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April 1, 2001:
"I realized that the purpose of writing is to
inflate weak ideas, obscure poor
reasoning, and inhibit clarity" (Calvin to Hobbes)
-Bill Watterson,
Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat (1994)
-
April 15, 2001:
"'Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they
pretend. Thinking's a dizzy
business, a matter of catching as many of those
foggy glimpses as you can and
fitting them together the best you can.'"
-Dashiell Hammett,
The Dain Curse (1929)
-
May 1, 2001:
"...and only because he had no place he could stay
in without getting tired of
it and because there was nowhere to go but
everywhere..."
-Jack Kerouac,
On the Road (1957)
-
May 17, 2001:
"It was always
manana
. For the next week that was all I heard--
manana
, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven."
-Jack Kerouac,
On the Road (1957)
-
June 1, 2001:
"I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of
man I had hoped I might be."
-Nicholson Baker,
The Mezzanine (1988)
-
June 16, 2001:
"'You know,' Elaine said, 'if it doesn't work you
can always make something up.
It's what writers do. When they're not lifting ideas
from other movies.'"
-Elmore Leonard,
Be Cool (1999)
-
July 2, 2001:
"It is impossible to experience one's own death
objectively and still carry a
tune."
-Woody Allen,
Getting Even (1966)
-
July 20, 2001:
"One can sleep almost anywhere, but one must have a
place to work. Even if it's
not a masterpiece you're doing. Even a bad novel
requires a chair to sit on and
a bit of privacy."
-Henry Miller,
Tropic of Cancer (1934)
-
(no relation)
August 3, 2001:
"Well, of course eggs should never be included in
pickup lines, and that was
the last I ever saw of her."
-Peter Farrelly,
The Comedy Writer (1998)
-
August 19, 2001:
"I'm burned out on some empty reasons / Another
waste of time / Something that
I wished I'd said / But I don't think it rhymed"
-John Rzeznik (Goo Goo Dolls),
"Ain't That Unusual"
From the album A Boy Named Goo
(1995)
-
September 3, 2001:
"You feel like a poor boy / A long way from home /
Well, you're just a poor boy
/ A long way from home"
-Tom Petty,
"Wake Up Time"
From the album Wildflowers
(1994)
-
September 16, 2001:
"Imagine there's no countries / It isn't hard to do
/ Nothing to kill or die
for / And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace..."
-John Lennon,
"Imagine"
From the album Imagine
(1971)
-
October 1, 2001:
"If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur 'Thou
still unravished bride of
quietness,' then I am instantly aware that I am in
the presence of the literary
. . . Your language draws attention to itself,
flaunts its material being, as
statements like 'Don't you know the drivers are on
strike?' do not."
-Terry Eagleton,
Literary Theory: An Introduction (1996)
-
October 15, 2001:
"'Not thinking about sex these days is like not
thinking about what goes into
hot dogs.'"
-Douglas Coupland,
Shampoo Planet (1992)
-
November 1, 2001:
"Suddenly I realize I'm goin' sixty miles an hour
and I don't remember the last
five minutes." (Willy Loman to his Wife)
-Arthur Miller,
Death of a Salesman (1949)
-
November 17, 2001:
"'I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.'"
-William Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night's Dream (circa 1595)
-
December 3, 2001:
"With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps"
-George Harrison (The Beatles),
"While My Guitar Gently Weeps"
From the white album
(1968)
-
December 16, 2001:
"Where do you think you're going? Nobody's leaving.
Nobody's walking out on
this fun, old-fashioned family Christmas. No, no!
We're all in this together.
This is a full-blown, four-alarm holiday emergency
here! We're gonna press on,
and we're gonna have the hap, hap, happiest
Christmas since Bing Crosby
tap-danced with Danny fucking Kaye! And when Santa
squeezes his fat white
ass
down that chimney tonight, he's gonna find the
jolliest bunch of assholes this
side of the nuthouse!"
-Clark Griszwold (as written by John Hughes and
performed by Chevy Chase),
"Christmas Vacation" (1989)
-
January 3, 2002:
"you mean to say that you can LOVE a piece of
buttered toast?
only some, sir. on certain mornings. in certain rays
of sunlight. love arrives
and departs without notice.
is it possible to love a human being?
of course, especially if you don't know them too
well."
-Charles Bukowski,
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)
-
January 15, 2002:
"-Do you think I should grow a beard while I'm
unemployed?
