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thalialunacy2So I've been collecting quotes since sometime around age 14. Weird quotes, deep quotes, cheesy quotes, funny quotes, quote I live by, quotes I don't agree with at all... they're all here. When I was in college, I plastered them up on my wall, whole sheets of them, so people would have something to do in my room. I love words, baby.
(Some don't have names attached, either by my fault or others, and I apologize. Please feel free to add/correct such things! (p) means paraphrased to the best of my ability.)
---
Sometimes the paper is the only thing that will listen to you.
Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .
There is no such thing as a weird human being. Some just take more understanding.
"I had a terrible dream. I dreamed that all truths were known."
- James K. Feibleman
Common sense is the deposits of prejudice laid down in the mind before the age of eighteen.
The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory.
"You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing."
- Margaret Atwood
"Vigor is contagious; and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
'Last year I fell in love with a girl. This year I fell in love with myself.'
- j.r. 9/96
“Do you believe in reincarnation? I do. When I come back I want to be a butterfly, cause no one suspects a butterfly.”
- Bart Simpson
be infants in evil, but in thinking be adults
- I Corinthians 14.20
"Forgetting is a sort of therapy, unless it's vital to remember."
- Tim Tiernan
'Love, and a cough, cannot be hid.'
- George Herbert
"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you."
- Rita Mae Brown
"I think this is how Chicago got started. A bunch of people in New York said, 'Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't cold enough. Let's go west.'"
- Richard Jeni
"Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography."
- Paul Rodriguez
"Why is it that when we talk to God we're said to be praying, but when God talks to us we're schizophrenic?"
- Lily Tomlin
"Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God's final word on where your lips end."
- Jerry Seinfeld
"I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else."
- Lily Tomlin
"Women love us only for our faults, and if we men have enough of them, they'll forgive us anything."
- Guillermo, Balkan Ghosts
People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's easier to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.
Mini-vans are tangible evidence of evil.
"History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club."
- John W. Campbell
It doesn't much matter who leads, long as the rhythm is right.
EMBRACE IMPERFECTION
- Brien R. Brown
there's a fear that you will sell your dreams for a job or cut your hair as you throw your graduation cap up in the real world air
- Dar Williams (p)
Why assumptions suck: when you hear hoofbeats, you think horses, not zebras.
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
- Jeanette Rankin
"Being able to laugh at someone you can identify with means you are able to laugh at yourself, which is the best form of therapy."
- Richard Gere (p)
"As long as there is wilderness, I know there is a larger part of myself that I can always visit, vast tracks of territory lying dormant, craving exploration and providing sanctity."
- Life After God by Douglas Coupland
"I think about this . . . I think about how hard it is -- even with the desire, and even with the will and the time -- I think of how hard it is to reach that spot inside us that remains pure that we never manage to touch but which we know exists -- and I try to touch that spot."
- Life After God by Douglas Coupland
" . . . I guess the nice thing about driving a car is that the physical act of driving itself occupies a good chunk of brain cells that otherise would be giving you trouble overloading your thinking. . . . A fast moving car is the only place where you're legally allowed to not deal with your problems. It's enforced meditation and this is good."
- Life After God by Douglas Coupland
"Our conversations were never easy, but as I -- we -- get older, we are all finding that our conversations must be spoken. A need burns inside us to share with others what we are feeling. Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic. It is as though the coolness that marked our youth is itself a type of retrovirus that can only leave you feeling empty. Full of holes."
- Life After God by Douglas Copeland
"For so many years I lived a life of solitude and I thought life was fine. But I kew that unless I explored intimacy and shared intimacy with someone else then life would never progress beyond a certain point. I remember thinking that unless I knew what was going on inside of someone else's head other than my own I was going to explode."
- Life After God by Douglas Coupland
Oh, evolve!
"Don't make fun of the ill!"
- Ally McBeal
"Maybe that's what scares me the most: as soon as you find love, you've had it."
- Ally McBeal
'That's not the job of the government, that's the job of Natural Selection:
to weed out the people who are stupid enough to not wear helmets.'
- Bill Maher (p), Politically Incorrect 8-24-99
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.
‘While anyone can make offensive comments about me, or to me, they *cannot* offend me without my permission.”
- Howie Lyhte
I discovered that incessant whining helps ease the existential pain.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
"Sean's my lacrossetitute."
- Ashley Wingfield
"Non-Violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
- Thomas Edison
"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities."
- Voltaire
"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men."
- Alice Walker
"Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."
- Milan Kundera
Have you ever imagined a world without hypothetical situations?
"You have beautiful relationships. Always appreciate them without boundaries."
- Korey Hendricks 9-99
"Dating men is hard? Try dating women, then you'll think dating men is easy.'
- Meredith 9/99
'And I do think inexperienced people can make good lovers. They make terrible sex partners, but being lovers is about loving much more than it is about sex.'
- Korey Hendricks 9/99
"Fold your hands in a weird way. Look at them from a weird angle. You can't really tell which is right which is left. That's how this woman makes me feel sometimes: egoless, blended, powerful, and yet confident. This is how we all should feel, always. Then again, if we felt this way always, then perhaps we wouldn't recognize the wonder of our joys as often or at all."
- Tim Tiernan
Old Age Comes at a Bad Time
"Trent Reznor is a network of balanced contradictions -- and all the richer for it. His music can be as abrasive as chain saw or as melodious as birds -- often in the same four minutes. Until The Fragile, he worked almost exclusively with machines but expertly wrung earthly warmth from their chips and bits. As much as his music screams, 'Fuck you,' it whispers, 'Love me.' It can sounds simple, but it is meticulously crafted and complexly programmed. Reznor uncorks chaos but has the intelligence to harness it."
- "The Fragile World of Trent Reznor" Anthony Bozz R.S. 823 10-14-99
'I wanna be a good famous.'
- Mike Herriman (p)
'Serious is just as serious.'
- Lisa Decker on marriage vs. significant others
'We are all very much alike, in just that life has happened to us all.'
- Marshel Copple
me: do you have stuff to do tonight?
her: i have stuff to do for the rest of my life. i need to realize this.
"Drunk is feeling sophisticated when you can't say it."
- Anonymous
"Why is American beer served cold? So you can tell it from urine."
- David Moulton
"Hi, my name's JR and I collect mothers."
- Seth Miot
"In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."
- Albert Camus
"I've just given up trying to figure people out. Chances are, what I think ends up being wrong, so now I just accept the info as I get it, rather than trying to guess."
- Lucky Alexis Anna Rowen Granoski Bennett
"I live in Vacaville -- I can't bring myself to kill my neighbors."
- Stephanie Dameral (p) on not eating beef
"A really good girl is evil in all the right places."
- Rabinder Bhatia
"Girl Problems are still better than having messy orgasms."
- Alicia Atkinson (p)
" . . .like you were playing with stamps and you decided to decorate your face . . . ."
- Carrie Weiner on dyeing baby hairs (p)
"Yeah, it's like when you hang out around radio towers too much and you have a metal plate in your head."
- Lucky AA Rowen-Granoski on how sleeping next to an attractive gay man messes you up
"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."
- Mark Twain
"Diamonds are magic, she said, and this is why women wear them on their fingers, as a sign of the magic of womanhood. Men have strength, Miss Ferenczi said, but no true magic."
- from 'Gryphon' by Charles Baxter
"Woman, get back in the chicken."
- Meena
"A woman wins by giving herself and other women permission -- to eat; to be sexual; to age; to wear overalls, a paste tiara, a Balenciaga gown, a secondhand opera cloak, or combat boots; to cover up or to go practically naked; to do whatever we choose following -- or ignoring -- our own aesthetic."
