a tie-a hermaphrodite to cast the deciding vote."
-
-Honore de Balzac
****
"Love as it exists in society is nothing more than the exchange of two fancies and the contact of two epidermises."
--Sebastien Chamfort
****
"If the shoe fits, it's ugly."
--Gold's Law
****
"If the shoe fits, buy another one just like it."
--George Carln
****
"Courage is fear holding on one minute longer."
General George Patton
****
"Silences make the real conversation between friends. Not the saying, but never needing to say is what counts."
--Margaret Lee Runbeck
****
"You grow up the day you have your first real laugh--at yourself."
--Ethel Barrymore
****
"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."
--Walter Bagehot
****
"The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost."
--G.K. Chesterton
****
"Spark's fourth rule for the project manager: Don't engage in arguments, but if cornered, ask an irrelevant question and lean back with a satisfied grin while your opponent tries to figure out what's going on-then quickly change the subject.
****
"A rehab is a place where you spend forty thousand dollars to find out that twelve-step meetings are free."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect."
--Edward Gibbon
****
"So live that you would not be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip."
--Will Rogers
****
"As soon as you feel too old to do a thing, do it. --Margaret Deland
****
"Every good idea eventually backfires."
--Jim Reed
****
"I often consider procrastinating, but I keep putting it off."
--Jim Reed
****
"At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning."
--William Safire
****
"In style all that is required is that it convey the message."
--Confucius
****
"Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die."
--Carrie Fisher
****
"Life is life-threatening."
--Jim Reed
****
"If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun."
--Katharine Hepburn
****
"Prejudice is the reason of fools."
--Voltaire
****
"Illusion is the first of all pleasures."
--Voltaire
****
"There is no greater fool than he who thinks himself wise; no one wiser than he who suspects he is a fool."
--Marguerite de Valois
****
"A woman of honor should never suspect another of things she would not do herself."
--Marguerite de Valois
****
"History is but a collection of epitaphs."
--Elbert Hubbard
****
"Old men love to give good advice; it consoles them for being able no longer to set a bad example."
--Rochefoucauld
****
"Anybody can win-unless there happens to be a second entry."
--George Ade
****
"Wisdom is considered a sign of weakness by the powerful because a wise man can lead without power but only a powerful man can lead without wisdom."
--Mark B. Cohen
****
"Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment."
--Robert Benchley
****
"Happiness is having a large, caring, close-knit family in another city."
--George Burns
****
"Try and live your life the way you wish other people would live theirs."
--Raymond Burr
****
"What's the secret of enjoying old age? I can't tell you. It's a secret."
--George Burns
****
"Get a good idea and stay with it, and work it until it's done and done right."
--Walt Disney
****
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."
--Mark Twain
****
"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do."
--Isaac Asimov
****
"When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy."
--Dave Barry
****
"I always read the last page of a book first, so that if I die before I finish, I will know how it turned out."
--Nora Ephron
****
"Reality is just a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs."
--Robin Williams
****
"The pen is mightier than the sword and considerably easier to write with."
--Marty Feldman
****
"Painting is the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic."
--Ambrose Bierce
****
"An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture."
--Jean Cocteau
****
"Art is anything you can get away with."
--Marshall McLuhan
****
"Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes" --Ella Wheeler Wilcox
****
"I recall nostalgia with great fondness."
--Jim Reed
****
"The mark of a truly great man is that when he dies there's nothing left for the creditors."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"Celibacy is not hereditary."
--First Law of Socio-Genetics
****
"Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a flea, and yet he will be making gods by the dozens."
--Montaigne
****
"I will look at any additional evidence to confirm the opinion to which I have already come."
--Hugh Molson
****
"A yawn is a silent shout."
--G. K. Chesterton
****
"The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out."
--Lord Macaulay
****
"I just put my feet in the air and move them around."
--Fred Astaire
****
"It was not a bosom to repose upon, but it was a capital bosom to hang jewels upon."
--Charles Dickens
****
"Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises."
--Samuel Butler
****
"It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all."
--William Makepeace Thackeray
****
"Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it."
--Malcolm Bradbury
****
"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either."
--Robert Graves
****
"The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by its author's explanation it never should have been published."
--Archibald MacLeish
****
"But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams."
--William Butler Yeats
****
"The woman who loves always smells good."
--Remy de Gourmont
****
"A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man."
--Lana Turner
****
"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure."
--Mark Twain
****
"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie were you in his place."
--H. L. Mencken
****
"There are two literary maladies-writer's cramp and swelled head."
--Coulson Kernahan
****
"Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things."
--Edgar Degas
****
"We have learned the answers, all the answers: It is the question that we do not know."
--Archibald Macleish
****
Elie Wiesel quotes a famous rabbi: "God made man because God loves stories."
****
"If it weren't for the last minute, nothing would get done."
--Corollary to Edwards' Law
****
"Art…is a force which blows the roof of the cave where we crouch imprisoned."
--Ernest Hello
****
"All bad art is the result of good intentions."
--Oscar Wilde
****
"Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things."
--Edgar Degas
****
"When a new book appears one should read an old one."
--Winston Churchill
****
"I'd much rather be a woman than a man. Women can cry, they can wear cute clothes, and they are the first to be rescued off of sinking ships."
--Gilda Radner
****
"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun.'" ---Unknown
****
"Many years ago I chased a woman for almost two years, only to discover that her tastes were exactly like mine: we both were crazy about girls."
---Groucho Marx
****
"You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on."
---Dean Martin
****
"Like all parents, my husband and I just do the best we can, and hold our breath, and hope we've set aside enough money to pay for our kids' therapy."
---Michelle Pfeiffer
****
"A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments, soccer games, romances, best friends, location of friend's houses, favorite foods, secret fears and hopes and dreams. A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house."
--unknown
****
"Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing."
---Phyllis Diller
****
"No two identical parts are alike."
--Beach's Law
****
"Even if it can't go wrong, it might."
--Corollary to Murphy's Law
****
"I preserve things that are significant to me. Only time will determine what is important in the long term. But something can be rediscovered only if someone has collected and preserved it."
--Michael Feinstein
****
"...a great artist, whatever the immediate conditions disturbing his own life, may be able to clarify for the benefit of another those fundamental truths the conviction of which lies too deep in his consciousness to be reached by external agitations."
--M.D. Herter Norton
****
"I don't care what category I'm in as long as I'm number one!"
--General Halftrack
****
"If everybody agreed with me, they'd all be right!"
--Lucy Van Pelt
****
"Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand."
--Plato
****
"Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing."
--Edmund Burke
****
"Poetry is music in words; and music is poetry in sound; both excellent sauce, but, those have lived and died poor, who made them their meat."
--Andrew Fuller
****
"You will find poetry nowhere, unless you bring some with you."
--Joseph Joubert
****
"Poetry is not made out of the understanding. The question of common sense is always: 'What is it good for?' a question which would abolish the rose, and be triumphantly answered by the cabbage."
--James Russell Lowell
****
"Poetry is the sister of sorrow; every man that suffers and weeps, is a poet; every tear is a verse; and every heart a poem."
--Father Andre
****
"The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality."
--Johann Wolfgang von Geothe
****
"Would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!"
--Gotthold Lessing
****
"Architecture is frozen music."
--Madam de Stael
****
"A man of the world must seem to be what he wishes to be thought."
--Jean de la Bruyere
****
"May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve."
--Sappho
****
"The most identifiable trait of Anglo-Saxons is that we always mistake a short memory for a clear conscience."
--Argus Hamilton
****
"There is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration."
--Steve Martin
****
"Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening."
--Steve Martin
****
Bill Murray: "Do you ever have deja vu?"
Andie McDowell: "Didn't you just ask me that?
--from Groundhog Day
****
"Be true to your teeth and they won't be false to you."
--Soupy Sales
****
"The only thing better than singing is more singing."
--Ella Fitzgerald
****
"Comfort begets suspicion."
--Jim Reed
****
"To travel is to take a journey into yourself."
--Danny Kaye
****
"Perseverance is a great substitute for talent."
--Steve Martin
****
"Every head is a world."
--Cuban proverb
****
"I do think the author ought to be able to give a good reason for the way things are in his poem. Not a bad question to ask oneself."
--James Dickey
****
"I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that."
--James Dickey
****
"If God made anything better than okra, he kept it back for himself."
--James Dickey
****
"Art-the arts generally-are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable."
--Doris Lessing
****
"I'm trying to get ahead, so I can concentrate on slowing down the rate at which I'm falling behind."
