Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There have been the most terrible, shocking events taking place in the United States of America within the last hour or so... I am afraid we can only imagine the terror and the carnage there and the many, many innocent people who will have lost their lives... It is perpetrated by fanatics who are utterly indifferent to the sanctity of human life and we, the democracies of this world, are going to have to come together to fight it together and eradicate this evil completely from our world.
One of my brothers used to tell me all the time, "Listen, nobody is going to discover you in the living room." It's about being interactive in life and participating in your own life. Once you get a grasp on that, you understand. "OK, I can take a couple of knocks. They can hit me on the chin, and I can get up." That's what it's about. It's not about not getting knocked down but getting up. Making sure that you keep pursuing whatever that passion is. For me, that passion is entertainment.
I believe that beyond the arena of art, the world would be a much better place if centered around a feminine perspective. The world has been really messed up by greedy white men who only work towards an agenda of personal wealth and power. It is this patriarchy of the past couple thousand years that causes so much strife. If the world was female-centered and if the dominant spirituality was based on the feminine and the earth, then human beings would know much more joy, peace, and harmony.
Clearly we're in historic times here. We have - one of the tributaries of the Mississippi River is a river called the Merrimack. And the crest areas there - they're going to be a number of feet, 2, 3, 4, over what they were in '93 or '82. And on the Mississippi River itself, down below St. Louis, we're still projecting a couple of feet over that historic number. So the bottom line is there's a significant amount of water that's causing evacuations and challenges throughout that whole area.
How would you take care of it?” I asked. He shrugged. “I know some ghouls. I make a couple calls, the guys come over for dinner, problem solved.” “They can put away nine whole giants? There’s that many ghouls in town?” “Probably not,” Leif admitted. “But whatever they do not eat tonight, they’ll take the rest to go.” I stared at him in disbelief. “You mean like a doggie bag?” The vampire nodded with a thin trace of a smile. “They have a refrigerated truck, Atticus. These are practical guys.
When you screen it the first couple times, you're just trying to get the movie to work, trying to get the story to flow, trying to find out where your areas are where you have enough breath to laugh a little bit. So you're doing that the first two or three screenings, and then finally, you dial the movie in and it's working, and at that point, it's 50/50 as far as what's funny and what's working. Sometimes you'll put something in and it will just die so hard that it'll almost kill the movie.
I want to tell everybody that you won't hear me trying to pop bottles in the club and all that kind of stuff. It's just not me and I think as long as you stay within your element and your age bracket, sure you're going a couple of young folks and teens, but that's not who I'm focused on. I'm really not. I love whoever supports, but I'm just not going to try and go back there because times have changed. If you don't move with the times, you'll get left off. I'm trying to change with the times.
Let me put it in a rather larger picture framework. Let's go to the longest time frame, the time frame of the life of our sun. As a star, our sun is about halfway through its life cycle. In the long run, we only have a couple of billion more years likely that we can inhabit this planet. By that time, we're going to have to be out of here before our sun dies. Now, I don't think we need to wait that long, and we certainly shouldn't wait that long. At the moment, we are not on a sustainable path.
My fourth mother, my godmother, she passed away a couple years ago - her name was Gwen. She was the theater director over at the gym where I grew up and learned about all those awesome things I told you about already. She was the one who taught me terms like "upstage" and "downstage," all those technical things about the art of what I do - how to breathe what I see, how to move. They were all her tactics, not anything learned or given to me through a theory, but rather by her natural abilities.
I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That's more of your quills. I don't want a hide full, thanks. I have always figured that you die each day and and each day is a is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you have died a couple thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.
We [me and Jennifer Salke] talked about the characters and different kinds of families and where are we today. We certainly pitched the gay couple, but we also talked about what it was like to be a single mother with a young daughter, what is it like to be a woman in your 50's who is completely starting over and dating again and having to go online to date again. We talked about the whole spectrum of the characters, but I don't think it ever came up about whether people are ready for it or not.
It's kind of funny...the moments on which life hinges. I think growing up you always imagine your life - your success - depends on your family and how much money they have, where you go to college, what sort of job you can pin down, starting salary...But it doesn't, you know. You wouldn't believe this, but life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming. And what you decide in those few seconds determines everything from then on... And you have no idea what you'll do until you're there.