- Naomi Wolf
you set up your place in my thoughts / moved in and made my thinking crowded
- emily saliers
"Women do more than live, we endure with vitality. Women do more than touch, we have the ability to feel. Women do more than see, we look for the truth. Women do more than read, we obtain knowledge. Women do more than listen, we comprehend. Women do more than think, we imagine the possibilities. Women do more than speak, because we have something to say."
"You know I'm not a peanut person -- I don't eat my own kind."
- Megan Murphy 1-31-00
'fear wakes you up sometimes when you don't even know you're sleeping'
- from Knives by GenieVB
subvert the dominant paradigm
I used to be Snow White -- but I drifted.
Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglect.
"I want to find somebody without the alcoholic gene so I can give my kids a fighting chance.'
- Megan Archer (3-3-00)
'see, this is why i have trouble finding guys -- i have a bigger penis than any of them'
- nicole davison 3-3-00
me: it tastes like a melted slushy...
him: that's kind of how i feel right now...
(3-3-00)
'It's like it's this big :little gesture: but we're so close that it's this big :big gesture:.
- clancy 3-4-00
'Religion is just one more power structure... has only as much to do with spirituality as it needs to to survive.'
- Josiah
'I think at the end of the day all religions are based on finding a reason why people should act in a caring, compassionate and humanitarian way. But, most of all, that they should act.'
- Pete Townshend
' . . . what continues to be important is that the human individual accepts the fact that he or she is capable of being spiritually swayed. And in order to make the best of that, they really have to listen to what's being said.'
- Pete Townshend, 1987 interview
'If it screams for truth rather than help, if it commits itself with a courage that it can't be sure it really has, if it stands up and admits that something is wrong but doesn't insist on blood, then it is rock n' roll.'
- Pete Townshend
"Rock and roll is only rock and roll if it's not safe."
- Mick Jagger, 1988, R.S. magazine
"What happened to me happened to Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. All people have talked about is the way they look. It's a cheap way to take away women's power."
- Calista Flockhart, on the media's scrutiny of her weight
'if I get j.r. germs, will i turn prettier?'
- Marshel Copple 4-00
'This college thing is too much for me. I gotta quit while I’m ahead . . . I gotta quit before they do something stupid and give me a degree.'
- Christian Bollacker 4-00
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art . . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that gives value to survival.”
- C.S. Lewis
'Intelligence and light sabres do not always go together.'
- Kat on boys dueling in the Shannon Center
"A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."
- Dave Barry
"Onions are funny."
- Seth Garrido
"'Ah! My breast!' she says while grabbing her knee."
- Meredith, whose Madrigal Feaste dress hid her breasts somewhere else on her body
"Breakfast? Nah, fuck breakfast. My breakfast was a Coke and a smile."
- Nathan Pereau on British breakfasts
'You are the essence of everything that is -- that is au natural.'
- Nathan Pereau on j.r.
"Well, what? They're not gonna say 'Here, Keanu, have some Ipicac.'"
- Nicole Davison on fake-looking Matrix vomit
"See, that's what different about me now -- I know myself better. I can warn you now."
- Claire Yunker on personal growth
And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plow-shares into swords
- Alan Wilson Watts
And on the 8th day God said, OK Murphy, you take over.
Birth, life, death. Repeat as necessary.
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
i live alone / the habit grows
- Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten
'Academic training was instrumental. You have to understand the language of society before you can start stretching and subverting it and ripping and tearing it and burning it and watching the plastic drip on the ants.'
- Mark Pauline
'well, i know you're not playing tiddly-winks . . . '
- nicole davison on ignoring sounds coming from the other room
i'm a barnacle on a whale . . . or something like that
- tim tiernan 9-24-00
'how do you respond to a thing like that?'
'i push over my king. i don't know.'
- me & clancy on friends going back into the closet
'we don’t know we been took and made history out of'
- aaron's monologue
'no one pays attention, but everybody has an opinion. and that's just ridiculous.'
- luann lauesen on the voting public
"… we can say what we like about ourselves [but we] don't have adequate words to express how we feel. … The problem for us it that words seem attached to ideas and detached from instinct. Feelings, attached to instinct and experienced physically, have to struggle for verbal expression because words seem to belong not in the body but in the head."
- Freeing the Natural Voice by Kristin Linklater
let's be conscious of our retarding, okay?
- ashley hamrick 11-28-00
I don't know how to balance anything when everything's balancing me . . . you know?
- tim tiernan 11-13-00
Daddy gave me a brain. Mommy gave me a body. I gave *myself* a college education.
- Jeni McKinney
'I wonder what the reaction time would be if I just bounded up out of my chair, across the tables, and started combing Charles Adams' hair with my fork!'
- Clancy Neilsen 12-13-00
'college is an endurance test . . . with a carrot at the end . . . .'
- w. spencer
'yeah, well, i don't know where it is, so what does it matter that i know what it is?'
- me
' . . . my storms of emotion have a trick of exhausting themselves.'
- War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
"Then you must tell 'em dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh moving' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore."
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
If we don't get funding I'm going to sew a rose on Jeff Cleveland's ASS!
- Alissa Van Keuren, Whittier College choir president, on the ASB president’s habit of using school money to hand out roses
ah... but to play something different... to be an actor and shed the worry ....alas I would still insult everyone else that could not shed it as well...
- john lane
'you're only allowed to pout if you can kick ass'
- Megan Archer on Angelina Jolie/Lara Croft
Have a Nike Homework Day: JUST DO IT
'makes me nicer to everybody when i'm nicer to everything.'
- clancy
Poetry and Revolution Before Breakfast
- Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
Life is a dipthong.
The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.
- Helen Hayes (at 73)
A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who never owned a car.
- Carrie Snow
I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.
- Jennifer Unlimited
If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.
- Catherine Aird
I think-therefore I'm single.
- Lizz Winstead
If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a noose around your neck?
- Linda Ellerbee
"Evil, my son, is abstract. It is not a solid entity roaming the universe, crying its terrible cry and flashing its black flanks. It is a force that dwells within each of us - more in some than in others - hidden away until something awakens it. It is the most dangerous of foes; it cannot be completely destroyed without the death of innocents. We cannot bring ourselves to destroy every living person and thing in mere anticipation of the evil they may harbor. No. Each must be willing to give up the evil inside - to turn it out and surrender it. That will be the fight. A fight which perhaps we will not win."
- Brett Martino
[college] life is like MST3K: people talking over a really bad movie
- andrew herder
me: how’s life?
her: … I’m getting some lemons … and I’m not making sweet lemonade …
me: how about lemon tarts? they take more time and more work … but they taste better.
the past is magnetic. it draws us in. we cannot help ourselves and, as with other things that we cannot help in ourselves, we make up elaborate explanations, reasonable rational explanations, to chant away the powerful things that don't belong to us.
- jw
"The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world."
- Hannah Arendt
"Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder the hate. In fact, violence only increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars."
- Matrin Luther King
Negative feelings, such as violence, are damaging to life, whether we act upon them ourselves, or cause or condone them in others.
They are born of greed, anger, or delusion, and may be slight, moderate, or intense. Their fruit is endless ignorance and suffering.
To remember this is to cultivate the opposite.
- The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, 2:34
“For self-protection man has created God, on whom he depends for his own protection, safety and securty, just as a child depends on its parent For self-preservation man has conceived the idea of an immortal soul, which will live eternally. In his ignorance, weakness, fear, and desire, man needs these two things to console himself. Hence he clings to them deeply and fanatically.”
- Walpola Rahula What the Buddha Taught
“ … do not be led by reports, or tradition, or hearsay. Be not led by the authority of religious texts, nor by mere logic or inference, nor by considering appearances, nor by the delight in speculative opinions, nor vby seeming possibilities, nor by the idea: ‘this is our teacher’. But, when you know for youselves that certain things are unwholesome, and wrong, and bad, then give them up … And when you know for yourselves that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them.”
- attributed to the Buddha
everybody I know has a grapefruit for a head.