--Bob Thaves
****
"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry."
--Mark Strand
****
"The profession of writing is nothing else but a violent, indestructible passion. When it has once entered people's heads it never leaves them."
--George Sand
****
"The dice of the gods are always loaded."
--Erasmus
****
"Know how to make God laugh? Tell him your plans."
--Robert Altman
****
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"Quality's rare. And never cheap."
--Lovejoy
****
"Always do the next thing."
--George Carlin
****
"If you cannot find a companion equal to or better than yourself, journey alone--do not travel with a fool."
--Buddha (Dhammapada)
****
"Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"Lazy people aren't lazy. They're merely clever."
--Lovejoy
****
"Avoiding newspapers ensures a better quality of ignorance."
--Lovejoy
****
"I've nothing against wealth as long as nobody suffers and the rich don't get uppity."
--Lovejoy
****
"I have a callous regard for most people."
--Jim Reed
****
"You cannot prepare for the death of a parent--for its awful finality, for what it takes from you."
--Tina Sinatra
****
"If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"Poetry isn't strange. You've known it all the way from Mother Goose. It's some sort of make-believe that's got some sort of truth in it--a little bit that's so fascinating you can't get rid of it. The thing I wanted most of all in the world was to know what was going on in the world, to find something to say to whatever happened--to sass it back. My poems are my adjustment to the world. I know what to say to the Sphinx."
--Robert Frost
****
"Worthy books are not companions-- They are solitudes..."
--P. T. Bailey
****
"How truly wise, perhaps, it was my dollars were so few, for if my purse were full, then I would never know if you had married me for riches, or because my eyes were blue!"
--Louise Shaw
****
"I have all the money I need, provided I die by 4 o'clock this afternoon."
--Henny Youngman
****
"Time only wasted when sprinkling perfume on goat farm."
--Charlie Chan
****
"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"When player cannot see man who deal cards, much wiser to stay out of game."
--Charlie Chan
****
"Every man must wear out at least one pair of fool's shoes."
--Charlie Chan
****
"The impossible sometimes permits itself the luxury of occurring."
--Charlie Chan
****
"When prepared for worst, then can hope for best."
--Charlie Chan
****
"Secret of this case harder to determine than alley cat's grandfather."
--Charlie Chan
****
"Very difficult to explain hole in doughnut, but hole always there."
--Charlie Chan
****
"No one knows less about servants than the master."
--Charlie Chan
****
"Curiosity responsible for cat needing nine lives."
--Charlie Chan
****
"You talk like rooster who think sun come up just to hear him crow."
--Charlie Chan
****
"Wherever one is not--that is where heart is."
--Charlie Chan
****
"Mind of woman like needle at bottom of ocean."
--Charlie Chan
****
"To live within limits, to want one thing, or a very few things, very much and love them very dearly. Cling to them. Survey them from every angle, become one with them--that is what makes the poet, the artist, the human being."
--Goethe
****
"Agriculture is a very fine thing, because you get such an unmistakable answer as to whether you're making a fool of yourself or hitting the mark."
--Goethe
****
"If the thing that is loved be base, the lover becomes base."
--Leonardo da Vinci
****
"A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read."
--Mark Twain
****
"The salvation of the world depends on the people who will not take evil good-humoredly, and whose laughter destroys fools instead of encouraging them."
--Bernard Shaw
****
"A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears."
--Montaigne
****
"A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist."
--Unknown
****
"What happens to your fist when you open your hand?"
--Zen Buddhism
****
"What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?"
--Bertolt Brecht
****
"We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities."
--Walt Kelly
****
"If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living."
--Yiddish proverb
****
"There is no future in bein' dead."
--Walt Kelly
****
"God is not all-powerful as he cannot build a wall he cannot jump."
--Pascal
****
"The book above all others in the world which should be forbidden is a catalogue of forbidden books."
--Lichtenberg
****
"One-seventh of your life is spent on Monday."
--Jon Arbuckle (Jim Davis of "Garfield" strip)
****
"God laughs in heaven when anyone says, 'Here I'm learned; this I understand...'" --Elizabeth Barrett Browning
****
"Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight as if for taming accidental thoughts from possible pulses."
--Elizabeth Barrett Browning
****
"Women aren't as mere as they used to be."
--Walt Kelly
****
"Large-scale slavery begins when the traditional mode of production is dislocated, usually due to warfare, imperial expansion, and changes in basic crops, which in turn induces the rural free poor to migrate into the cities and newly opened colonial settlements. At the imperial center, land and capital fall increasingly under the monopoly of the rich, while citizen labor grows scarcer. The territorial expansion of the state, by making the enslavement of other peoples profitable, temporarily solves the economic problem. Were human beings then molded by the new culture, were they to behave like the red Polyergus ants for which slavery is an automatic response, slave societies might become permanent. But the qualities that we recognize as most distinctly mammalian--and human--make such a transition impossible. The citizen working class becomes further divorced from the means of production because of their aversion to the low status associated with common labor. The slaves, meanwhile, attempt to maintain family and ethnic relationships and to piece together the shards of their old culture. Where the effort succeeds, many of them rise in status and alter their position from its original, purely servile form. Where self-assertion fails because it is suppressed, reproduction declines and large numbers of new slaves must be imported in each generation. The rapid turnover has a disintegrating effect on the culture of slaves and masters alike. Absenteeism rises as the slave owners attempt to spend more of their time in the centers of their own culture. Overseers come increasingly into control. Inefficiency, brutality, revolt, and sabotage increase, and the system spirals slowly downward."
--Edward O. Wilson
****
"Slave-supported societies'...ascent to maturity is rapid, their period of glory short, and their descent to oblivion ostentatious and mightily drawn out."
--Orlando Patterson
****
"Nationalism and racism...are the culturally nurtured outgrowths of simple tribalism...civilizations have raised self-love to the rank of high culture, exalted themselves by divine sanction and diminished others with elaborately falsified written histories."
--Edward O. Wilson
****
"The force behind most warlike policies is ethnocentrism, the irrationally exaggerated allegiance of individuals to their kin and fellow tribesmen."
--Edward O. Wilson
****
"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
--Joseph Campbell
****
"Human aggression cannot be explained as either a dark-angelic flaw or a bestial instinct. Nor is it the pathological symptom of upbringing in a cruel environment. Human beings are strongly predisposed to respond with unreasoning hatred to external threats and to escalate their hostility sufficiently to overwhelm the source of the threat by a respectably wide margin of safety."
--Edward O. Wilson
****
"Generosity without hope of reciprocation is the rarest and most cherished of human behaviors, subtle and difficult to define, distributed in a highly selective pattern, surrounded by ritual and circumstance, and honored by medallions and emotional orations."
--Edward O. Wilson
****
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
****
"Am I beautiful? I think it must be the rose. My hair--it only weighs me down. My eyes--I only see with them. My lips--they only help me to speak. Of what use is it to be beautiful?"
--Spoken by the robot Helena in R.U.R. by Karel Capek
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"Our true nationality is mankind."
--H.G. Wells
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"Popular education, no matter what efforts are made to improve it, must inevitably remain but little more than a device for perpetuating the ideas that happen to be official--in other words, the nonsense regarded as revelation by the powers currently in control..."
--H.L. Mencken
****
"Human life as we know it, is only the dispersed raw material for life as it might be. There is a hitherto undreamt-of fullness, freedom and happiness within the reach of our species. Mankind can pull itself together and take that now...but, if mankind fails to apprehend its opportunity, then division, cruelties, delusions and ultimate frustration lies before our kind. The decision to perish or escape has to be made within a very limited time. For escape, vast changes in the educational, economic and directive structure of human society are necessary. They are definable. They are practicable. But they demand courage and integrity. They demand a force and concentration of will and a power of adaptation in habits and usages which may not be within the compass of mankind."
--H.G. Wells
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"I hate pious people. I hate their abject prayers. Almost always they are mean demands for preferential miracles."
--H.G. Wells
****
"Revolution is the living God and Religion is pickled God."
--H.G. Wells
****
"The individual life is doomed to frustration and death, unless it can escape into the synthesis of mankind...Give yourself, with all your heart, or else perish, as all self-centered individuals must perish, for ever. Your individual life in itself is worth nothing at all. It may be bright for a moment like a flash in the darkness, but it will leave the darkness deeper than before. Live for all life or do not dream you are living."
--H.G. Wells
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"Has any psychological experiment yielded a more delightful suggestion than this one: that there is a part of the mind without ambition or information, which nonetheless is expert on what is beautiful?"
--Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
****
"One of the millionaire ladies asked me one day, 'If you were in my shoes, what would you do?'...what I told her was that I'd buy apartments for all the people I know who don't have a decent place to live. I'd furnish it for them and then make a gift of it to them. To which my lady millionaire responded, 'And when the sink got clogged, they'd call you and ask you to fix it for them.' I said, 'There are plumbers'...but I could see the implication: that once having given, those to whom you gave would turn to you to straighten out their problems, big and small. And I'm sure that giving--endlessly and, as it were, without limitation--would soon pale. Have you ever heard the prayer of the Provencal fisherman: 'Holy Mother, I pray you to grant me enough fish that I may eat and feed my family, have sufficient left to give some away, and then enough more so that those who need may steal from me.' As far as money goes, that's the only meaningful philosophy I've ever heard."
--Pauline Reage
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"Nothing happens unless first a dream."
--Carl Sandburg
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"I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues."
--Duke Ellington
****
"Almost all the craziness in the world comes from running from pain."
--Mary Pipher
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"Most of the unhappiness in the world is caused by people who are 90 percent happy, going for the last 10 percent."
--Mary Pipher
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"If you're not the lead dog, the scenery never changes."
--Grimmy (Mike Peters)
****
"Did you know that at one time, each of us weighed 17 pounds?"
--Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding
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"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."
--Theodore Roosevelt
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"Since I haven't brains enough to write more solid articles and wouldn't if I could--I often worry about my future since I am no doctor and at best but a mean scrivener, but out of all the things one does, from pipe fitting to testing seamless leather belting & from ceramics to statesmanship, I can do only one thing, even passably, and that is make words and space them between punctuation points..."
--James Thurber
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"They come for you in the morning in a limousine; they take you to the studio; they stick a pretty girl in your arms; sometimes they earn something off you and give you some of the profits. They call that a profession?--come on!"
--Marcello Mastroianni
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"The height of human wisdom is to bring our tempers down to our circumstances and to make a calm within, under the weight of the greatest storm without."
--Daniel Defoe
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The meek are contesting the will. --Bumper Sticker
****
THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FLEE
--Jim Reed
****
"My theology, briefly, is that the universe forces me to examine the concept of unintelligent design."
--Jim Reed
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"If there is any principle of the constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought--not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought of those we hate."
--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
****
"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."
--James Thurber
****
"I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement."
--Oscar Wilde
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"I would like to take you seriously but to do so would affront your intelligence."
--William F. Buckley Jr.
****
"Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess."
--Oscar Wilde
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"I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel."
--Bertrand Russell
****
*
"So little time and so little to do."
--Oscar Levant
****
"If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States."
--H.L. Mencken
****
"I'm an insomniac-agnostic-egotist: I lie awake nights trying to figure out whether or not I believe that I am as great as I am."
--Thaves ("Frank & Earnest"
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"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry."
--Mark Strand
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"The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art-because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over what I've done-is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae."
-Kurt Vonnegut
****
"Where words fail, music speaks."
-Hans Christian Andersen
****
"The profession of writing is nothing else but a violent, indestructible passion. When it has once entered people's heads it never leaves them."
-George Sand
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"A word is the taste our tongue has of eternity; that's why I speak."
-Rosario Castellanos
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"From the solemn gloom of the temple children run out to sit in the dust, God watches them play and forgets the priest."
-Rabindranath Tagore
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"Man is the only creature who ever stiffs a waiter."
-Woody Allen
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"We are all here for a spell; get all the good laughs you can."
-Will Rogers
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"Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo."
-Don Marquis
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"A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn't be."
-Robert Quillen
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"The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair."
-Mary Heaton Vorse
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"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there."
-Indira Gandhi
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"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat."
-John Lehman
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"Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff."
-Frank Zappa
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"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"The main advantage of being famous is that when you bore people at dinner parties they think it is their fault."
-Henry Kissinger
"I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see."
-John Burroughs
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"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
-Antoine de Saint Exupery
****
"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."
-Winston Churchill
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"By the time Mozart was my age, he'd been dead for ten years."
-Tom Lehrer
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"The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see noting more in a quotation than an extract."
-Isaac Disraeli
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"The art of a thing is, first, its aim, and next, its manner of accomplishment."
-C.N. Bovee
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"There are two kinds of artists in this world; those that work because the spirit is in them, and they cannot be silent if they would, and those that speak from a conscientious desire to make apparent to others the beauty that has awakened their own admiration."
-Anna Katharine Green
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"Society is now one polished horde, Form'd of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored."
-Byron
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"Reviewers are forever telling authors, they can't understand them. The author might often reply: Is that my fault?"
-J.C. and A.W. Hare
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"Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world."
-Desmond Tutu
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"Remember: Two wrongs make a casserole."
-Bunny Hoest & John Reiner
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"Silence the artist and you have silenced the most articulate voice the people have."
-Katharine Hepburn
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"An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it."
-Paul Valery
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"How vain painting is-we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don't admire at all."
-Blaise Pascal
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"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
-Pablo Picasso
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"The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right."
-William Safire
****
"Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead."
-Scottish Proverb
****
"'Be yourself' is the worst advice you can give to some people."
-Tom Masson
****
"No matter how bad things get, you got to go on living, even if it kills you."
-Sholom Aleichem
****
"Democracy is being able to say no to the boss."
-Aldous Huxley
****
"The doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines."
-Frank Lloyd Wright
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"I got an hourglass figure, but it's later than you think."
-Minnie Pearl
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"The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
-William Faulkner
****
"I ain't lazy, I'm just blessed with a lack of ambition."
-Louis Armstrong
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"The surest way to wake up and smell the roses every day is to go to sleep face down in the flower bed."
-Argus Hamilton
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"It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation."
-John Stuart Mill
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"I will be brief. Not nearly so brief as Salvador Dali, who gave the world's shortest speech. He said, 'I will be so brief I have already finished,' and he sat down."
-Edward O. Wilson
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"If you could say it, there'd be no reason to paint."
-Edward Hopper
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"Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write."
-Elie Wiesel
****
Hawkins: I've got it! I've got it! The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true! Right?
Griselda: Right. But there's been a change: they broke the chalice from the palace!
Hawkins: They broke the chalice from the palace?
Griselda: And replaced it with a flagon.
Hawkins: A flagon…?
Griselda: With the figure of a dragon.
Hawkins: Flagon with a dragon.
Griselda: Right.
Hawkins: But did you put the pellet with the poison in the vessel with the pestle?
Griselda: No! The pellet with the poison's in the flagon with the dragon! The vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true!
Hawkins: The pellet with the poison's in the flagon with the dragon; the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true.
Griselda: Just remember that.
-From "The Court Jester" starring Danny Kaye
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"Segregation became unfashionable before it became unjust."
-Brett Butler
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"Oprah Winfrey gave each audience member a thousand dollar debit card Tuesday to spend on the needy. The agreed rules are you can't give it to a relative and you can't give it to yourself. It's the same thing the Old Testament says about sex."
-Argus Hamilton
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"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would always say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.' To this day, especially in times of 'disaster,' I remember my mother's words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers-so many caring people in this world."
-Fred Rogers
****
"Doubtless, you want to be my friend. Come back on Tuesday."
-Dorothy Parker
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"What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?"
-Mike Peters (spoken by Grimmy, of Mother Goose and Grimm comic strip)
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"Of late, I have no friends; I must be doing something right."
-Somerset Maugham
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"If they try to rush me, I always say, I've only got one other speed - and it's slower."
-Glenn Ford
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"The first man to raise a fist is the man who's run out of ideas."
-Spoken by Malcolm McDowall in the role of H.G. Wells, in the movie "Time After Time."
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"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him!"
-James D.Miles
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"Plagiarism is the basis of all culture."
-Charles Seeger
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"Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple."
-Pete Seeger
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Laura: "And if I don't talk-will you belt me one?"
Mike: "Hell, I never hit dames. I always kick 'em."
Laura: "Do I get a reward if I do?"
Mike: "Sure, I won't kick you."
-Dialogue between detective Mike Hammer and suspect Laura, in "The Girl Hunters" by Mickey Spillane
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"It was a dark and stormy night. But then, that happens sometimes."
-Jim Reed
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"Comedy is in my blood. Too bad it's not in my act."
-Rodney Dangerfield
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"Thanksgiving is the time of year when American families make every possible effort to get together at half-time."
-Argus Hamilton
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"A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking."