I did some research on this a couple years ago," Augustus continued. "I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?" "And are there?" "Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about
What's against legalization in a practical sense? A couple of college kids figured out how to take a hemp plant and turn it into newspaper and it was actually a better quality of paper. It was cheaper and if you plant hemp in a field it revitalizes the soil. You can grow food in a dirt lot if you do enough harvest of hemp. I don't pretend to know the specifics of the economics of it to say how much we'll be getting, but there is money to be made there that is not being made because it's illegal.
I think leaders lead themselves, but leaders have ideas and maybe they're visionary ideas. Probably today, people would say Steve Jobs was a visionary because he invented this little gadget, the cell phone. But he didn't invent cell phones, and he didn't design the cell phone. He just took a couple of ideas and put them together, and no one else put those same ideas together as successfully as he did. But he had something that he was trying to do that intrigued him, and he could do it very well.
Even when couples share more equitably in the work at home, women do two-thirds of the daily jobs at home, like cooking and cleaning up--jobs that fix them into a rigid routine. Most women cook dinner and most men change the oil in the family car. But dinner needs to be prepared every evening around six o'clock, whereas the car oil needs to be changed every six months, any day around that time, any time that day.... Men thus have more control over when they make their contributions than women do.
In my couple of books, including Going Clear, the book about Scientology, I thought it seemed appropriate at the end of the book to help the reader frame things. Because we've gone through the history, and there's likely conflictual feelings in the reader's mind. The reader may not agree with me, but I don't try to influence the reader's judgment. I know everybody who picks this book up already has a decided opinion. But my goal is to open the reader's mind a little bit to alternative narratives.
Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separate, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce.
Conversations are like dances. Two people effortlessly move in step with one another, usually anticipating the other person's next move. If one of the dancers moves in an unexpected direction, the other typically adapts and builds on the new approach. As with dancing, it is often difficult to tell who is leading and who is following in that the two people are constantly affecting each other. And once the dance begins, it is almost impossible for one person to singly dictate the couple's movement.
Frequently, I go straight into the studio and see what's around. I might hire a couple of instruments that I've never used - maybe a particular type of electronic organ or an echo unit. Then I just dabble with sounds until something starts to happen that suggests a texture. The texture suggests some kind of mood, and the mood suggests some kind of lyric. That's like working in reverse, often quite the other way around, from sound to song. Although often they stop before they get to the song stage.
For most couples who come to me - especially in the aftermath of the revelation of an affair, when they are in a state of crisis and fear the loss of a predictable future - they start to have conversations for the first time about love, sex, monogamy, and marriage. Most couples don't negotiate or don't even converse about any of these things until the crisis of the affair has actually forced them to. Why does it take infidelity to get us talking about the stuff that should be there from the start?
It's not a matter of whether the reviews of your books are good or bad, it's about being taken seriously, both as a woman writer and as a writer of color. Also, it worries me when people point to a couple of women writers or writers of color who get some attention - and I am sometimes pulled into that category - to prove that others are getting a fair shot. It's like those people who keep saying that racism no longer exists in this country because Barack Obama was a President of the United States.
How I hate the man who talks about the 'brute creation', with an ugly emphasis on Brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?
I was able to go over [Saxophone Competition] and work a little more in Europe. I'm thankful that those of kinds of things. Simultaneously, some nice things did come in. I got a nice festival that came in, in Virginia through that. There was a club that opened in DC in the famous Willard Hotel near the White House. And the club was called The Nest. I played there a few nights. Some musicians in Philly and D.C. kind of brought me down and got me on a couple things. So things opened up a little bit.
I worked in Bhs, but I was only there for a couple of weeks before I got fired because I needed the Saturday off to go to drama club. I was useless - I was so bored. There was nothing to do, so I'd go and do a circuit of the store, throwing jumpers on the floor, then go and pick them up. It wasn't rock 'n' roll rebellion, it was just to look busy. They tried to teach me how to work the till and I'm useless with numbers, so I was making it all up as I went along. I must have lost them tons of money.
You know, I feel like people in this country who feel really strongly about a man and a woman being the only -- the sole sort of gatekeeper of marriage should also support people staying together. I mean, a lot of heterosexual couples don't stay together, and I think that's as upsetting as two people who are really committed and loving and have been monogamous for many years wanting to ... be married and have -- share some of the same rights that this country is so uniquely qualified to give people.