- marshel copple 4.8.02
“I guess every song has a special meaning for someone somewhere. Elvis Presley is still showing up in 7-11 stores across the country, even though he’s been dead for years, so I figure music just might be the most important thing there is.”
- The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
If you cannot work with love but only with distaste it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gates of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
- Khalil Gibran
On acting: ‘You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for.’
- Jane Fonda
What the hell … you might be right, you might be wrong, but just don’t avoid.
- Katharine Hepburn
We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.
- Khalil Gibran
The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. And only he who listens can speak.
- Dag Hammarskjöld
On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined.
- Lord Byron
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
- Winston Churchill
You have to be very religious to change your religion.
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
- Erica Jong
The 80s were like The Island of Misfit Toys.
- Ron Sheffield, RS Magazine (p)
Orgasms are like Kevin Spacey movies. You can’t possibly have a bad one. It’s just a matter of frequency and length.
- Eric Dzinski
My family adopted a kitten with an uncanny resemblance to another cat we had recently lost. He acted like him as well, so we named the newcomer "Deja Mew".
A friend renamed two of his more thriving plant varieties "Creepusamongus" and "Creepusallaroungus". But the plant that he thought he had killed many times was known as "Thrivusdespitus".
When I was an infantry platoon commander, my Marines trained regularly for night-time reconnaissance patrol. As we moved along, each of us would whisper the name of any obstacle to the person behind so that no one would be surprised and utter a cry that would disclose our position. During one exercise, the lead man in the formation occasionally turned around and whispered to me "log" or "rock", which I would pass along. Suddenly there was a crash ahead of me, and from several feet down, I heard a single whispered word-"hole".
You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
Knowing how much I love flowers, my nine-year-old daughter presented me with branches she'd picked from a blossoming fruit tree in a vacant lot. "Bonnie, these are lovely," I said, "but do you realize that if you had left them on the tree, each of these blossom would have become a cherry?" "No, they wouldn't have," she stated firmly. "Oh, yes they would have. If left alone, each blossom would have grown into a cherry." "Well, okay," she conceded, "but they were plums last year."
Do you ever feel that life is like a car wash and you're going through it on a bicycle?
If swimming is so good for your figure, why do whales look the way they do?
How come the windshield wiper always works better on the passenger's side?
Why are income taxes due on April 15 -- the same day the Titanic went down?
As our symphony orchestra rehearsed the final section of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, the conductor offered his interpretation of the music's various parts. The soft, delicate French horns, he explained, should symbolize the fleeing village maidens, while the louder trombones and trumpets would represent the chasing savages.
When the conductor raised his baton to continue, a voice was heard from the French horn section. "Do you mind, Maestro, if we play our part a bit faster?"
‘The famous Seattle rain. The thin, gray rain that toadstools love. The persistent rain that knows every hidden entrance into collar and shopping bag. The quiet rain that can rust a tin roof without the tin roof making a sound in protest. The shamanic rain that feeds the imagination. The rain that seems actually a secret language, whispering, like the ecstasy of primitives, of the essence of things.’
- Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins
Children and dogs are as necessary to the welfare of the country as Wall Street and the railroads.
- Harry S. Truman
We tend to hold with Lorena Hickok, a columnist in the 1920s for the Minneapolis Morning Tribune, who observed of college football that “you might as well put in your time watching a lot of ants running in and out of their hole. That is, if there isn’t anything else you’d rather be doing right then.” I’m sorry if I’m tipping sacred cows here. I don’t mean to say I’m above watching organized sports. Possibly below it, for the fact is I’d rather watch ants. Draw your own conclusions.
- High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
Oh, how slight the difference between ‘independent’ and ‘ornery.’
- High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
Housework, like the Buddha, takes many forms, depending on what is in your heart as you approach it. I personally am inclined to approach it the way government treats dissent: ignore it until it revolts.
- High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
A pen may or may not be mightier than the sword, but it is brassier than the telephone.
- High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
“I am carrying on with all of this in a desert, two thousand miles from my verdant childhood home. I am disembodied. No one here remembers how I was before I grew to my present height. I’m called upon to reinvent my own childhood time and again; in the process, I wonder how I can ever know the truth about who I am.”
- High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
“[Mariah Burton] Nelson lists at least six sports in which women and men now compete together at the elite level (dog-sled racing, horse racig, marathon wimming, equestrian events, rifle shooting, and auto racing), and many more recreational sports in which a wife and husband can typically find themselves evenly matched. And yet, she says, many people continue to rely hard on five games that showcase upper-body strength (football, baseball, basketball, boxing, and hockey) as reassurance of a certain order, gender-wise, in the universe.
“Me, I bear in mind that women life seven years long than men, on average, and figure that’s the sport I’ll sign up for.”
- High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
“We’re familiar enough, across all cultures, with ancestor worship. Why have we never put a second, parallel candle on that alter for ‘progeny worship’? How can we proceed with such pure disregard for the ones who will come after—not just our own heirs, but all of life? How do we fail to realize we are a point in a grand procession, with equal responsibilities to past and future?”
- High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
“Love of one’s country should be like love of one’s spouse—a give-and-take criticism and affection. Although it is hoped one prefers one’s spouse to other people … one does not prove that one loves one’s wife by battering other women.”
- Garry Wills
“Whoever said life is a bowl of cherries forgot about the pits and stems.”
- Devon Hill
“We can’t ever still our voices.”
- Grandma Floss 11/29/02
“I don’t care much about the money at all. Frankly, if I get the chance to kiss someone in a movie, they wouldn’t need to pay me at all. … Basically, I can say that I came to acting because of the women.”
- Orlando Bloom
“Legolas’ moves are smooth and elegant, like a cat…it’s all very balletic. It’s also bloody hard to do without falling over!”
- Orlando Bloom
“Vig used to call me ‘elf boy,’ and I’d call him ‘filthy human.’ As an Elf, I never got a scratch on me, never got dirty. And Vig would come out with blood and sweat all over him. And he’d say to me, ‘Oh, go manicure your nails.’”
- Orlando Bloom
“We have these digs at each other. Viggo will go on about Elves and how they’re always doing their nails and brushing their long, blonde hair, and being all prissy. And I just say: Well, at least I’m going to live forever! Got that? LIVE FOREVER!”
- Orlando Bloom
“For a young actor like me to have the opportunity to work with the genre of actors and directors on ‘Lord of the Rings’ is unbelievable. There was no, should I, should I not. It was like, where do I sign up! It was just bonkers. It was like here, have a life.”
- Orlando Bloom
“Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.”
- Colin Powell
Blessed are those who are easily amused/entertain themselves, for they will be never bored.
“I came home this afternoon and checked the machine for a message but the only message I got was from the company that holds my student loan, Sallie Mae. Sallie Mae sounds like a naïve and barefoot hillbilly girl but in fact they are a ruthless and aggressive conglomeration of bullies located in a tall brick building somewhere in Kansas. I picture it to be the tallest building in that state and I have decided they hire their employees straight out of prison. It scares me.”
- 'The SantaLand Diaries’, Barrell Fever, David Sedaris
“Everything about the cash register intimidates me. Each procedure involves a series of codes: separate numbers for cash, checks, and each type of credit card. The term Void has gained prominence as the filthiest four-letter word in my vocabulary. Voids are nightmare of paperwork and coded numbers, everything produced in triplicate and initialed by the employee and his supervisor.
Leaving the building tonight I could not shake the mental picture of myself being stoned to death by restless, angry customers, their nerves shattered by my complete lack of skill. I tell myself that I will simply pry open my register and accept anything they want to give me – beads, cash, watches, whatever. I’ll negotiate and swap. I’ll stomp their credit cards through the masher, write “Nice Knowing You!” along the bottom of the slip and leave it at that.”