-Steven Wright
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"Ahh, ya doesn't has to call me Johnson! You can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay, or you can call me Johnny or you can call me Sonny, or you can call me RayJay, or you can call me RJ… but ya doesn't hafta call me Johnson."
-Bill Saluga
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"Don't notice what people wear. Notice the way people wear what they wear."
-Jim Reed
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"Oregon State professor said Wednesday he has invented a miniature reactor that can convert vegetable oil to biodiesel. Don't get your hopes up. Due to its press deadline, Oil and Gas Journal went ahead and ran his obituary three weeks before the car accident."
-Argus Hamilton
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"If you really want to hurt your parents…the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."
-Kurt Vonnegut
****
"Grandparenthood offers the chance to repeat the mistakes of parenthood but with less life-scarring impact on either party."
-Al Franken
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"Good leadership involves responsibility to the welfare of the group, which means that some people will get angry at your actions and decisions. It's inevitable, if you're honorable. Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity; you'll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted, and you'll avoid offering differential rewards based on differential performance because some people might get upset. Ironically, by procrastinating on the difficult choices, by trying not to get anyone mad, and by treating everyone equally 'nicely' regardless of their contributions, you'll simply ensure that the only people you'll wind up angering are the most creative and productive people in the organization."
-General Colin Powell
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"The Secret Service seized a man after he climbed over the White House fence Sunday. He was screaming that he's a victim of administration deceptions. Within seconds Scott McClellan was wrestled to the ground and dragged back into his office."
-Argus Hamilton
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"'Tis my modest opinion that no man can fly pirate colors who's not willing to sell his friend, his sweetheart, or his mother."
-Spoken by Humble Bellows, played by actor Torin Thatcher in the movie THE CRIMSON PIRATE written by Roland Kibbee
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"I worship the ground you walk on. Not you, just the ground you walk on."
-Jim Reed
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"Ray Bradbury doesn't write the way people talk, he writes the way people feel when they talk."
-Jim Reed
****
"A literalism of convenience…"
--Leonard Pitts (referring to extreme interpretation of the Bible by arch conservative activists)
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"A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy."
-Edward O. Wilson
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"If something gets a laugh, you do it again."
-Harpo Marx, responding to a Russian audience who had asked for the "political meaning" of his slapstick comedy pantomime act.
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"It is no longer a question of where civilization began, but if it ever did!"
-Alfred E. Neuman
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"No other writer since Mark Twain has caught the vitality and innocence of small-town American youth with as fine and mature a perception as Ray Bradbury's."
-Robert O. Bowen, reviewing "Dandelion Wine"
****
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
-Edmund Burke
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"I loved my friend. He went away from me. There's nothing more to say. The poem ends, Soft as it began- I love my friend."
-Langston Hughes
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"We are currently living in a nation where one out of three people weighs as much as the other two."
-Argus Hamilton
****
"Just how much does succotash suffer?"
-Jim Reed
****
"I'm not a big fan of the group approach to writing. Writing is a solitary art. As I wrote in The Complete Idiot's Guide To Publishing Children's Books, "Stop attending workshops. Read other writers if you must, but for heaven sakes save your soul and stay away from how-to workshops and conferences. At worst, they'll drain you of your creativity. At best, they'll have you writing like everyone else. Keep what little originality you have left from childhood. Protect it. Nurture it. Let it run wild. That's all you have. That's all you need. The only way to learn to write is to write. There is no other way. Workshops and conferences can only take you away from the real work, the real world of writing."
-Charles Ghigna
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"I worshipped the ground she ran me into."
-Jim Reed
****
"If you was a mud puddle, I'd stomp you dry."
-Limeliters
****
"He who slings mud loses ground."
-Adlai Stevenson
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"Maturity is highly overrated."
-Jim Davis
****
"Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon."
-Ann Patchett
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"It's hard to forget a girl when you buy her a gift on time."
-Flip Wilson, quoting Benjamin Franklin
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"A brother is like one's shoulder."
-Somalian proverb
****
"Happiness is not a gift bestowed, but a result achieved."
-Plato
****
"Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind."
-Henry James
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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
-Dr. Seuss
****
"Life is a great big canvas: throw all the paint on it you can."
-Danny Kaye
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"It was nearly eleven-thirty, and I had just put the cat out. But it hadn't been easy. He had burned more fiercely than I anticipated."
-George Carlin
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"The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
-Emerson
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"When I was a kid, my grandmother convinced me that brown eggs were tastier. Now I just wonder what route they took through the hen."
-Scott Adams
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"Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand."
-Plato
****
"Learn to listen to people that you think you're smarter than."
-Chris Rock
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"Never question another man's motives. His wisdom, yes, but not his motives."
-Dwight Eisenhower
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"She was standing before the Honors House working on her tobaccolaureate."
-Jim Reed
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On the validity of certain truths, facts and ideas: "Like religions…we don't believe them, we only think we do."
-Edgar Rice Burroughs
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"To separate journalism and poetry-therefore, history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge."
-Archibald MacLeish
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"I'm so sick of hypochondria."
-Jim Reed
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"Reincarnation could explain why bad things happen to good people and why good things happen to bad people. But since bad things also happen to bad people and good things also happen to good people, one might well suppose that there is no rhyme or reason why anything happens to anybody."
-Robert Todd Carroll
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"Shall I tell you what true knowledge is? When you know, to know that you know, and when you do not know, to know that you do not know-that is true knowledge."
-Confucius
****
"Canned Kosher mackerel would rightfully be called 'Holy Mackerel,' right?"
-Jim Reed
****
"There are two ways of hiding something in writing. You leave it out, or you disguise it…when you hide something, you often return to find more than you hid."
-Nancy Willard
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"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether's it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-Hermann Goring
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"Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die."
-Carrie Fisher
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"Triority: Three things that need to be done first."
-Rich Hall
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"For the first time we have had the chance to examine there the effect that slavery produces on society. On the right bank of the Ohio everything is activity, industry; labour is honoured; there are no slaves. Pass to the left bank and the scene changes so suddenlly that you think yourself on the other side of the world; the enterprising spirit is gone. There, work is not only painful: it's shameful, and you degrade yourself in submitting yourself to it…to do any kind of manual labour is to act like a slave…every day the North grows more wealthy and densely populated while the South is stationary or growing poor."
-Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
****
"…what value is attached here to the life of a man, when he has the misfortune to have a black skin. About a week ago we had to cross the Tennessee river. To reach the other side we had only a paddlewheel boat operated by a horse and two slaves. We ourselves got across all right, but as the river was full of drift ice the master of the boat was afraid to try to take the carriage across. 'Don't worry,' one of our travelling companions said to him, 'we'll make up if necessary the value of the horse and the slaves.' This argument removed all objections: the carriage was taken on and got across."
-Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
****
On politics: "Again to-day they assured me that in the new western States the people generally made very poor selections. Full of pride and ignorance, the electors want to be represented by people of their own kind. Moreover, to win their votes one has to descend to manoeuvres that disgust distinguished men. You have to haunt the taverns and dispute with the populace: that's what they call Electioneering in America…the fittest men would probably have too much reservedness of manners and severity of morals to secure an Election resting on universal suffrage…Why don't noteworthy men reach the legislature? I doubt whether the people would name them. Besides, little store is set by public office and the outstanding men don't solicit it. This is at the same time what makes the state operate so badly and what prevents revolutions…The greatest merit of American government is to be powerless and passive. In the present state of things America needs, in order to prosper, neither skilful leadershiip nor profound plans, nor great efforts, but liberty and still more liberty."
-Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
****
"Everything is personal."
--Jim Reed
****
"Do the people choose good representatives?…No, generally they elect men of their own capacity, and flatterers. I haven't the slightest doubt of the advantage that would accrue from limiting the suffrage. The choicies would certainly be much better. But it is in the nature of things, in a 'democratic' state, that the qualifications be broadened steadily and irresistibly, until the whole world can vote."
-Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
****
Zoot Sims was having a smoke between sets when a bum asked him: "Hey buddy, how about three bucks for a beer?"
Zoot answered: "How do I know you're not going to buy a bowl of soup with it?"
--Allen Johnson Jr.
****
"Treat the world well…It was not given to you by your parents…It was lent to you by your children."
--African saying
****
"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt…… If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake."
--Thomas Jefferson
****
ART CAN BE A HELL OF A THING "'Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.' The words of the Second Commandment reflect the Semitic view of the graphic arts, common to Jews and Arabs alike: no living creature was to be represented. The prohibition does not actually occur in the Koran, but one of the hadith, or traditions, makes the Prophet say that on the Day of Judgement artists will be confronted with their creations and challenged to bring them to life. Failing inevitably to do so, they will be consigned to hell-fire; they have usurped and abused the creative function of the Deity."
