share quotes

The righteous truth is, there ain’t nothing worse than some fool lying on some Third-World beach in spandex psychedelic trousers, smoking damn dope, pretending he gettin’ consciousness expansion. I want consciousness expansion, I go to my local tabernacle an’ I sing!

Every time I hear this interlude in “Ain’t Goin’ to Goa,” I remember clearly just why I love A3.

Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

—Flannery O’Connor
[Love that last line, especially.]

Happiness is self-contentedness, helping to make children deeply and quietly glad that they are who they are. . . . Helping a child is the greatest gift you can give in the language of the human heart. It spells love in the most profound way.

—Aristotle

[This book] is about a search…for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.

—Studs Terkel, from the Introduction to his book Working

We may either smother the divine fire of youth or we may feed it. We may either stand stupidly staring as it sinks into a murky fire of crime and flares into the intermittent blaze of folly or we may tend it into a lambent flame with power to make clean and bright our dingy city streets.

—Jane Addams, 1909
   (as quoted as an epigram to Studs Terkel’s Division Street: America)

I always say ‘I love you’
When I mean ‘Turn out the light,’
And I say ‘Let’s run away’
When I just mean ‘Stay the night’

—The Magnetic Fields

I don’t hate my parents
I don’t get drunk just to spite ‘em
I got my own reasons to drink now
Think I’ll call my dad up and invite ‘im.

—The Pursuit of Happiness, “I’m an Adult Now”

There are thirty-two ways to write a story . . . but there is only one plot: “Things are not as they seem.”

—Jim Thompson

I believe that those of us who are older should keep our ears and hearts open to the possibility that our age may have cost us the most important of human characteristics: the hope for a better, fairer, and more just world.

—Bob Kerrey, president of the New School, defending the actions of his students during McCain’s commencement address

Anyone who’s lived on the Great Plains for any amount of time should recognize the truth and substance of this passage.

Today, aside from a few fine marble headstones in country graveyeards and the occasional roadside historical marker, not a trace of the blizzard of 1888 remains on the prairie. Yet in the imagination and identity of the region, the storm is as sharply etched as ever: This is a place where blizzards kill children on their way home from school.
 
—David Laskin, The Children’s Blizzard (emphasis his)