‘The SantaLand Diaries’, Barrel Fever, David Sedaris
“Once the line gets long we break it up into four different lines because anyone in their right mind would leave if they knew it would take over two hours to see Santa. Two hours—you could see a movie in two hours. Standing in a two-hour line makes people worry that they’re not living in a democratic nation. People stand in line for two hours and they go over the edge.”
‘The SantaLand Diaries’, Barrell Fever, David Sedaris
“You know, I telephoned my grandparents the other day, and my grandfather said to me, ‘We saw your movie.’ ‘Which one?’ I said, and he shouted, ‘Betty, what was the name of that movie I didn’t like?”
- Brad Pitt
“I just realized that I’m a character out of some fucked up Beckett play.”
- Andrew Hurder 12-16-02
"Writing is easy…you just open a vein."
- Red Smith, American sports writer, who died c. 1993
A man cannot love his wife without loving all women a little, I guess the reverse must be true.
- Paraphrase from Time enough For Love by Robert H. Heinlein
"Of course, I get angry. Of course, I get sad. I have a full range of emotions. I also have a whole smorgasbord of ways of dealing with my feelings. That is what we should give children. Give them…ways to express their rage without hurting themselves or somebody else. That's what the world needs."
- Fred Rogers
My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being, hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.
- Erma Bombeck
I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes beacues I know I’m not dumb…And I'm also not blonde.
- Dolly Parton
When women are depressed they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country.
- Elayne Boosler
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
- Gloria Steinem
Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Veni, Vidi, Velcro. I came, I saw, I got stuck.
"Any children's book worth reading at ten that isn't worth reading at fifty isn't worth reading."
"The Rolling Stones must be part of the wizarding community in some respects as Keith Richards couldn't possibly still be alive otherwise."
- TheTreacleTart aka Lydia, Fellytones and Fuzzy Slippers
"I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved; the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave."
- George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), novelist (1819-1880)
"…music lights up with its pulsing lamp the cave of our being."
- The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
"It was nice to have yourself known by a man; it was getting to be known that was embarrassing: all that self-conscious verbalization over too many drinks, and then the bodies revealed with the hidden marks and sags like disappointing presents at Christmastime. But how much of love, when you thought about it, was not of the other but of yourself naked in his eyes: of that rush, that little flight, of shedding your clothes, and being you at last."
- The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
"…Alexandra…was inclined to think that the past is often romanticized, that when it was the present it had that same curious hollowness we all feel now."
- The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
"Jane Smart was practicing Bach's Second Suite for unaccompanied cello, in D Minor, the little black sixteenth-notes of the prelude going up and down and then up again with the sharps and flats like a man slightly raising his voice in conversation, old Bach setting his infallible tonal suspense engine in operation again, and abruptly Jane began to resent it, these notes, so black and certain and masculine, the fingering getting trickier with each sliding transposition of the theme and he not caring, this dead square-faced old Lutheran with his wig and his Lord and his genius and two wives and seventeen children, not caring how the tips of her fingers hurt or how her obedient spirit was pushed back and forth, up and down by these military notes just to give him a voice after death, a bully's immortality…"
- The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
"An educated mind is nothing without a compassionate heart."
- Cora Poage (Whittier College class of 2003)
"If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter knows the details of her mother's life—without flinching or whining—the stronger the daughter."
- The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
"Beth had come to think of church basements as a kind of underground railway to emotional succor—trailing all over America, where people in transformation, grieving, marrying, givign birth and dying, were gathered around scarred tables in rooms with walls covered by children's crayoned pictures of the Annunciation."
– The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard
"Yes, I think I am [a romantic]. I think that all the bad things in the world, including wars and religion, and all the good things in the world, including Shakespeare and country music, come from love. That's what I think."
– The Deep end of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard
"No legacy is so rich as honesty."
- William Shakespeare
"We don't need more strength or more ability or greater opportunity. What we need is to use what we have."
- Basil S. Walsh
"Your legacy should be that you made it better than it was when you got it."
- Lee Iacocca
"From there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere."
- Dr. Seuss
"Anger is never without a Reason, but seldom with a Good One."
- Benjamin Franklin
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
- Albert Einstein
"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first."
- David Comins
"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"We don't just 'borrow' words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
- James D Nicoll
"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
- John F Woods
"Drugs have taught an entire generation of kids the metric system."
- PJ O'Rourke
“Our knight has a trailer.”
- Chris Taylor 7/20/05
Me: I have a star on my tit!
Jane: I’d start worrying about the three wisemen.
7-05
“You don’t have to have love to breed. You just need a VISA card.”
- Scott Goodroad 9-23-05
“I love Fridays. I can’t even convey how much I love Fridays. If I ever convert to a religion, it’ll be on a Friday.”
- Sarah Scott 2-23-06
Ravenclaw rescues our own like Tarzan on a blue and bronze rope.
- lj user angelnomoon 6-25-06
"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"
- Henry Ward Beecher
"A book lover never goes to bed alone."
- Anonymous
"A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy."
- Max Weinreich, linguist and author (1894-1969)
"[T]he rule "Things always change in time" only really applies in L.A. if you're a kid under seventeen or a mini-mall."
- Lisa, The Psycho Ex Game by Merrill Markoe & Andy Prieboy
"But it was love that made me nervous. Love that reminded me of someone coming up and tapping me on the back, then acting like he hadn't done anything when I turned to see who was there."
- Lisa, The Psycho Ex Game by Merrill Markoe & Andy Prieboy
"But if by 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by 'Liberal', then I'm proud to say I'm a 'Liberal'."
- John F. Kennedy, 14 Sept 1960
What I had seen as laying the groundwork for a lasting friendship through a growing intimacy had been more of the noxious atmospheric gases that were the building blocks of most friendships in LA. It wasn't as if I hadn't been through it a dozen times before. LA friendships were frequently just a facsimile. They often came apart without warning. The confusing part was that they included elements that looked an awful lot like friendship: dinners, parties, personal soul-baring, lengthy phone calls full of shared confidences. They all added up to a Bizarro World replica, similar to real friendship except for the goatees and the beret.
- Lisa, The Psycho Ex Game by Merrill Markoe & Andy Prieboy
And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
- Anais Nin,
We all experience intermittent amnesia, sometimes from drinking Ketel one Vodka but usually from the rudimentary passage of time. We refer to this phenomenon as "forgetting stuff." Most people consider foretting stuff to be a normal part of living. However, I see it as a huge problem; in a way, there's nothing I fear more. The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality. And since objective reality is fixed, all we can do is try to experience—to consume—as much of that fixed reality as possible. This can only be done by living in the moment (which I never do) or by exhaustively filing away former moment for later recall (which I do all the time).
- Chuck Klosterman Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs
What reason weaves, by passion is undone.
- Alexander Pope
The difficult you can do in a day. The impossible takes a little longer.
Sorry, no one has perfected scratch-n-sniff sarcasm. Say what you mean next time. :)
- Lj user _falnfenix_
"I always thought that Slytherins were yuppie, not goth. Lucius is such an overbearing PTA mom."
- Journalfen user ladybirdsleeps
"Directing porn just hasn't been the same since high school."
- Sara's friend Lawrence, 12-7-04
'A book is like a mirror. If a fool looks in, you can't expect a genius to look out.'
– unknown
"Passion was about the body, the senses and the skin and the pounding blood. Love was about something much less easy, much less simple. Love was seeing someone for exactly who they were—the strong and the weak, the fearless and the vulnerable, and knowing that the sum of it all, the total of the person, was worth more than all the passion in the world. To see the truth of someone, and have them see the truth of you—that was something more rare and beautiful than any simple affair. Passion simply made the entire matter more exciting."
- Duke Most Wanted by Celeste Bradley
"He hadn't seen her until it was too late, like a buried gemstone that another man found first. She was not he easy beauty, not the obvious target, but required perception and wisdom—yet he now saw the truth. She was entirely beautiful to him. Was the gemstone buried in the cinders any less valuable than that displayed in a fine ring? The only difference was the setting."
