favorite quotes
"We are living in the future.
I'll tell you how I know.
I read it in a magazine, fifteen years ago." - - John Prine
"I want Room Service!
I want the Club Sandwich. I want the cold Mexican beer. ...
I want my shirts laundered, like they do at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo."
From the movie "Johnny Mnemonic", 1995
based on the book by William Gibson,
screenplay by William Gibson.
Click to hear audio
Exerpt from the 1966 movie "After the Fox", also called "Caccia alla volpe" starring Peter Sellers. In this scene, Peter Sellers plays an Italian crook pretending to be an American tourist.
Iris Origo, Images and Shadows: Autobiography. The University Press, Cambridge, 1970
"Again and again I have seen the miracle occur: the arrival at the end of a long day's motoring at a squalid inn in North Africa or Greece, the unloading of the innumerable suitcases, cloaks and hold-alls with which we travelled, and my mother wandering off with her companions to whichever ruin we had come to see.
"No, don't bother about the luggage. Leuty will see to things."
An hour later, when we returned, the metamorphosis had taken place: in my mother's room the bed was made up with her own sheets and cashmere shawls; the hot-water bottles were already in place and the tea-tray prepared; the engraved bottles and brushes were on the dressing-table; the medicine chest stood open; the guide-books and maps (and perhaps, a pocket copy of The Golden Treasury or La Divina Comedia) were on the bed-table, and the mosquito-net over the bed; an aroma of roast chicken rose from the kitchen and Condy's Fluid from the bathroom. Another corner of a foreign field was now forever England."
Gertrude Jekyll (Gardening writer in England), we got this quote from Richard, the owner of the farm where we are staying.
"It is important that even in the very smallest garden, not less than an acre must be reserved for trees."
The Sunday Times (London), July 6, 1997, Travel, The Big Squeeze an article about airline seats.
"However, airlines admit that it might take years before the improvements (better designed seats) filter down to economy class. Premium passengers need more space, they say, rather disingenuously, because successful people tend to be taller."
The Sunday Times (London), July 6, 1997, Magazine.
"...a lad among lads given to the pursuit of all things laddish."
The New Yorker, May 12, 1997, Life and Letters: The Lives of Robert Hughes
"'I've inherited a distaste for spilling my guts,' he says. 'But I am learning about just how far back things go - about the long gunpowder trails that have been laid since childhood and are then ignited with a great whoosh by a bewildering, random event.'"
X-Files, the TV series, by Fox Muldar
"There is certainly something unexplainable, Scully, not unidentifiable."
Anthony Trollope, "Can You Forgive Her", chapter 47
"You shall be my pet, and my poppet, and my dearest little duck all the days of your life."
Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle in the Vice Presidential debate Oct 6, 1988
"Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."
The Fly, the original version of the movie, spoken by Andre, the main character.
"It would be funny if life weren't so sacred", comment regarding the cat turning into "a stream of cat atoms" after disintegrating perfectly but then not reappearing.
Martin Amis, The Information, the last page.
"Who was he? Who had he been throughout? Who would he always be? He was Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603-59): the Dutch explorer who discovered Tasmania without noticing Australia ..."
Bananas, the movie directed by Woody Allen. Spoken by Fielding Marshall:
"I object Your Honor. This trial is a travesty. It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham."
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, (1849-1850)
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."
John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923)
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead."
The Sopranos, Season Two, spoken by character Tony Soprano
"When you're married you'll appreciate the importance of fresh produce."
Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Blithdale Romance", a novel about a group of people in the late 1800s setting up a commune.
"This lack of faith in our cordial sympathy, on the traveler's part, was one among the innumerable tokens how difficult a task we had in hand, for the reformation of the world."
ibid, "What, in the name of common sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough. My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the bed-chamber adjoining; my centre-table, strewn with books and periodicals; my writing desk, with a half-finished poem, in a stanza of my own contrivance; my morning lounge at the reading-room or picture-gallery; my noontide walk along the cheery pavement, with the suggestive succession of human faces, and the brisk throb of human life, in which I shared; my dinner at the Albion, where I had a hundred dishes at command, and could banquet as delicately as the wizard Michael Scott when the devil fed him from the King of France's kitchen; my evening at the billiard-club, the concert, the theatre, or at somebody's party, if I pleased; - what could be better than all this? Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a barn-yard; to be the chamber-maid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation I had thrust myself? Above all, was it better to have a fever, and die blaspheming, as I was like to do?"
ibid, "Possibly there was a sensual influence in the broad light of noon that lay beneath me. It may have been the cause, in part, that I suddenly found myself possessed by a mood of disbelief in moral beauty or heroism, and a conviction of the folly of attempting to benefit the world. Our especial scheme of reform, which, from my observatory, I could take in with the bodily eye, looked so ridiculous that it was impossible not to laugh aloud.
ibid, "But the joke is a little too heavy," thought I. "If I were wise, I should get out of the scrape with all diligence, and then laugh at my companions for remaining in it.""