Random Quotes 2

He never retreats, though sometimes he advances backwards. -Walt Kelly, on Harlan Ellison

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want - an adorable pancreas? -Jean Kerr

I feel about dogs the way I feel about people. I don't like them in general, but there are a few exceptions. -KJL

What good is music? None . . . and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and leaders, music says, 'You are irrelevant;' and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, 'Listen.' For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky. -Ursula LeGuin

We do not always know what is important and what is not. -Madeline L'Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? -C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Whatever you are, be a good one. -Abraham Lincoln

I don't necessarily think God put us here to be sober all the time. -Courtney Love

Just because you're not happy, doesn't mean the salt and pepper can't be happy. They're a happy couple! -Loveday

Today the real test of power is not capacity to make war but the capacity to prevent it. -Anne O'Hare McCormick

I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement, and everybody is working very hard to make me happy. -Terence McKenna

The theater attracts a lot of mad people, you know. It's a strange existence that you serve. -Conor McPherson

Cultivate humility. To be exalted is to be in danger. -John McQuiston, II, Always We Begin Again

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was flat. And fifteen minutes ago you knew that people were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tommorow. -Agent K, Men in Black

People who do not have colds cannot understand why sufferers from that affliction make such a fuss about it. People who do have colds wonder how they could have forgotten how terrible they felt the last time. Their agony is intensified by the fact that nobody takes them seriously. 'It's only a cold; take some aspirin and go to bed.' People who have colds hate everyone else in the world, especially people who do not have colds. -Barbara Michaels

Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet. -Roger Miller

The dancers were invisible behind the masks, and the gods were visible in them. The gods were real, and they had come from another world. They were the shapes of immortality. -N. Scott Momaday

The world does not require so much to be informed as reminded. -Hannah More

I was elated. It was the same kind of thrill I got in Paris when a wild-haired stranger singled me out on a crowded street and began shouting, 'Zionist Pig!' -Jack Neely

Simplicity can be deceptive. -P.Niven

The one sin the gods never forgive us is that of being born women. -Queen Orual of Glome

'Do you believe in God?' [Maurice] Sendak believes in several - Keats, Melville, and Mozart among them. Art is the only immortality he requires. -Troy Patterson, "Where the Wild King Is," Entertainment Weekly, #741, 12 Dec 2003, p. 49.

You didn't get ideas. You smelled them out, tracked them down, wrestled them into submission; you pursued them with forks and hope, and if you were lucky enough to catch one you impaled it, with the forks, before the sneaky little devil could get away. -Elizabeth Peters, Naked Once More

This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the porch, it would be pushing up the daises. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot. -Monty Python's Flying Circus, episode B (1969)

People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history. -Dan Quayle

I base most of my fashion sense on what doesn't itch. -Gilda Radner

You cannot banish joy, for that is the road to madness. -from the movie Renaissance

Plato claim[ed] that the unexamined life is not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure. -Tom Robbins in Still Life with Woodpecker

Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice. -Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve. -Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death. -Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

Space is merely a device to prevent everything from being in the same spot. -Tom Robbins in Still Life with Woodpecker

Plus je vois les hommes, plus j'admire les chiens. -Jeanne-Marie Roland (The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs.)

Many of my favorite shamans are rockstars. They probably don't even know they're shamans but they know how to get to ecstasy and back, and how to take others with them. They may not have a license, but they know how to drive. -Gabielle Roth, from Maps to Ecstasy

Most people would rather die than think: many do. -Bertrand Russell

The great cat's voice is thunder and falling rocks, lightning and the wet snap of living bone, and the man is such a small, small thing. And then . . . He's nothing at all. -The Sandman presents Bast, issue 2, pg. 16.

I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both. -Patricia Schroeder

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper. -Rod Serling

Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom. -Situationist graffiti, Paris, 1968

To bring an end to ethnic conflict, one need only place a Wal-Mart between the combatants. The reason is that Wal-Mart destroys whatever culture it is near. Thus centuries of cultural enmity can be wiped out as though it were just another main street dress shop falling victim to Sam Walton's megalomania. -Sam Smith

Sometimes it's a good day to die. Sometimes it's a good day to have breakfast. -Thomas Builds-the-Fire, from Smoke Signals

It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business. -Gertrude Stein

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others. One should always be a little improbable. Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance. - Tom Stoppard, in The Invention of Love

Might we not say to the confused voices which sometimes arise from the depths of our being: 'Ladies, be so kind as to speak only four at a time'? -Anne-Sophie Swetchine

I live with me - it's hell. I wish I could move out. -Diana Trent, Waiting for God

Work long and tranquilly, like a child stringing beads in kindergarten. That's my motto for work. -Brenda Ueland

Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God. -Kurt Vonegut

I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could. -Orsen Welles

I generally avoid temptation, unless I can't resist it. -Mae West

There are three kinds of people that no one understands: geniuses, madmen, and guys that mumble. -Whistler

Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best. -Oscar Wilde, sign over piano

The poetic capacity for Myth is quite different from the human capacity for religion. -Charles Williams

You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends. -Robert A. Wilson

Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed [on the turf], the gravel is the place for me. -Virginia Woolf

It is strange what a difference a tail makes. -Virginia Woolf

Trust your crazy ideas. -Dan Zadra

All biologists are elements in a philosophical paradox: Life studying itself. -Anon.

Listen to the silences. -Unknown

Quod perditum est, in venietur. (That which is lost will be found.) -Unknown

Lick: Eat shrimp, rice, salad, pudding, watermelon with your fingers, and then lick them clean. Thoroughly enjoy yourself, especially if it leaves others aghast. Lick the salt off your lover's sweaty body. Better yet, lick it off your own. At least once in you life, let a dog lick your face. (Actually, once may be enough.) Lick ice cream as provocatively as you want to no matter who's watching. Get a big lollipop with swirls of different colors and lick it for old times sake. (Stop the lick before you get sick.) . . . If you can't join 'em, lick 'em! Lick your lips if they're dry or for no reason whatsoever. Lick the bowl clean of every last bit of chocolate icing. Lick anything that comes to mind. Yes, anything. -Unknown