- Duke Most Wanted by Celeste Bradley
(Some don't have names attached, either by my fault or others, and I apologize. Please feel free to add/correct such things! (p) means paraphrased to the best of my ability.)
---
Sometimes the paper is the only thing that will listen to you.
Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .
There is no such thing as a weird human being. Some just take more understanding.
"I had a terrible dream. I dreamed that all truths were known."
- James K. Feibleman
Common sense is the deposits of prejudice laid down in the mind before the age of eighteen.
The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory.
"You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing."
- Margaret Atwood
"Vigor is contagious; and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
'Last year I fell in love with a girl. This year I fell in love with myself.'
- j.r. 9/96
“Do you believe in reincarnation? I do. When I come back I want to be a butterfly, cause no one suspects a butterfly.”
- Bart Simpson
be infants in evil, but in thinking be adults
- I Corinthians 14.20
"Forgetting is a sort of therapy, unless it's vital to remember."
- Tim Tiernan
'Love, and a cough, cannot be hid.'
- George Herbert
"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you."
- Rita Mae Brown
"I think this is how Chicago got started. A bunch of people in New York said, 'Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't cold enough. Let's go west.'"
- Richard Jeni
"Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography."
- Paul Rodriguez
"Why is it that when we talk to God we're said to be praying, but when God talks to us we're schizophrenic?"
- Lily Tomlin
"Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God's final word on where your lips end."
- Jerry Seinfeld
"I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else."
- Lily Tomlin
"Women love us only for our faults, and if we men have enough of them, they'll forgive us anything."
- Guillermo, Balkan Ghosts
People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's easier to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.
Mini-vans are tangible evidence of evil.
"History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club."
- John W. Campbell
It doesn't much matter who leads, long as the rhythm is right.
EMBRACE IMPERFECTION
- Brien R. Brown
there's a fear that you will sell your dreams for a job or cut your hair as you throw your graduation cap up in the real world air
- Dar Williams (p)
Why assumptions suck: when you hear hoofbeats, you think horses, not zebras.
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
- Jeanette Rankin
"Being able to laugh at someone you can identify with means you are able to laugh at yourself, which is the best form of therapy."
- Richard Gere (p)
"As long as there is wilderness, I know there is a larger part of myself that I can always visit, vast tracks of territory lying dormant, craving exploration and providing sanctity."
- Life After God by Douglas Coupland
"I think about this . . . I think about how hard it is -- even with the desire, and even with the will and the time -- I think of how hard it is to reach that spot inside us that remains pure that we never manage to touch but which we know exists -- and I try to touch that spot."
- Life After God by Douglas Coupland
" . . . I guess the nice thing about driving a car is that the physical act of driving itself occupies a good chunk of brain cells that otherise would be giving you trouble overloading your thinking. . . . A fast moving car is the only place where you're legally allowed to not deal with your problems. It's enforced meditation and this is good."
- Life After God by Douglas Coupland
"Our conversations were never easy, but as I -- we -- get older, we are all finding that our conversations must be spoken. A need burns inside us to share with others what we are feeling. Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic. It is as though the coolness that marked our youth is itself a type of retrovirus that can only leave you feeling empty. Full of holes."
- Life After God by Douglas Copeland
"For so many years I lived a life of solitude and I thought life was fine. But I kew that unless I explored intimacy and shared intimacy with someone else then life would never progress beyond a certain point. I remember thinking that unless I knew what was going on inside of someone else's head other than my own I was going to explode."
- Life After God by Douglas Coupland
Oh, evolve!
"Don't make fun of the ill!"
- Ally McBeal
"Maybe that's what scares me the most: as soon as you find love, you've had it."
- Ally McBeal
'That's not the job of the government, that's the job of Natural Selection:
to weed out the people who are stupid enough to not wear helmets.'
- Bill Maher (p), Politically Incorrect 8-24-99
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.
‘While anyone can make offensive comments about me, or to me, they *cannot* offend me without my permission.”
- Howie Lyhte
I discovered that incessant whining helps ease the existential pain.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
"Sean's my lacrossetitute."
- Ashley Wingfield
"Non-Violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
- Thomas Edison
"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities."
- Voltaire
"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men."
- Alice Walker
"Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."
- Milan Kundera
Have you ever imagined a world without hypothetical situations?
"You have beautiful relationships. Always appreciate them without boundaries."
- Korey Hendricks 9-99
"Dating men is hard? Try dating women, then you'll think dating men is easy.'
- Meredith 9/99
'And I do think inexperienced people can make good lovers. They make terrible sex partners, but being lovers is about loving much more than it is about sex.'
- Korey Hendricks 9/99
"Fold your hands in a weird way. Look at them from a weird angle. You can't really tell which is right which is left. That's how this woman makes me feel sometimes: egoless, blended, powerful, and yet confident. This is how we all should feel, always. Then again, if we felt this way always, then perhaps we wouldn't recognize the wonder of our joys as often or at all."
- Tim Tiernan
Old Age Comes at a Bad Time
"Trent Reznor is a network of balanced contradictions -- and all the richer for it. His music can be as abrasive as chain saw or as melodious as birds -- often in the same four minutes. Until The Fragile, he worked almost exclusively with machines but expertly wrung earthly warmth from their chips and bits. As much as his music screams, 'Fuck you,' it whispers, 'Love me.' It can sounds simple, but it is meticulously crafted and complexly programmed. Reznor uncorks chaos but has the intelligence to harness it."
- "The Fragile World of Trent Reznor" Anthony Bozz R.S. 823 10-14-99
'I wanna be a good famous.'
- Mike Herriman (p)
'Serious is just as serious.'
- Lisa Decker on marriage vs. significant others
'We are all very much alike, in just that life has happened to us all.'
- Marshel Copple
me: do you have stuff to do tonight?
her: i have stuff to do for the rest of my life. i need to realize this.
"Drunk is feeling sophisticated when you can't say it."
- Anonymous
"Why is American beer served cold? So you can tell it from urine."
- David Moulton
"Hi, my name's JR and I collect mothers."
- Seth Miot
"In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."
- Albert Camus
"I've just given up trying to figure people out. Chances are, what I think ends up being wrong, so now I just accept the info as I get it, rather than trying to guess."
- Lucky Alexis Anna Rowen Granoski Bennett
"I live in Vacaville -- I can't bring myself to kill my neighbors."
- Stephanie Dameral (p) on not eating beef
"A really good girl is evil in all the right places."
- Rabinder Bhatia
"Girl Problems are still better than having messy orgasms."
- Alicia Atkinson (p)
" . . .like you were playing with stamps and you decided to decorate your face . . . ."
- Carrie Weiner on dyeing baby hairs (p)
"Yeah, it's like when you hang out around radio towers too much and you have a metal plate in your head."
- Lucky AA Rowen-Granoski on how sleeping next to an attractive gay man messes you up
"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."
- Mark Twain
"Diamonds are magic, she said, and this is why women wear them on their fingers, as a sign of the magic of womanhood. Men have strength, Miss Ferenczi said, but no true magic."
- from 'Gryphon' by Charles Baxter
"Woman, get back in the chicken."
- Meena
"A woman wins by giving herself and other women permission -- to eat; to be sexual; to age; to wear overalls, a paste tiara, a Balenciaga gown, a secondhand opera cloak, or combat boots; to cover up or to go practically naked; to do whatever we choose following -- or ignoring -- our own aesthetic."
- Naomi Wolf
you set up your place in my thoughts / moved in and made my thinking crowded
- emily saliers
"Women do more than live, we endure with vitality. Women do more than touch, we have the ability to feel. Women do more than see, we look for the truth. Women do more than read, we obtain knowledge. Women do more than listen, we comprehend. Women do more than think, we imagine the possibilities. Women do more than speak, because we have something to say."