-Peter Avery & John Heath-Stubbs
****
"If the good lord had wanted us to walk, he wouldn't have invented roller skates."
-Willie Wonka
****
"Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are going to throw it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out."
--Brenda Ueland
****
"If a student is a Maynard Ferguson freak, I immediately tell him to go out and buy some records by Dizzy, Miles, Freddie Hubbard, Wynton Marsalis, and Louis Armstrong. I try to teach them that one of the funnest rewards of playing music is when you start to sound like yourself" --Maynard Ferguson
****
"If you spread sunshine all over the place, won't that annoy insomniacs?"
--Jim Reed
****
"If Mary had a little lamb, wouldn't there be hearings about a possible ban on gene splicing?"
--Jim Reed
****
"Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing."
--T.H. Huxley
****
"I'll play it first and tell you what it is later."
--Miles Davis
****
"The past is close kin to pain, and it is near to happiness."
--Howell Vines
****
"About Diane Sawyer: If you're really having a run of bad luck, she walks with you in a field."
--Mort Sahl
****
"Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"Facts quite often, I fear to confess, like lawyers, put me to sleep at noon. Not theories, however. Theories are invigorating and tonic. Give me an ounce of fact and I will produce you a ton of theory by tea this afternoon. That is, after all, my job."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"Half the fun of travel is the esthetic of lostness."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down."
--Ray Bradbury
****
"Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down."
-Ray Bradbury
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"My stories run up and bite me in the leg - I respond by writing them down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off."
--Ray Bradbury
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"Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."
--Ray Bradbury
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"The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance the idea that anything is possible."
--Ray Bradbury
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"Touch a scientist and you touch a child."
--Ray Bradbury
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"We are an impossibility in an impossible universe."
--Ray Bradbury
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"Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future."
--Ray Bradbury
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"You can't try to do things; you simply must do them."
--Ray Bradbury
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"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
--Ray Bradbury
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"It is not by great acts but by small failures that freedom dies. The sense of justice dies slowly in people. They grow used to the unthinkable and sometime they look back and even wonder when "things" changed. They will not find the day or a time or a place. Justice and liberty die quietly because men first learn to ignore injustice and then no longer recognize it. Once militarism captures the mind of a people it spreads slowly-it is endemic; it moves undramatically. Unless military incursion on civilian life is stopped at constitutional walls, our nation and the world may go with either a bang or a whimper. But it will matter little, for freedom will have fallen not under a conqueror's heel but more gloriously-it will simply have marched away to a cadenced count."
--Charles Morgan Jr.
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"It is sad to grow old but nice to ripen."
--Brigitte Bardot
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One comedian recalled a class at Temple University in which the professor and students spent three hours debating the question: "Is the glass half-full or half-empty?" Afterwards, He rode the subway to the home of his paternal grandmother, who had dropped out of school in the third grade. She asked what he was studying, and he told her about the half-empty/half-full debate. His grandmother, who was kneading bread, answered without hesitation, "It depends on whether you're drinking or pouring."
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"Beauty is in the heart of the beholder."
--H.G. Wells
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"I'm an almost-total skeptic. While your eyes are closed in prayer, mine are wide open. I wouldn't want to miss seeing Jesus, should he appear while you're asleep at the wheel."
--Jim Reed
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"Her shallowness ran deep."
--Jim Reed
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"He knows not gracious mercy who sins not. Why grieve? It was for sin that mercy came."
--Omar Khayyam
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"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying."
--Woody Allen
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"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
--Woody Allen
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"You never get away from who you are."
--Jim Reed
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"Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."
-Spoken by Westley in The Princess Bride by William Goldman
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"Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."
-Spoken by Montoya in The Princess Bride by William Goldman
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"Religion goes against my religion."
--Jim Reed
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"If all sots and lovers go to Hell, Heaven will be empty as this palm of mine."
--Omar Khayyam
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"Hell is a spark struck by our vain distress; Heaven but an instant when content we know."
--Omar Khayyam Quatrain
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"Money is how people assign value."
--Jim Reed
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"Liberals seldom mate outside their politics."
--Jim Reed
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"Rules are for established things, like the pieces and positions of a game. Men and women are not established things; they're experiments, all of them."
--H. G. Wells
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"Queer, incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty."
--H. G. Wells
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"The reality of beauty yields itself to no words."
-H. G. Wells
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"It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening."
-H. G. Wells
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"You take quite ignorant people before almost any beautiful work of art and they will laugh at it as absurd."
-H. G. Wells
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"Be a rebel or a revolutionary to your heart's content, but a mere seceder never."
-H. G. Wells
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"In every conversation, every departure must either be a presumption when you talk into your antagonist's special things, a pedantry when you fall back upon your own, or a platitude when you tell each other things you both know."
-H. G. Wells
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"One keeps rules in order to be one's self. One studies Nature in order not to be blindly ruled by her. There's no sense in morality, I suppose, unless you are fundamentally immoral."
-H. G. Wells
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"The dead stay where we leave them. I suppose that is the real good in death, that they do stay; that it makes them immortal for us. Living they were mortal. But now they can never spoil themselves or be spoilt by change again."
-H. G. Wells
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"There is no describing the reality of love. The shapes of things are nothing, the actual happenings are nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon them and a wonder."
-H. G. Wells
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"Let slip the puppies of war."
-Jim Reed
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"The showgirl was victim to a sequins of events."
-Jim Reed
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"Each violet leaf that springs from earth was once A mole that decked the cheek of some fair maid."
-Omar Khayyam
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"If I ne'er sinned, what then would Mercy do? For Mercy but awaits my sin and thine."
-Omar Khayyam
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"Would that all things forbidden made men drunk, For ne'er on earth I'd see sobriety."
-Omar Khayyam
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"Though people call me lewd continually, I'm guiltless, 'tis their fancies fixed on me."
-Omar Khayyam
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"How many ne'er set foot beyond themselves!"
-Omar Khayyam
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"A silenced bigot can do far more mischief than one who airs his hatred publicly."
-Ted Gup
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"A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular."
-Adlai Stevenson
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"My bookloft is often frequented by people who don't read and who enter, thinking it's the hot dog stand downstairs…alternating with people who'd like to read but don't like the idea that it would require purchasing a book."
-Jim Reed
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"Art hath an enemy called Ignorance."
-Ben Jonson
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"We look to our own prejudices reinforced by the news media, and when that doesn't happen, we accuse them of bias."
-Jane E. Kirtley
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"If a person goes to a country and finds the newspapers filled with nothing but good news, there are good men in jail."
-Daniel P. Moynihan
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"There may come a day when art is a lost art."
--Jim Reed
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"The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were."
-David Brinkley
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"Freedom of religion, as the Founding Fathers saw it, was not just the right to associate oneself with a certain denomination but the right to disassociate without penalty. Belief or nonbelief was a matter of individual choice-a right underwritten in the basic charter of the nation's liberties."
-Norman Cousins
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"Rappers don't have to worry about anything. No one likes what they have to say anyway, so they're not afraid to speak up."
-Russell Simmons
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"Words themselves become beings, sentences become…natural vegetation to be guided by the gardener's hands."
-Eric Sevareid
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"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees.Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible."
-Elie Wiesel
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"We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry."
-P.J. O'Rourke
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"Humor is, by its nature, more truthful than factual."
-P.J. O'Rourke
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"Writing…is more than living, for it is being conscious of living."
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously."
-Hubert H. Humphrey
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"The toughest thing is to love somebody who has done something harmful to you…especially when that somebody has been yourself."
-Fred Rogers
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"When we're able to resign ourselves to the wishes that will never come true, there can be enormous energies available within us for whatever we can do."
-Fred Rogers
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"Writing is mostly an exercise in talking to myself. In lieu of stimulating conversation with others, I converse alone, monologue embedded in monologue. Quite stimulating, sometimes!"
-Jim Reed
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"The real drama of life (that which matters most) is rarely center stage."
-Fred Rogers
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"Caring is not what a powerful person gives to a weaker one. Caring is a matter of being there…lamenting right along with the one who hurts."
-Fred Rogers
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"The older I get, the more convinced I am that the space between people who are trying their best to understand each other is hallowed ground."
-Fred Rogers
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"You're a short time here and a long time gone."
-Bo Diddley
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"I'm so hungry I could just eat."