Nothing against Bob Dole but it's a different era now. They have no idea what we are facing. They act like this is just another day at the office. And maybe in a couple years Republicans will get the power back and then we'll go back and be convivial and all get along and so forth. This has to be stopped. Millions of Americans feel this way. They don't have faith in our principles. They don't have the will or energy to go on offense. I'm talking about the Republican leadership, wherever you find it.
Many couples have never had a conversation about sexuality and sexual boundaries. The presence or lack of sex, the quality of it, the satisfaction and dissatisfaction, the unmet needs. An affair upsets the status quo by not only bringing the subject of sexuality to the forefront but every other aspect of their relationship as well. An affair yields conversation that should have happened in the beginning, but that people were afraid to have because, well, what would that mean about their relationship?
I had these couple of hippie guy friends who were super broke and living in the attic of somebody's house and they were like, "We don't have any food, man." And so I decided to go to the grocery store and steal chicken pot pie. And I stuck it inside my clothes. I took a couple frozen chicken pot pies and stuck them inside my pants, and I got caught walking out of the store. And they took me in the back room, and - luckily, I was 14, but I had a fake ID saying I was 18, so they didn't call my parents.
A couple years ago, I felt like I was in a dead end, and I kept asking myself, "How do you get out of a dead end?" People would say the answer is, "You just turn around." But that was not the answer that I was going to accept. I realized, for me, that getting out of a dead end was literally the world turning upside down, and I had to fall out of the dead end. So you have to surrender, so I've really learned how to surrender, practice unconditional love. With my art, I've always put out things I love.
I've been mayor so I believe there is something else for me. I don't know what that is yet, but I definitely have a testimony now brother! As far as talking to young couples, talking to brothers who are strong, they have it going on, they know exactly what they want to do, how they want to do it but they don't have any God in their life. They don't really move by a spirit. They are not really connected to the community. There is a testimony in here somewhere that I think I can share but I don't know.
It's right around this time that her Grandmother Hall dies. And Eleanor Roosevelt is responsible for making all the funeral arrangements. And there are a couple of things that she really understands, as she contemplates her grandmother's life and makes the funeral arrangements. One, she's really talented, an organizational woman. She knows how to do things. She begins to compare her life to her grandmother's life. And it's very clear to her that being a devoted wife and a devoted mother is not enough.
Toward the end of the campaign, we interviewed some voters in Raleigh, N.C., which is a generally Democratic city, and I'm thinking of a young couple. They had two kids. They described themselves as Christian. They oppose gay marriage. And they were saying that even though they didn't like Donald Trump, they were thinking of voting for him. And one of the reasons was they felt that they were - their very views were making them socially unacceptable. They were feeling a little alienated from the world.
Every political race I've started, I've entered as an underdog and a long shot. This is certainly no exception. But I happen to be the best person for this job. Democrats need someone who can win. And there are two strategies for winning: You can energize the base, which is the strategy the party has used in the last couple of elections...unfortunately without success.Or you can energize and expand the base and bring the campaign to states where we've not had much success particularly in the heartland.
[...] He didn't want his wife to read historical romances because it might give her unrealistic expectations. [...] If I had been him, I would have been reading your books every time you laid them down to see how I could improve my skills and please you. Second warning of the night. I bought a couple." You bought a couple of what?" Historical romances. I'm three-quarters through the first one." He flashed her a slow grin. "All I can say is, I like the way your mind works." ~Jake Coulter and Molly Wells
I was always pretty broad. I've had a couple bad experiences. One time, I showed up late for a gig in Brooklyn at an Italian restaurant. I ran on stage, did my show, and then some guy in the audience threatened to kill me because he didn't like my joke. Instead of talking to him, I just ran off stage. And then, because I was late, the owner of the restaurant threatened to kill me. And I was 19 years old and so scared that I almost started crying. But, I've done every gig you can imagine, in every state.
The world teaches birth control. Tragically, many of our sisters subscribe to its pills and practices when they could easily provide earthly tabernacles for more of our Father's children. We know that every spirit assigned to this earth will come, whether through us or someone else. There are couples in the Church who think they are getting along just fine with their limited families but who will someday suffer the pains of remorse when they meet the spirits that might have been part of their posterity.
I don't want people thinking of me sexually. I don't want people to be like, 'She's hot-looking,' you know? I want them to listen to me for what I am saying. And I think the best way to do that is to sniff my armpits, and like, sit and burp every now and then. It just completely throws people off. I had a couple of offers to do some hot scenes in the shower with some guy and to make it real hot and sexy. The next thing you know, I'd be the next J.Lo or something. But that's easy. I want it the hard way.
