Up Quotes (page 115)
I can’t do nothing for you either, Billy. You know that. None of us can. You got to understand that as soon as a man goes to help somebody, he leaves himself wide open. He has to be cagey, Billy, you should know that as well as anyone. What could I do? I can’t fix your stuttering. I can’t wipe the razorblade scars off your wrists or the cigarette burns off the back of your hands. I can’t give you a new mother. And as far as the nurse riding you like this, rubbing your nose in your weakness...
Ken Kesey
We've got a form of brainwashing going on in our country…. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that's what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. MORE IS GOOD. MORE IS GOOD. We repeat it--and have it repeated to us--over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what's really important...
Morrie Schwartz
I did pick up a few tolerably ripe and breezy expressions out in France. All through my military career there was something about me - some subtle magnetism, don't you know, and that sort of thing - that seemed to make Colonels and blighters of that sort rather inventive. I sort of inspired them, don't you know.
P. G. Wodehouse
The day may come when, contemplating a world given back to the primeval forst, a human survivor will have no means of even guessing how much intelligence Man once imposed upon the forms of the earth, when he set up the stones of Florence in the billowing expanse of the Tuscan olive-groves. No trace will be left then of the palaces that saw Michelangelo pass by, nursing his grievances against Raphael; and nothing of the little Paris cafes where Renoir once sat beside Cezanne, Van Gogh beside...
Andre Malraux
Some of us have a ragged faith. You cry for a long time, and then after that are defeated and flattened for a long time. Then somehow life starts up again. ... Some aching beauty comes with huge loss, although maybe not right away when it would be helpful. Life is a very powerful force, despite the constant discouragement. So if you are a person with connections to life, a few tendrils eventually break through the sidewalk of loss, and you notice them, maybe space out studying them for a few...
Anne Lamott
What she read was a series of short connected lyrics, “Isis in Darkness.” The Egyptian Queen of Heaven and Earth was wandering in the Underworld, gathering up pieces of the murdered and dismembered body of her lover Osiris. At the same time, it was her own body she was putting back together; and it was also the physical universe. She was creating the universe by an act of love.
Margaret Atwood
Here’s another question I have. How come when it’s us, it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken, it’s an omelette?
Are we so much better than chickens all of a sudden? When did this happen, that we passed chickens in goodness. Name 6 ways we’re better than chickens.
See, nobody can do it! You know why? ‘Cause chickens are decent people.
You don’t see chickens hanging around in drug gangs, do you? No, you don’t see a chicken strapping some guy into a chair and hooking up his nuts to a car...
George Carlin
The things here are stronger--the things that differentiate us from one another are too powerful. The common interest is no longer decisive. It has broken up already and given place to the interest of the individual. Now and then something still will shine through from that other time when we all wore the same rig, but already it is dwindled and dim. These others here are still our comrades and yet our comrades no longer--that is what is so sad. All else went west in the war, but comradeship...
Erich Maria Remarque
This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece. I stretch out my hand and reach the corners of the world. The world is bundled up in this room. Beyond the door, where the river is, where the roads are, we shall be. We can take the world with us when we go and sling the sun under your arm. Hurry now, it's getting late. I don't know if this is...
Jeanette Winterson