-Garfield (Jim Davis)
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"Everything takes longer than it does."
-Don Strobe & Liz Reed
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"There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that's the time for sex."
-H.G. Wells
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"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."
-H.G. Wells
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"It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening."
-H.G. Wells
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"There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile."
-H.G. Wells
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"Rest enough for the individual man. Too much and too soon and we call it death. But for Man no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First, this little planet and its winds and ways. And then all laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him. And at last, out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning…. Little animals. And if we're no more than animals we must snatch each little scrap of happiness, and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. It is this, or that. All the universe or nothing. Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?"
-H.G. Wells
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"The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something."
-Carl Sandburg
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"Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child. " -Carl Sandburg
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"I knew her before she was a virgin."
--Oscar Levant, on Doris Day
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"I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery."
-Billy Collins
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"How good and wonderful a thing is work, the more so if the work we do is useful; but there is something equally good and wonderful, and that is to observe. To observe, to see and to discover, these are grand and rewarding things; but for these one must be able to let the imagination soar, and those who lack this quality are blind to all there is to be seen."
-Karel Capek
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"What's the use of happiness? It can't buy you money."
-Henny Youngman
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"A good conscience is a continual Christmas."
-Benjamin Franklin
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"Understanding physics is child's play when compared to understanding child's play."
-Albert Einstein
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"It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was."
-Anne Sexton
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"It is poignant but fundamental that the flag protects those who hold it in contempt."
-Anthony M. Kennedy
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"We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents."
-William Brennan
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"The freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much."
-Robert H. Jackson
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"Neither Jefferson nor any of his eighteenth century cosigners (of the Declaration of Independence) meant ALL when they used the word 'all.' They meant 'all' with the exception of slaves, women, and the laboring poor. These exceptions were so taken for granted in the eighteenth century that no one thought it necessary to mention them when using the word 'all.'" -Mortimer Adler
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"The first important financial advance for newspapers came in 1451 when Johann Gutenberg…invented the printing press, which made it possible for a newspaper to cheaply and accurately reproduce every single error thousands of times."
-Dave Barry
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"Who speaks the truth should have one foot in the stirrup."
-Hindu proverb
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"Live in contact with dreams, and you will get something of their charm; live in contact with facts, and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country where the facts were not brutal, and the dreams not unreal."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"Laura Bush on Friday warned that risky behaviors like drugs and sex and alcohol and violence and smoking are the top causes of disease and death among young people. She is absolutely right. They are also the top causes of nostalgia among older people."
-Argus Hamilton
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"Always do what you are afraid to do."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"Old age is respectable just as long as it asserts itself, maintains its proper rights, and is not enslaved to any one. For as I admire a young man who has something of the old man in him, so do I an old one who has something of a young man."
-Cato
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"As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts."
-Adrienne Rich
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"Laughter is the outward expression of a nerve well-struck."
-Larry Gelbart
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"Volunteers! You can't kill them. You can't make them do anything. But when the do accomplish something, you are grateful. And you try to thank them."
-Jim Reed
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"I notice that in spite of the frightful lies you have printed about me, I still believe everything you say about other people."
-Robert Maynard Hutchins
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"Get yourself a notebook and write in it EVERY night for two weeks. Then stop-if you can. If you can't, you're a writer."
-Charles Ghigna
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"Never work more than seven days a week or twelve hours a day, and sometimes a little less. To grow younger with the years, work harder as you grow older."
-Mortimer Adler
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"The more controlled, limited, and tormented art is, the freer it is."
-Igor Stravinsky
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"Get over the folly of thinking that there is any conflict between high living and high thinking: Asceticism is for the birds."
-Mortimer Adler
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"The First Amendment requires that we protect some falsehood in order to protect speech that matters."
-Lewis F. Powell Jr.
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"Swallowing words before you say them is better than having to eat them afterwards."
-Unknown
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"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."
-Martin Luther
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"Everything has been thought of before, but the difficulty is to think of it again."
-Goethe
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"An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit."
-Pliny the Younger
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"It is one of our jobs, as journalists, to be hated. But it is not enough to be merely hated. It is also important to be hated for the right reasons."
-Gerald Hannon
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"This book's…purpose is to entertain the reader although, as is usual with my books, the discerning person will find brilliant and subtle philosophical observations half-concealed behind the clowning and the smart-alecking. I can't help this. Somehow, in spite of unshirted hell, the wisdom seems to creep into my stuff. This is saddening to me, for all I want from life is truth and beauty and money."
-H. Allen Smith
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"Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is always dangerous."
-Alan Barth
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"The feeble tremble before popular opinion, the foolish defy it, the wise judge it, the skillful direct it."
-Jeanne-Marie Roland
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"I've been directed a poem to write, And if I did 'twould be a sight; The fact, as you can plainly see, Is poets aren't made of stuff like me."
-Eleanor O'Hara
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"Like it or not, the flag stands for the right to burn it."
-Lisa Emerick
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"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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"A paranoid is a man with the facts."
-William S. Burroughs
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"Never give up; never say die; always say 'If I die,' NOT 'When I die.'" -Mortimer Adler
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"Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music."
-George Carlin
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"The idea of democracy was first broached as a political ideal in the middle of the nineteenth century, and first became a political reality, even in the slightest degree, well on towards the middle of the twentieth century."
-Mortimer Adler
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"I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don't have as many people who believe it."
-George Carlin
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"If God held all the truth in his right hand, and in his left hand held the lifelong pursuit of it, he would choose the left hand."
-Lessing
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"Art, music, and philosophy are merely poignant examples of what we might have been had not the priests and traders gotten hold of us."
-George Carlin
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"A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music."
-Soren Kierkegaard
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"There is properly no history, only biography."
-R.W. Emerson
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"At Christmas, play, and make good cheer, For Christmas comes but once a year."
-Thomas Tusser
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"Plagiarists have, at least, the merit of preservation."
-Benjamin Disraeli
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"Although words exist for the most part for the transmission of ideas, there are some which produce such violent disturbance in our feelings that the role they play in the transmission of ideas is lost in the background."
-Albert Einstein
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"Smile-it will bug your enemies."
--Dik Browne
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"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
-R.W. Emerson
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THE GOLDEN RULE (from Treasury of the Familiar Part 3) "Do nothing to thy neighbor which thou wouldst not have him to thee hereafter."
-Mahabharata
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"That nature only is good when it shall not do unto another whatever is not good for its own self."
-Dadistan-I dinik, Zend-Avesta
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"Hurt not others with that which pains yourself."
-Undana Varga
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"Do not do unto others what you would not they should do unto you."
-Confucius
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"Never to to other persons what would pain thyself."
-Panchatantra
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"Whatsoever thou wouldst that men should not do to thee, do not do that to them."
-Hillel Ha-Babli
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"As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise."
-St. Luke
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"All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."
-St. Matthew
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"If people do good to you, you will do good to them, and if they oppress you, oppress them not again."
-Mohammed
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"All mistakes are intentional."
-Chet Atkins
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"Tolerance is the only real test of civilization."
-Arthur Helps
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"Not to decide is to decide."
-Harvey Cox
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"Give me that old time religion-paganism."
-Dik Browne
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"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself."
-Truman Capote
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"An equal has no power over an equal."
-Law Maxim
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"You can't own too many Lava Lamps."
-Jim Reed
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"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. And then you win."
-Mahatma Gandhi
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"Democracies die behind closed doors."
-Judge Damon J. Keith
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"Live one day at a time, unless you can figure out how to live two."
-Dik Browne
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"Too much sanity may be madness, and the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be."
-Don Quixote
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"If you took all the dill pickles eaten in America in one month and laid them end to end…people would think you were some kind of nut."
-Homer and Jethro
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"Synonym-a word you use when you can't spell the other one."
-Homer & Jethro
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"Scientists have finally found the answer to the common cold: 'Gesundheit!'" -Homer Haynes & Jethro Burns
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"There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
-Flannery O'Connor
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"Nice guys finish last, but we get to sleep in."
-Evan Davis
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"Being a newspaper columnist is like being married to a nymphomaniac. It's great for the first two weeks."
-Lewis Grizzard
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"Bumper sticker: We Are the Proud Parents of a Child Whose Self-Esteem is Sufficient that He Doesn't Need Us Advertising His Minor Scholastic Achievements on the Bumper of Our Car."
-George Carlin
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God asks Satan what might have made history less disappointing. Satan: "If man had had less faith and more shame."
-William Gerhardi
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"If the doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster."
