Quotes

Here you will see some quotes. They may be from actors. They may be from authors. They may be from the guy down the street who never wears a shirt but who really should wear a shirt (we never talk, so a quote from him is highly unlikely). They may be quotes from anyone, but they will all be quotes I truly like.

“A city is a large community where people are lonely together."
- Herbert Prochnow

“A person has two reasons for doing anything . . . a good reason and the real reason."
- Unknown

“If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?”
- Chuck Palahniuk

A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!”
“However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
- Stephen Crane

“Learn your lines, find your mark, look 'em in the eye and tell 'em the truth."
- James Cagney

"All morons hate it when you call them a moron."
- J.D. Salinger

"A magician is an actor impersonating a magician."
- Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin

"You bring onstage the same thing you bring into a room: the person you are."
- David Mamet

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die."
- Rutger Hauer as Roy Baty in Blade Runner

"This is the number one rule for your set
In order to survive, gotta learn to live with regrets"
- Jay-Z

"I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."
- Oscar Wilde

"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."
- Ernest Hemingway

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."
- Mark Twain

"People who like to skip can't skip in a three-page story."
- Grace Paley

"The pleasure we take in cleverness and technical virtuosity soon exhausts itself in the absence of any recognizable human landscape."
- Tobias Wolff

"You ask me where the hell I'm going
At a thousand feet per second"
- Radiohead, from "The Tourist"

"Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war
for a lead role in a cage?"
- Pink Floyd, from "Wish You Were Here"

"If you go home with somebody, and they don't have any books, don't f*ck them."
- John Waters

"In the somber cathedral of academia, I'd forgotten: literature is a form of fondness-for-life. It is love for life taking verbal form."
- George Saunders 

Comments

Post a Comment

Just Go Ahead and Write Something Groovy, It's Okay

Popular posts from this blog

The First Time Some Boy Groped My Girl

At three years old, Cheyenne loved McKlusky Beach Park, which was really just a place to park your car and walk down to the beach. Mornings, before we left for preschool, she'd beg to go there in the afternoon. More often than not I relented. On those days, before picking her up, I'd shove the swimsuits and folding chair and beach toys into the trunk. A purple plastic bucket and a matching plastic spade, but it never took long before she just rolled around in some sand, tossing clumps in the air or at birds. Those were the best days to be a mother, because the sun and salt air and breeze weren't just for her, as so many things a mother does are. One day something unfortunate happened. I sat where I always did, book in hand and leaned back in my beach chair—not far away, but not so close she constantly felt my eyes. Some collection by Welty, a story about a slow girl filling up her hope chest to marry a man she’d only met the night before. She asked a few old ladies to g
Read more

Rites of Stillborn Romance

“Sure, we can shake uglies against the stall wall, but only if you take me home for a shower afterward,” she’ll say, and drag you inside the fourth floor library restroom for twenty minutes, then she’ll follow your car to your apartment. Three days will be spent mostly naked, snugged in bed or in the kitchen cooking. She’ll tell you, “You can’t cut cheese with a bread knife.” You’ll slide a bread knife from the wooden block, search the fridge for sharp cheddar. Three nights of dishes overflowing your shallow sink. Thursday’s pasta pot, lid closed to “soak,” will film over and belch fetid tomato breath if you jar the lid while probing for a cleanish utensil. Hardened beef fat will rim the cast iron skillet, remnants of late night burgers (your idea). Slimy yogurt spoons, serrated knife edges, all sizes of plates, a dingy baking pan for frozen pizzas—nearly every dish you own will jut in jagged juxtapositions, terrain fit to frighten even the most adventurous night vermin. Your scr
Read more

Out of Touch, Out of Time

The shade of his skin is Tourist Milk. Loud-colored trunks and a surfer shirt he’s recently purchased from Gator Gifts do little to help: everyone on the beach knows he doesn't belong. Making matters worse are lace-up sneakers and crew socks—sandals he forgot, in Wisconsin and at the gift shop. His is the type of body to slump forward even when standing straight, the trademark of a man who's spent a lifetime staring at his shoes. Sometimes, he goes long stretches of a day without eating so he can pretend stomach groans are her talking to him if he can't sleep. He wasn’t there, wasn’t even aware she existed. Yet he imagines campfire flames flicking so low, the white coals barely burning at all, not even an audible crackling. So she made a drunken leap, not for a friend’s dare, but because she was there with a campfire and flight in her gut. She didn’t clear it, fell down, the skin of her hip sizzling until she finally rolled. The soft scar that stretched nearly halfway
Read more