"You know I'm not a peanut person -- I don't eat my own kind."
- Megan Murphy 1-31-00
'fear wakes you up sometimes when you don't even know you're sleeping'
- from Knives by GenieVB
subvert the dominant paradigm
I used to be Snow White -- but I drifted.
Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglect.
"I want to find somebody without the alcoholic gene so I can give my kids a fighting chance.'
- Megan Archer (3-3-00)
'see, this is why i have trouble finding guys -- i have a bigger penis than any of them'
- nicole davison 3-3-00
me: it tastes like a melted slushy...
him: that's kind of how i feel right now...
(3-3-00)
'It's like it's this big :little gesture: but we're so close that it's this big :big gesture:.
- clancy 3-4-00
'Religion is just one more power structure... has only as much to do with spirituality as it needs to to survive.'
- Josiah
'I think at the end of the day all religions are based on finding a reason why people should act in a caring, compassionate and humanitarian way. But, most of all, that they should act.'
- Pete Townshend
' . . . what continues to be important is that the human individual accepts the fact that he or she is capable of being spiritually swayed. And in order to make the best of that, they really have to listen to what's being said.'
- Pete Townshend, 1987 interview
'If it screams for truth rather than help, if it commits itself with a courage that it can't be sure it really has, if it stands up and admits that something is wrong but doesn't insist on blood, then it is rock n' roll.'
- Pete Townshend
"Rock and roll is only rock and roll if it's not safe."
- Mick Jagger, 1988, R.S. magazine
"What happened to me happened to Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. All people have talked about is the way they look. It's a cheap way to take away women's power."
- Calista Flockhart, on the media's scrutiny of her weight
'if I get j.r. germs, will i turn prettier?'
- Marshel Copple 4-00
'This college thing is too much for me. I gotta quit while I’m ahead . . . I gotta quit before they do something stupid and give me a degree.'
- Christian Bollacker 4-00
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art . . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that gives value to survival.”
- C.S. Lewis
'Intelligence and light sabres do not always go together.'
- Kat on boys dueling in the Shannon Center
"A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."
- Dave Barry
"Onions are funny."
- Seth Garrido
"'Ah! My breast!' she says while grabbing her knee."
- Meredith, whose Madrigal Feaste dress hid her breasts somewhere else on her body
"Breakfast? Nah, fuck breakfast. My breakfast was a Coke and a smile."
- Nathan Pereau on British breakfasts
'You are the essence of everything that is -- that is au natural.'
- Nathan Pereau on j.r.
"Well, what? They're not gonna say 'Here, Keanu, have some Ipicac.'"
- Nicole Davison on fake-looking Matrix vomit
"See, that's what different about me now -- I know myself better. I can warn you now."
- Claire Yunker on personal growth
And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plow-shares into swords
- Alan Wilson Watts
And on the 8th day God said, OK Murphy, you take over.
Birth, life, death. Repeat as necessary.
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
i live alone / the habit grows
- Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten
'Academic training was instrumental. You have to understand the language of society before you can start stretching and subverting it and ripping and tearing it and burning it and watching the plastic drip on the ants.'
- Mark Pauline
'well, i know you're not playing tiddly-winks . . . '
- nicole davison on ignoring sounds coming from the other room
i'm a barnacle on a whale . . . or something like that
- tim tiernan 9-24-00
'how do you respond to a thing like that?'
'i push over my king. i don't know.'
- me & clancy on friends going back into the closet
'we don’t know we been took and made history out of'
- aaron's monologue
'no one pays attention, but everybody has an opinion. and that's just ridiculous.'
- luann lauesen on the voting public
"… we can say what we like about ourselves [but we] don't have adequate words to express how we feel. … The problem for us it that words seem attached to ideas and detached from instinct. Feelings, attached to instinct and experienced physically, have to struggle for verbal expression because words seem to belong not in the body but in the head."
- Freeing the Natural Voice by Kristin Linklater
let's be conscious of our retarding, okay?
- ashley hamrick 11-28-00
I don't know how to balance anything when everything's balancing me . . . you know?
- tim tiernan 11-13-00
Daddy gave me a brain. Mommy gave me a body. I gave *myself* a college education.
- Jeni McKinney
'I wonder what the reaction time would be if I just bounded up out of my chair, across the tables, and started combing Charles Adams' hair with my fork!'
- Clancy Neilsen 12-13-00
'college is an endurance test . . . with a carrot at the end . . . .'
- w. spencer
'yeah, well, i don't know where it is, so what does it matter that i know what it is?'
- me
' . . . my storms of emotion have a trick of exhausting themselves.'
- War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
"Then you must tell 'em dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh moving' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore."
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
If we don't get funding I'm going to sew a rose on Jeff Cleveland's ASS!
- Alissa Van Keuren, Whittier College choir president, on the ASB president’s habit of using school money to hand out roses
ah... but to play something different... to be an actor and shed the worry ....alas I would still insult everyone else that could not shed it as well...
- john lane
'you're only allowed to pout if you can kick ass'
- Megan Archer on Angelina Jolie/Lara Croft
Have a Nike Homework Day: JUST DO IT
'makes me nicer to everybody when i'm nicer to everything.'
- clancy
Poetry and Revolution Before Breakfast
- Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
Life is a dipthong.
The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.
- Helen Hayes (at 73)
A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who never owned a car.
- Carrie Snow
I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.
- Jennifer Unlimited
If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.
- Catherine Aird
I think-therefore I'm single.
- Lizz Winstead
If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a noose around your neck?
- Linda Ellerbee
"Evil, my son, is abstract. It is not a solid entity roaming the universe, crying its terrible cry and flashing its black flanks. It is a force that dwells within each of us - more in some than in others - hidden away until something awakens it. It is the most dangerous of foes; it cannot be completely destroyed without the death of innocents. We cannot bring ourselves to destroy every living person and thing in mere anticipation of the evil they may harbor. No. Each must be willing to give up the evil inside - to turn it out and surrender it. That will be the fight. A fight which perhaps we will not win."
- Brett Martino
[college] life is like MST3K: people talking over a really bad movie
- andrew herder
me: how’s life?
her: … I’m getting some lemons … and I’m not making sweet lemonade …
me: how about lemon tarts? they take more time and more work … but they taste better.
the past is magnetic. it draws us in. we cannot help ourselves and, as with other things that we cannot help in ourselves, we make up elaborate explanations, reasonable rational explanations, to chant away the powerful things that don't belong to us.
- jw
"The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world."
- Hannah Arendt
"Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder the hate. In fact, violence only increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars."
- Matrin Luther King
Negative feelings, such as violence, are damaging to life, whether we act upon them ourselves, or cause or condone them in others.
They are born of greed, anger, or delusion, and may be slight, moderate, or intense. Their fruit is endless ignorance and suffering.
To remember this is to cultivate the opposite.
- The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, 2:34
“For self-protection man has created God, on whom he depends for his own protection, safety and securty, just as a child depends on its parent For self-preservation man has conceived the idea of an immortal soul, which will live eternally. In his ignorance, weakness, fear, and desire, man needs these two things to console himself. Hence he clings to them deeply and fanatically.”
- Walpola Rahula What the Buddha Taught
“ … do not be led by reports, or tradition, or hearsay. Be not led by the authority of religious texts, nor by mere logic or inference, nor by considering appearances, nor by the delight in speculative opinions, nor vby seeming possibilities, nor by the idea: ‘this is our teacher’. But, when you know for youselves that certain things are unwholesome, and wrong, and bad, then give them up … And when you know for yourselves that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them.”
- attributed to the Buddha
everybody I know has a grapefruit for a head.
- marshel copple 4.8.02
“I guess every song has a special meaning for someone somewhere. Elvis Presley is still showing up in 7-11 stores across the country, even though he’s been dead for years, so I figure music just might be the most important thing there is.”