-Isaac Asimov
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"Every human soul is a sculptor."
-Robert Ingersoll
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"So far, this is the oldest I've been."
-George Carlin
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"If you haven't gotten where you're going, you probably aren't there yet."
-George Carlin
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"When you think about it, 12:15 p.m. is actually 11:75 a.m."
-George Carlin
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"I think everyone should treat one another in a Christian manner. I will not however be responsible for the consequences."
-George Carlin
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"Everybody likes to be missed, even if it's only by a rock."
-Dik Browne
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"Dogs have no idea what time it is."
-George Carlin
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"On rainy nights, does the sandman send the mudman?"
-George Carlin
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"Queenly incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty!"
-H.G. Wells
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"One seems to start in life, expecting something. And it doesn't happen. And it doesn't matter. One starts with ideas that things are good and things are bad-and it hasn't much relation to what IS good and what IS bad."
-H.G. Wells
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"To perceive an object abstractly means NOT to perceive some aspects of it. It clearly implies selection of some attributes, rejection of other attributes, creation or distortion of still others. We make it what we wish. We create it."
-Abraham Maslow
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"The normal adjustment of the average, common sense, well-adjusted person implies a continued successful rejection of much of the depths of human nature, both conative and cognitive. To adjust well to the world of reality means a splitting of the person. It means that the person turns his back on much in himself because it is dangerous…by so doing, he loses a great deal too, for these depths are also the source of all his joys, his ability to play, to love, to laugh, and, most important…to be creative. By protecting himself against the hell within himself, he also cuts himself off from the heaven within."
-Abraham Maslow
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"It is the things which are valuable and pleasant to a good person that are really valuable and pleasant."
-Aristotle
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"The Twilight of the Gods is my favorite time of day."
-Dik Browne
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"Clear thoughts expressed in unclear language is the style of a confirmed bachelor. He never has to explain anything to a wife."
-Lin Yutang
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"Part of the pleasure of being alive is the knowledge that you're not dead yet."
-George Carlin
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"When you step on the brakes your life is in your foot's hands."
-George Carlin
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"My most frequent sex fantasy: to work in a delicatessen and have a woman come in and ask me to give her a pound of tongue. And I'd say, 'Well, I don't get off till four o'clock.' And she'd say, 'Well, I don't get off at all, that's why I want some tongue.'" -George Carlin
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"You never seem to get laid on Thanksgiving. I think it's because all the coats are on the bed."
-George Carlin
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"Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers."
-George Carlin
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"There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can't do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you."
-Franz Kafka
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"A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself."
-George MacDonald
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"1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything. 2. Do not think it worthwhile to produce belief by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light. 3. Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed. 4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument, and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory. 5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found. 6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you. 7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. 8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies deeper agreement than the latter. 9. Be scrupulously truthful, even when truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it. 10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness."
--Bertrand Russell
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"It is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it."
-George MacDonald
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"Study as if you never could get enough of it, as if you were afraid something might get away from you."
-Confucius
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One day he requested the Music Master of Lu to teach him to play the zither. For ten days this gentleman allowed his ears to be affrighted by the noises Confucius was producing from his instrument, and finally he said, "Well, well, you've practiced enough. We had better try something else."
"No," said Confucius. " I have learned the melody now-it is the rhythm that escapes me."
Earnestly he twanged away. After some time longer, the Music Master said, "Now you have practiced the rhythm, let's go on to something else."
"No," said Confucius. "I haven't quite caught the mood."
Relentlessly he continued to play until the Music Master said, "Now you have practiced the mood, let us proceed."
"No," said Confucius. "I haven't yet sensed the man who wrote the music."
Now the Music Master began to open his ears to this strangely persistent pupil, and he noted how deftly the large fingers were moving, drawing a range of emotions from the instrument. He listened and from time to time spoke: "Now you seem serious and thoughtful…Now you are cheerful and your hopes are high."
Suddenly Confucius stopped playing, his face alight. "Now I know who he was. He was a dark man, swarthy, and tall-oh, he must have been a great, tall man. His eyes were like those of a rain looking into the distance, and his mind was like a King of the Four Quarters of Heaven. Who but King Wen could have composed this music?"
The Music Master arose from his mat in astonishment, and he bowed twice, with awe, to his young pupil, saying with awe, "You have guessed correctly. Among us musicians there is a tradition that the composer of this music was King Wen."
-Confucius
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"The big topic of discussion today is how best to address people in power-senators, legislators, lawyers-without trying to placate them and accept their hostile and/or patronizing behavior. Suggestions are thrown out as to how to handle the sexism, racism, or homophobia that is often a factor in these encounters without alienating the offending sexist, racist, or homophobe. We spend thirty minutes trying to balance the need to correct and educate people without appearing to be pushy man-hating women. It's unlike any discussions that a group of businessmen would have."
-Lynn Snowden
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"We are often unable to tell people what they NEED to know, because they WANT to know something else."
-George MacDonald
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"Tolerance is another word for indifference."
-W. Somerset Maugham
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"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hand away."
-Ray Bradbury
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"Don't worry about who knows you. Just make sure you are worth knowing."
-Confucius
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"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
-W. Somerset Maugham
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"Copy editors don't object to being called anal retentive, they just debate whether the term should be hyphenated."
-Alex MacLeod, Seattle Times
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"You can taste a word."
-Pearl Bailey
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The philosopher Thales "used to say that there was no essential difference between being alive and being dead. Someone asked why, if that was the case, he chose life instead of death. 'Because there is no difference,' Thales replied."
-Dictionary of Anecdotes
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"Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for."
-Ray Bradbury
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"The dice of the gods are always loaded."
-Erasmus
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"Know how to make God laugh? Tell him your plans."
-Robert Altman
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"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
-Ray Bradbury
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"Quality's rare. And never cheap."
-Lovejoy
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"Always do the next thing."
-George Carlin
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"If you cannot find a companion equal to or better than yourself, journey alone-do not travel with a fool."
-Buddha (Dhammapada)
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"Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down."
-Ray Bradbury
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THE THREE AMIGOS SALUTE: Wherever there is injustice, you will find us. Wherever there is suffering, we'll be there. Wherever liberty is threatened, you will find us. We're The Three Amigos!
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"Lazy people aren't lazy. They're merely clever."
-Lovejoy
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"Avoiding newspapers ensures a better quality of ignorance."
-Lovejoy
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"I've nothing against wealth as long as nobody suffers and the rich don't get uppity."
-Lovejoy
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"I have a callous regard for most people."
-Jim Reed
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"When you're up there writing, do you ever get the impression that someone is looking over your shoulder?"
-Groucho Marx to skywriter contestant on "You Bet Your Life"
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"You cannot prepare for the death of a parent-for its awful finality, for what it takes from you."
-Tina Sinatra
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"If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down."
-Ray Bradbury
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"Poetry isn't strange. You've known it all the way from Mother Goose. It's some sort of make-believe that's got some sort of truth in it-a little bit that's so fascinating you can't get rid of it. The thing I wanted most of all in the world was to know what was going on in the world, to find something to say to whatever happened-to sass it back. My poems are my adjustment to the world. I know what to say to the Sphinx."
-Robert Frost
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"Worthy books are not companions- They are solitudes…" -P. T. Bailey
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"How truly wise, perhaps, it was my dollars were so few, for if my purse were full, then I would never know if you had married me for riches, or because my eyes were blue!"
-Louise Shaw
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"I have all the money I need, provided I die by 4 o'clock this afternoon."
-Henny Youngman
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"Time only wasted when sprinkling perfume on goat farm."
-Charlie Chan
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"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."
-Ray Bradbury
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"When player cannot see man who deal cards, much wiser to stay out of game."
-Charlie Chan
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"Every man must wear out at least one pair of fool's shoes."
-Charlie Chan
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"The impossible sometimes permits itself the luxury of occurring."
-Charlie Chan
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"When prepared for worst, then can hope for best."
-Charlie Chan
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"Secret of this case harder to determine than alley cat's grandfather."
-Charlie Chan
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"Very difficult to explain hole in doughnut, but hole always there."
-Charlie Chan
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"No one knows less about servants than the master."
-Charlie Chan
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"Curiosity responsible for cat needing nine lives."
-Charlie Chan
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"You talk like rooster who think sun come up just to hear him crow."
-Charlie Chan
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"Wherever one is not-that is where heart is."
-Charlie Chan
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"Mind of woman like needle at bottom of ocean."