Sometimes compromise is important. Sometimes it's better to give in to someone else's wishes in order to have fun as a group or as a couple, or for the benefit of the team. Sometimes compromise is dangerous. We need to guard against compromising our standards to gain the approval or love of someone else. Decide when you can, and when you cannot, compromise. If it's not harmful and you are ambivalent about a decision, then compromise. If it could lead to breaking your values, compromise isn't a good idea.
Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left clichés, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an “Arms are for Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.
I love you too much to lie to you, Lisey. I love you with all that passes for my heart. I suspect that kind of all-out love becomes a burden to a woman in time, but it's the only kind I have to give. I think we're going to be quite a wealthy couple in terms of money, but I'll almost certainly be an emotional pauper all my life. I've got the money coming, but as for the rest I've got just enough for you, and I won't ever dirty or dilute it with lies. Not with the words I say, not with the ones I hold back.
If the people of God were to transform the world through fascination, these amazing teachings had to work at the center of these peculiar people. Then we can look into the eyes of a centurion and see not a beast but a child of God, and then walk with that child a couple of miles. Look into the eys of tax collectors as they sue you in court; see their poverty and give them your coat. Look in to the eys of the ones who are hardest for you to like, and see the One you love. For God loves good and bad people.
As I view it, in every family a record should be kept...that record should be the first stone, if you choose, in the family altar. It should be a book known and used in the family circle; and when the child reaches maturity and goes out to make another household, one of the first things that the young couple should take along should be the records of their families, to be extended by them as life goes on...each one of us carries, individually, the responsibility of record keeping, and we should assume it.
Osho used me and Shunyo (my girlfriend at the time) as an example of how he envisioned men and women should relate. He shared a story he had often told in discourse of a man and woman who lived at opposite ends of a lake. They were deeply in love but only met by chance when sometimes out rowing on the water. He said it was beautiful how Shunyo and I met like this couple. When we had the feeling to be together, we would meet and enjoy. And when we were apart, we were also happy and content in our aloneness.
Jim eyed me for a couple of seconds, then got off the bed and went to curl up on the pile of blankets I'd arranged as its bed. "I don't suppose you'd care to lend me a couple hundred euros?" I pointed at the wall. It turned its back to me so I could get into the nightgown Perdita had lent me. "You are not going to bet on me. Or against me. No betting whatsoever. Got that?" Jim huffed and settled down for the night. "You sure do know how to take all the fun out of life. Bet you even made Drake use a condom.
Coming up with lectures is a huge amount of work. I was willing to do one lecture for Gresham because I was honored to have been invited, but to create lectures for a class would probably require that I shut down everything else and concentrate on lectures for a couple of years. Then there would be many, many other skills that I'd have to learn, such as how to sit through a faculty meeting, how to deal with students, etc. It is really not in the cards for me. It's not who I am or what I do. I'm a novelist.
The discoveries of the last couple decades are showing that properties of a self do actually inhere in matter, that matter seems to have properties of self-organization and life, even intelligence, consciousness. I can't say that science has proved these things, but it at least suggests the possibility. As we re-invest the world with sacredness, "spiritual" comes to mean something very different. If only a human being has these qualities, then spiritual work is inner. It's all about your own consciousness.
One time we stayed at a B&B, and there were a couple of hippies who had this nice little area and they let us sleep in their beds that they had in the back.Then the woman suggested we go out and lie on some cushions and look up at the stars and look for UFOs and she said, "You know, I do this all the time," and I was like, "Okay..." So there we are, lying there next to this amazing loch, and we're looking up in the stars and I don't really know what I was expecting, but to see some sort of metallic object.
As much as we - in a revisionist way - tell ourselves that we've always been a righteous country with a couple of swerves off the path, we need to look back and see that we've always also been a racist country and have had a tendency towards banal aggressiveness. The thing that's alarming is not so much that a few people in America at the top are initiating these crazy policies, but that the middle is willing to go there too. There's a strange movement of the middle to this position of banal aggressiveness.
Feminism means to me aquality, actually. Women having equal rights to every thing the male population have in all aspects. Whether that's socially, or within the household or in the workplace. I don't find it a difficult word but it does have a lot of baggage. There's still a lot of work to be done in various parts of the world and society. If you look at where a woman's place was a couple of generations ago, there's been a huge development and progression. And it's an important queston to keep bringing up.