- The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
If you cannot work with love but only with distaste it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gates of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
- Khalil Gibran
On acting: ‘You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for.’
- Jane Fonda
What the hell … you might be right, you might be wrong, but just don’t avoid.
- Katharine Hepburn
We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.
- Khalil Gibran
The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. And only he who listens can speak.
- Dag Hammarskjöld
On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined.
- Lord Byron
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
- Winston Churchill
You have to be very religious to change your religion.
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
- Erica Jong
The 80s were like The Island of Misfit Toys.
- Ron Sheffield, RS Magazine (p)
Orgasms are like Kevin Spacey movies. You can’t possibly have a bad one. It’s just a matter of frequency and length.
- Eric Dzinski
My family adopted a kitten with an uncanny resemblance to another cat we had recently lost. He acted like him as well, so we named the newcomer "Deja Mew".
A friend renamed two of his more thriving plant varieties "Creepusamongus" and "Creepusallaroungus". But the plant that he thought he had killed many times was known as "Thrivusdespitus".
When I was an infantry platoon commander, my Marines trained regularly for night-time reconnaissance patrol. As we moved along, each of us would whisper the name of any obstacle to the person behind so that no one would be surprised and utter a cry that would disclose our position. During one exercise, the lead man in the formation occasionally turned around and whispered to me "log" or "rock", which I would pass along. Suddenly there was a crash ahead of me, and from several feet down, I heard a single whispered word-"hole".
You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
Knowing how much I love flowers, my nine-year-old daughter presented me with branches she'd picked from a blossoming fruit tree in a vacant lot. "Bonnie, these are lovely," I said, "but do you realize that if you had left them on the tree, each of these blossom would have become a cherry?" "No, they wouldn't have," she stated firmly. "Oh, yes they would have. If left alone, each blossom would have grown into a cherry." "Well, okay," she conceded, "but they were plums last year."
Do you ever feel that life is like a car wash and you're going through it on a bicycle?
If swimming is so good for your figure, why do whales look the way they do?
How come the windshield wiper always works better on the passenger's side?
Why are income taxes due on April 15 -- the same day the Titanic went down?
As our symphony orchestra rehearsed the final section of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, the conductor offered his interpretation of the music's various parts. The soft, delicate French horns, he explained, should symbolize the fleeing village maidens, while the louder trombones and trumpets would represent the chasing savages.
When the conductor raised his baton to continue, a voice was heard from the French horn section. "Do you mind, Maestro, if we play our part a bit faster?"
‘The famous Seattle rain. The thin, gray rain that toadstools love. The persistent rain that knows every hidden entrance into collar and shopping bag. The quiet rain that can rust a tin roof without the tin roof making a sound in protest. The shamanic rain that feeds the imagination. The rain that seems actually a secret language, whispering, like the ecstasy of primitives, of the essence of things.’
- Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins
Children and dogs are as necessary to the welfare of the country as Wall Street and the railroads.
- Harry S. Truman
We tend to hold with Lorena Hickok, a columnist in the 1920s for the Minneapolis Morning Tribune, who observed of college football that “you might as well put in your time watching a lot of ants running in and out of their hole. That is, if there isn’t anything else you’d rather be doing right then.” I’m sorry if I’m tipping sacred cows here. I don’t mean to say I’m above watching organized sports. Possibly below it, for the fact is I’d rather watch ants. Draw your own conclusions.
- High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
Oh, how slight the difference between ‘independent’ and ‘ornery.’
- High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
Housework, like the Buddha, takes many forms, depending on what is in your heart as you approach it. I personally am inclined to approach it the way government treats dissent: ignore it until it revolts.
- High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
A pen may or may not be mightier than the sword, but it is brassier than the telephone.
- High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
“I am carrying on with all of this in a desert, two thousand miles from my verdant childhood home. I am disembodied. No one here remembers how I was before I grew to my present height. I’m called upon to reinvent my own childhood time and again; in the process, I wonder how I can ever know the truth about who I am.”
- High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
“[Mariah Burton] Nelson lists at least six sports in which women and men now compete together at the elite level (dog-sled racing, horse racig, marathon wimming, equestrian events, rifle shooting, and auto racing), and many more recreational sports in which a wife and husband can typically find themselves evenly matched. And yet, she says, many people continue to rely hard on five games that showcase upper-body strength (football, baseball, basketball, boxing, and hockey) as reassurance of a certain order, gender-wise, in the universe.
“Me, I bear in mind that women life seven years long than men, on average, and figure that’s the sport I’ll sign up for.”
- High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
“We’re familiar enough, across all cultures, with ancestor worship. Why have we never put a second, parallel candle on that alter for ‘progeny worship’? How can we proceed with such pure disregard for the ones who will come after—not just our own heirs, but all of life? How do we fail to realize we are a point in a grand procession, with equal responsibilities to past and future?”
- High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
“Love of one’s country should be like love of one’s spouse—a give-and-take criticism and affection. Although it is hoped one prefers one’s spouse to other people … one does not prove that one loves one’s wife by battering other women.”
- Garry Wills
“Whoever said life is a bowl of cherries forgot about the pits and stems.”
- Devon Hill
“We can’t ever still our voices.”
- Grandma Floss 11/29/02
“I don’t care much about the money at all. Frankly, if I get the chance to kiss someone in a movie, they wouldn’t need to pay me at all. … Basically, I can say that I came to acting because of the women.”
- Orlando Bloom
“Legolas’ moves are smooth and elegant, like a cat…it’s all very balletic. It’s also bloody hard to do without falling over!”
- Orlando Bloom
“Vig used to call me ‘elf boy,’ and I’d call him ‘filthy human.’ As an Elf, I never got a scratch on me, never got dirty. And Vig would come out with blood and sweat all over him. And he’d say to me, ‘Oh, go manicure your nails.’”
- Orlando Bloom
“We have these digs at each other. Viggo will go on about Elves and how they’re always doing their nails and brushing their long, blonde hair, and being all prissy. And I just say: Well, at least I’m going to live forever! Got that? LIVE FOREVER!”
- Orlando Bloom
“For a young actor like me to have the opportunity to work with the genre of actors and directors on ‘Lord of the Rings’ is unbelievable. There was no, should I, should I not. It was like, where do I sign up! It was just bonkers. It was like here, have a life.”
- Orlando Bloom
“Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.”
- Colin Powell
Blessed are those who are easily amused/entertain themselves, for they will be never bored.
“I came home this afternoon and checked the machine for a message but the only message I got was from the company that holds my student loan, Sallie Mae. Sallie Mae sounds like a naïve and barefoot hillbilly girl but in fact they are a ruthless and aggressive conglomeration of bullies located in a tall brick building somewhere in Kansas. I picture it to be the tallest building in that state and I have decided they hire their employees straight out of prison. It scares me.”
- 'The SantaLand Diaries’, Barrell Fever, David Sedaris
“Everything about the cash register intimidates me. Each procedure involves a series of codes: separate numbers for cash, checks, and each type of credit card. The term Void has gained prominence as the filthiest four-letter word in my vocabulary. Voids are nightmare of paperwork and coded numbers, everything produced in triplicate and initialed by the employee and his supervisor.
Leaving the building tonight I could not shake the mental picture of myself being stoned to death by restless, angry customers, their nerves shattered by my complete lack of skill. I tell myself that I will simply pry open my register and accept anything they want to give me – beads, cash, watches, whatever. I’ll negotiate and swap. I’ll stomp their credit cards through the masher, write “Nice Knowing You!” along the bottom of the slip and leave it at that.”
‘The SantaLand Diaries’, Barrel Fever, David Sedaris
“Once the line gets long we break it up into four different lines because anyone in their right mind would leave if they knew it would take over two hours to see Santa. Two hours—you could see a movie in two hours. Standing in a two-hour line makes people worry that they’re not living in a democratic nation. People stand in line for two hours and they go over the edge.”