-Charlie Chan
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"To live within limits, to want one thing, or a very few things, very much and love them very dearly. Cling to them. Survey them from every angle, become one with them-that is what makes the poet, the artist, the human being."
-Goethe
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"Agriculture is a very fine thing, because you get such an unmistakable answer as to whether you're making a fool of yourself or hitting the mark."
-Goethe
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"If the thing that is loved be base, the lover becomes base."
-Leonardo da Vinci
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"A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read."
-Mark Twain
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"The salvation of the world depends on the people who will not take evil good-humoredly, and whose laughter destroys fools instead of encouraging them."
-Bernard Shaw
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"A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears."
-Montaigne
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"A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist."
-Unknown
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"What happens to your fist when you open your hand?"
-Zen Buddhism
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"What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?"
-Bertolt Brecht
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"We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities."
-Walt Kelly
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"If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living."
-Yiddish proverb
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"There is no future in bein' dead."
-Walt Kelly
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"God is not all-powerful as he cannot build a wall he cannot jump."
-Pascal
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"The book above all others in the world which should be forbidden is a catalogue of forbidden books."
-Lichtenberg
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"One-seventh of your life is spent on Monday."
-Jon Arbuckle (Jim Davis of "Garfield" strip)
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"God laughs in heaven when anyone says, 'Here I'm learned; this I understand…'" -Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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"Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight as if for taming accidental thoughts from possible pulses."
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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"Women aren't as mere as they used to be."
-Walt Kelly
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"Large-scale slavery begins when the traditional mode of production is dislocated, usually due to warfare, imperial expansion, and changes in basic crops, which in turn induces the rural free poor to migrate into the cities and newly opened colonial settlements. At the imperial center, land and capital fall increasingly under the monopoly of the rich, while citizen labor grows scarcer. The territorial expansion of the state, by making the enslavement of other peoples profitable, temporarily solves the economic problem. Were human beings then molded by the new culture, were they to behave like the red Polyergus ants for which slavery is an automatic response, slave societies might become permanent. But the qualities that we recognize as most distinctly mammalian-and human-make such a transition impossible. The citizen working class becomes further divorced from the means of production because of their aversion to the low status associated with common labor. The slaves, meanwhile, attempt to maintain family and ethnic relationships and to piece together the shards of their old culture. Where the effort succeeds, many of them rise in status and alter their position from its original, purely servile form. Where self-assertion fails because it is suppressed, reproduction declines and large numbers of new slaves must be imported in each generation. The rapid turnover has a disintegrating effect on the culture of slaves and masters alike. Absenteeism rises as the slave owners attempt to spend more of their time in the centers of their own culture. Overseers come increasingly into control. Inefficiency, brutality, revolt, and sabotage increase, and the system spirals slowly downward."
-Edward O. Wilson
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"Slave-supported societies'…ascent to maturity is rapid, their period of glory short, and their descent to oblivion ostentatious and mightily drawn out."
-Orlando Patterson
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"Nationalism and racism…are the culturally nurtured outgrowths of simple tribalism…civilizations have raised self-love to the rank of high culture, exalted themselves by divine sanction and diminished others with elaborately falsified written histories."
-Edward O. Wilson
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"The force behind most warlike policies is ethnocentrism, the irrationally exaggerated allegiance of individuals to their kin and fellow tribesmen."
-Edward O. Wilson
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"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
-Joseph Campbell
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"Human aggression cannot be explained as either a dark-angelic flaw or a bestial instinct. Nor is it the pathological symptom of upbringing in a cruel environment. Human beings are strongly predisposed to respond with unreasoning hatred to external threats and to escalate their hostility sufficiently to overwhelm the source of the threat by a respectably wide margin of safety."
-Edward O. Wilson
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"Generosity without hope of reciprocation is the rarest and most cherished of human behaviors, subtle and difficult to define, distributed in a highly selective pattern, surrounded by ritual and circumstance, and honored by medallions and emotional orations."
-Edward O. Wilson
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"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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"Am I beautiful? I think it must be the rose. My hair-it only weighs me down. My eyes-I only see with them. My lips-they only help me to speak. Of what use is it to be beautiful?"
-Spoken by the robot Helena in R.U.R. by Karel Capek
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"Our true nationality is mankind."
-H.G. Wells
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"Popular education, no matter what efforts are made to improve it, must inevitably remain but little more than a device for perpetuating the ideas that happen to be official-in other words, the nonsense regarded as revelation by the powers currently in control…" -H.L. Mencken
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"Human life as we know it, is only the dispersed raw material for life as it might be. There is a hitherto undreamt-of fullness, freedom and happiness within the reach of our species. Mankind can pull itself together and take that now…but, if mankind fails to apprehend its opportunity, then division, cruelties, delusions and ultimate frustration lies before our kind. The decision to perish or escape has to be made within a very limited time. For escape, vast changes in the educational, economic and directive structure of human society are necessary. They are definable. They are practicable. But they demand courage and integrity. They demand a force and concentration of will and a power of adaptation in habits and usages which may not be within the compass of mankind."
-H.G. Wells
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"I hate pious people. I hate their abject prayers. Almost always they are mean demands for preferential miracles."
-H.G. Wells
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"Revolution is the living God and Religion is pickled God."
-H.G. Wells
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"The individual life is doomed to frustration and death, unless it can escape into the synthesis of mankind…Give yourself, with all your heart, or else perish, as all self-centered individuals must perish, for ever. Your individual life in itself is worth nothing at all. It may be bright for a moment like a flash in the darkness, but it will leave the darkness deeper than before. Live for all life or do not dream you are living."
-H.G. Wells
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"Has any psychological experiment yielded a more delightful suggestion than this one: that there is a part of the mind without ambition or information, which nonetheless is expert on what is beautiful?"
-Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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"One of the millionaire ladies asked me one day, 'If you were in my shoes, what would you do?'…what I told her was that I'd buy apartments for all the people I know who don't have a decent place to live. I'd furnish it for them and then make a gift of it to them. To which my lady millionaire responded, 'And when the sink got clogged, they'd call you and ask you to fix it for them.' I said, 'There are plumbers'…but I could see the implication: that once having given, those to whom you gave would turn to you to straighten out their problems, big and small. And I'm sure that giving-endlessly and, as it were, without limitation-would soon pale. Have you ever heard the prayer of the Provencal fisherman: 'Holy Mother, I pray you to grant me enough fish that I may eat and feed my family, have sufficient left to give some away, and then enough more so that those who need may steal from me.' As far as money goes, that's the only meaningful philosophy I've ever heard."
-Pauline Reage
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"Nothing happens unless first a dream."
-Carl Sandburg
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"I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues."
-Duke Ellington
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"Almost all the craziness in the world comes from running from pain."
-Mary Pipher
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"Most of the unhappiness in the world is caused by people who are 90 percent happy, going for the last 10 percent."
-Mary Pipher
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"If you're not the lead dog, the scenery never changes."
-Grimmy (Mike Peters)
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"Did you know that at one time, each of us weighed 17 pounds?"
-Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding
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"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."
-Theodore Roosevelt
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"Since I haven't brains enough to write more solid articles and wouldn't if I could-I often worry about my future since I am no doctor and at best but a mean scrivener, but out of all the things one does, from pipe fitting to testing seamless leather belting & from ceramics to statesmanship, I can do only one thing, even passably, and that is make words and space them between punctuation points…" -James Thurber
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"They come for you in the morning in a limousine; they take you to the studio; they stick a pretty girl in your arms; sometimes they earn something off you and give you some of the profits. They call that a profession?-come on!"
-Marcello Mastroianni
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"The height of human wisdom is to bring our tempers down to our circumstances and to make a calm within, under the weight of the greatest storm without."
-Daniel Defoe
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The meek are contesting the will. -Bumper Sticker
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"THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FLEE" -Jim Reed
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"My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated, but not signed."
-Christopher Morley
"My theology, briefly, is that the universe forces me to examine the concept of unintelligent design."
-Jim Reed
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"If there is any principle of the constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought-not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought of those we hate."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."
-James Thurber
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"I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement."
-Oscar Wilde
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"I would like to take you seriously but to do so would affront your intelligence."
-William F. Buckley Jr.
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"Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess."
-Oscar Wilde
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"I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel."
-Bertrand Russell
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"So little time and so little to do."
-Oscar Levant
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"If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States."
-H.L. Mencken
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"I'm an insomniac-agnostic-egotist: I lie awake nights trying to figure out whether or not I believe that I am as great as I am."
-Thaves ("Frank & Earnest"