The Who Quotes (page 219)
-
-
-
Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people, never satisfied with where they are as a matter of selection? The pioneers, the immigrants who peopled the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady rooted ones stayed home and are still there. But every one of us...are descended from the restless ones, the wayward ones who were not content to stay at home. Wouldn't it be unusual if we had not inherited this tendency? And the fact is that we have.
John Steinbeck
At all these European shows there are autograph collectors who stand outside for sound check and before the show and sometimes at the hotel. I don’t even know if they know who I am. At Gateshead, I signed autographs going in to the show, when I came out this little guy came up to me. Cathy said, “You already signed for him.” He said, “No! I wasn’t here before.” He was irate. Anyway, Cathy and I got in the car and went to the hotel that was about mile away. The guy beat the car there. I told...
Randy Newman
Darkness invades the dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light is the worst. Light in his dreams, was always hope: the basic moral hope. As the contacts break helically away, hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply tonight crying, Who? Who?
Thomas Pynchon
If any of us had heard the word "feminist" we would have thought it meant a girl who wore too much makeup, but we were, without knowing it, feminists ourselves, bound together by the freemasonry that exists among intelligent women who know they are intelligent. It is the only kind of female bonding that works, which is why most men do not like intelligent women. They don't mind one female brain if they can enjoy it privately; it's the idea of two or more on the loose that upsets them. The...
Florence King
Those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish. These can never again live the life of the day. When one meets them at high noon they give off, as if it were a protective emanation, something dark and muted. The light does not become them any longer. They begin to have an unrecorded look. It is as if they were being tried by the continual blows of an unseen adversary.
Djuna Barnes
Sometimes the newer kids who won’t even let him near them come in and set the resistance on the shoulder-pull at a weight greater than their own weight. The guru on the towel dispenser just sits there and smiles and doesn’t say anything. They hunker, then, and grimace, and try to pull the bar down, but, like, lo: the overweighted shoulder-pull becomes a chin-up. Up they go, their own bodies, toward the bar they’re trying to pull down. Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of...
David Foster Wallace
When getting my nose in a book. Cured most things short of school, It was worth ruining my eyes. To know I could still keep cool, And deal out the old right hook. To dirty dogs twice my size. Later, with inch-thick specs, Evil was just my lark: Me and my coat and fangs. Had ripping times in the dark. The women I clubbed with sex! I broke them up like meringues. Don't read much now: the dude. Who lets the girl down before. The hero arrives, the chap. Who's yellow and keeps the store. Seem far...
Philip Larkin
Most of the time it's not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. When we undertake the pilgrimage, it's not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls. The day arrives when the guilty must return to save those who could not find the courage to leave.
Orhan Pamuk
A story went the rounds about a San Franciscan white matron who refused to sit beside a Negro civilian on the streetcar, even after he made room for her on the seat. Her explanation was that she would not sit beside a draft dodger who was a Negro as well. She added that the least he could do was fight for his country the way her son was fighting on Iwo Jima. The story said that the man pulled his body away from the window to show an armless sleeve. He said quietly and with great dignity,...
Maya Angelou
Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or...
Christopher Hitchens
And confronting these men, wild and terrible as we agree that they were, there were men of quite another kind, smiling and adorned with ribbons and stars, silk stockinged, yellow gloved and with polished boots; men who insisted on the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages, of divine right, of bigotry, ignorance, enslavement, the death penalty and war, and who, talking in polished undertones, glorified the sword and the executioners' block. For our part, if we had to choose between the...
Victor Hugo
We are captivated by the feminine shadow of the self we might have been; in my case by that counterpart of the romantic writer who should have had the courage to reject society and to accept poverty for the sake of the development of his personality. Now when I see such beings I hope that I can somehow be freed from my shortcomings by union with them. Hence the recurrent longing to forsake external reality for a dream and to plunge into a ritual flight...I am attracted by those who...
Cyril Connolly
This Church is true. It will weather every storm that beats against it. It will outlast every critic who rises to mock it. It was established by God our Eternal Father for the blessing of His sons and daughters of all generations. It carries the name of Him who stands as its head, even the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. It is governed and moves by the power of the priesthood. It sends forth to the world another witness of the divinity of the Lord. Be faithful, my friends. Be...
Gordon B. Hinckley
That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.
Ralph Waldo Emerson