‘The SantaLand Diaries’, Barrell Fever, David Sedaris
“You know, I telephoned my grandparents the other day, and my grandfather said to me, ‘We saw your movie.’ ‘Which one?’ I said, and he shouted, ‘Betty, what was the name of that movie I didn’t like?”
- Brad Pitt
“I just realized that I’m a character out of some fucked up Beckett play.”
- Andrew Hurder 12-16-02
"Writing is easy…you just open a vein."
- Red Smith, American sports writer, who died c. 1993
A man cannot love his wife without loving all women a little, I guess the reverse must be true.
- Paraphrase from Time enough For Love by Robert H. Heinlein
"Of course, I get angry. Of course, I get sad. I have a full range of emotions. I also have a whole smorgasbord of ways of dealing with my feelings. That is what we should give children. Give them…ways to express their rage without hurting themselves or somebody else. That's what the world needs."
- Fred Rogers
My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being, hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.
- Erma Bombeck
I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes beacues I know I’m not dumb…And I'm also not blonde.
- Dolly Parton
When women are depressed they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country.
- Elayne Boosler
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
- Gloria Steinem
Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Veni, Vidi, Velcro. I came, I saw, I got stuck.
"Any children's book worth reading at ten that isn't worth reading at fifty isn't worth reading."
"The Rolling Stones must be part of the wizarding community in some respects as Keith Richards couldn't possibly still be alive otherwise."
- TheTreacleTart aka Lydia, Fellytones and Fuzzy Slippers
"I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved; the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave."
- George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), novelist (1819-1880)
"…music lights up with its pulsing lamp the cave of our being."
- The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
"It was nice to have yourself known by a man; it was getting to be known that was embarrassing: all that self-conscious verbalization over too many drinks, and then the bodies revealed with the hidden marks and sags like disappointing presents at Christmastime. But how much of love, when you thought about it, was not of the other but of yourself naked in his eyes: of that rush, that little flight, of shedding your clothes, and being you at last."
- The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
"…Alexandra…was inclined to think that the past is often romanticized, that when it was the present it had that same curious hollowness we all feel now."
- The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
"Jane Smart was practicing Bach's Second Suite for unaccompanied cello, in D Minor, the little black sixteenth-notes of the prelude going up and down and then up again with the sharps and flats like a man slightly raising his voice in conversation, old Bach setting his infallible tonal suspense engine in operation again, and abruptly Jane began to resent it, these notes, so black and certain and masculine, the fingering getting trickier with each sliding transposition of the theme and he not caring, this dead square-faced old Lutheran with his wig and his Lord and his genius and two wives and seventeen children, not caring how the tips of her fingers hurt or how her obedient spirit was pushed back and forth, up and down by these military notes just to give him a voice after death, a bully's immortality…"
- The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
"An educated mind is nothing without a compassionate heart."
- Cora Poage (Whittier College class of 2003)
"If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter knows the details of her mother's life—without flinching or whining—the stronger the daughter."
- The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
"Beth had come to think of church basements as a kind of underground railway to emotional succor—trailing all over America, where people in transformation, grieving, marrying, givign birth and dying, were gathered around scarred tables in rooms with walls covered by children's crayoned pictures of the Annunciation."
– The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard
"Yes, I think I am [a romantic]. I think that all the bad things in the world, including wars and religion, and all the good things in the world, including Shakespeare and country music, come from love. That's what I think."
– The Deep end of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard
"No legacy is so rich as honesty."
- William Shakespeare
"We don't need more strength or more ability or greater opportunity. What we need is to use what we have."
- Basil S. Walsh
"Your legacy should be that you made it better than it was when you got it."
- Lee Iacocca
"From there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere."
- Dr. Seuss
"Anger is never without a Reason, but seldom with a Good One."
- Benjamin Franklin
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
- Albert Einstein
"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first."
- David Comins
"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"We don't just 'borrow' words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
- James D Nicoll
"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
- John F Woods
"Drugs have taught an entire generation of kids the metric system."
- PJ O'Rourke
“Our knight has a trailer.”
- Chris Taylor 7/20/05
Me: I have a star on my tit!
Jane: I’d start worrying about the three wisemen.
7-05
“You don’t have to have love to breed. You just need a VISA card.”
- Scott Goodroad 9-23-05
“I love Fridays. I can’t even convey how much I love Fridays. If I ever convert to a religion, it’ll be on a Friday.”
- Sarah Scott 2-23-06
Ravenclaw rescues our own like Tarzan on a blue and bronze rope.
- lj user angelnomoon 6-25-06
"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"
- Henry Ward Beecher
"A book lover never goes to bed alone."
- Anonymous
"A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy."
- Max Weinreich, linguist and author (1894-1969)
"[T]he rule "Things always change in time" only really applies in L.A. if you're a kid under seventeen or a mini-mall."
- Lisa, The Psycho Ex Game by Merrill Markoe & Andy Prieboy
"But it was love that made me nervous. Love that reminded me of someone coming up and tapping me on the back, then acting like he hadn't done anything when I turned to see who was there."
- Lisa, The Psycho Ex Game by Merrill Markoe & Andy Prieboy
"But if by 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by 'Liberal', then I'm proud to say I'm a 'Liberal'."
- John F. Kennedy, 14 Sept 1960
What I had seen as laying the groundwork for a lasting friendship through a growing intimacy had been more of the noxious atmospheric gases that were the building blocks of most friendships in LA. It wasn't as if I hadn't been through it a dozen times before. LA friendships were frequently just a facsimile. They often came apart without warning. The confusing part was that they included elements that looked an awful lot like friendship: dinners, parties, personal soul-baring, lengthy phone calls full of shared confidences. They all added up to a Bizarro World replica, similar to real friendship except for the goatees and the beret.
- Lisa, The Psycho Ex Game by Merrill Markoe & Andy Prieboy
And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
- Anais Nin,
We all experience intermittent amnesia, sometimes from drinking Ketel one Vodka but usually from the rudimentary passage of time. We refer to this phenomenon as "forgetting stuff." Most people consider foretting stuff to be a normal part of living. However, I see it as a huge problem; in a way, there's nothing I fear more. The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality. And since objective reality is fixed, all we can do is try to experience—to consume—as much of that fixed reality as possible. This can only be done by living in the moment (which I never do) or by exhaustively filing away former moment for later recall (which I do all the time).
- Chuck Klosterman Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs
What reason weaves, by passion is undone.
- Alexander Pope
The difficult you can do in a day. The impossible takes a little longer.
Sorry, no one has perfected scratch-n-sniff sarcasm. Say what you mean next time. :)
- Lj user _falnfenix_
"I always thought that Slytherins were yuppie, not goth. Lucius is such an overbearing PTA mom."
- Journalfen user ladybirdsleeps
"Directing porn just hasn't been the same since high school."
- Sara's friend Lawrence, 12-7-04
'A book is like a mirror. If a fool looks in, you can't expect a genius to look out.'
– unknown
"Passion was about the body, the senses and the skin and the pounding blood. Love was about something much less easy, much less simple. Love was seeing someone for exactly who they were—the strong and the weak, the fearless and the vulnerable, and knowing that the sum of it all, the total of the person, was worth more than all the passion in the world. To see the truth of someone, and have them see the truth of you—that was something more rare and beautiful than any simple affair. Passion simply made the entire matter more exciting."
- Duke Most Wanted by Celeste Bradley
"He hadn't seen her until it was too late, like a buried gemstone that another man found first. She was not he easy beauty, not the obvious target, but required perception and wisdom—yet he now saw the truth. She was entirely beautiful to him. Was the gemstone buried in the cinders any less valuable than that displayed in a fine ring? The only difference was the setting."
- Duke Most Wanted by Celeste Bradley