-That's a great idea. A beard sends a message about
who you are.
-Um... Okay.
-I assume you already have a shopping cart and
filthy rags."
-Scott Adams,
Dilbert (2002)
-
February 1, 2002:
"Well, I fell in love. She just stood there."
-Woody Allen,
Bananas (1971)
-
February 17, 2002:
"Perhaps the best and only thing you need to say
about
Talk
is that it was a magazine, and it existed, and in
the course of doing so, it
employed wirters, always a worthy enterprise as
there are always more writers
than employment."
-Lewis Grossberger (Media Person),
MediaWeek (Jan. 28, 2002)
-
March 1, 2002:
"Our tasty new snack cracker will, if only for a few
lovely moments,
significantly lessen the aching, gnawing angst that
haunts your very soul."
March 18, 2002:
"Broccoli's a side dish, folks. Always has been.
Always will be."
-Denis Leary,
No Cure for Cancer (1993)
-
April 1, 2002:
"Show me a good loser in professional sports and
I'll show you an idiot."
-Leo Durocher-
April 15, 2002:
"Oh painted night set free with light
Glows outside the Rainbow Saloon
Matching braces with a Spanish lady
'neath a graduation moon
No more colleges, no more coronations
Some punk's idea of a teenage nation
Has forced Santa Ana to change his station
From soldier to cartoon."
-Bruce Springsteen,
"Santa Ana"
From the box set Tracks
(1998)
-
May 1, 2002:
"'If there's no meaning in it,' said the King, 'that
saves a world of trouble,
you know, as we needn't try to find any.'"
-Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland (1865)
-
May 15, 2002:
"'How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full
credit for being alive.'"
-Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse - Five (1966)
-
June 1, 2002:
"After supper she got out her book and learned me
about Moses and the
Bulrushers; and I was in a sweat to find out all
about him; but by-and-by she
let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable
long time; so then I didn't
care no more about him; because I don't take no
stock in dead people."
-Mark Twain,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
-
June 19, 2002:
"This is my boom stick!"
-Sam Raimi / Ivan Raimi,
Army of Darkness (1993)
-
July 1, 2002:
"You mean that's it?"
-Bon Jovi,
Social Disease
From the Album "Slippery When Wet" (1986)
-
July 19, 2002:
"'It's very difficult to fail at pornography.'"
-Michael Chabon,
The Amazine Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
-
August 1, 2002:
"For $6.5 million, I felt he
could wait another day."
-Mike Port,
General Manager - Boston Red Sox
In regards to Jose Offerman's displeasure at being
released from the team after returning from a road
trip near his home, rather than during the road trip.
Thursday, August 1, 2002
-
August 15, 2002:
"'...the net fact is that you have elected familial
responsibilities and
rewards-indeed, straight-laced middleclassness in
general-over the higher
expenses of spirit and wastes of shame attendant
upon a less regular, more
glamorous style of life. So to elect is surely
admirable for the layman, even
essential if the social fabric, without which there
can be no culture, is to be
preserved. For the artist, however, and in
particular the writer, whose
traditional material has been the passions of men
and women, the choice is
fatal. You having made it I bid you goodnight
probably forever.'"
-John Barth,
"Life-Story" from
Life in the Funhouse (1963)
-
September 3, 2002:
"All told, of the roughly 300 Super Bowl predictions
tracked [in the last three
years], two were right -- a one-in-150 performance.
If you simply placed
into a hat the names of the 31 NFL teams that
existed in those years and drew a
name at random, your odds of predicting the Super
Bowl winner would be 1-in-31.
This means that in the past three years,
professional sportscasters and
commentators, possessed with their incredible
insider knowledge, have proven
themselves
five times less likely than random chance
to predict the Super Bowl winner."
September 15, 2002:
"I drank what?"
-Aristotle,
According to Val Kilmer's Character, Chris Knight, in
the film Real Genius,
written by Neal Israel, Pat Proft & Peter Torokvei -
(1985)
-
October 1, 2002
:
"do you drive a garbage truck? don't feel bad. there
are better jobs, done
worse."
-Charles Bukowski,
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)
-
October 16, 2002
:
"'Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad
enough as it is without
wanting to invent any more of it.'"
-Douglas Adams,
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)
-
November 2, 2002
:
"So Long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peacably
along the King's highway, and
neither compels you or me to get up behind him --
pray, Sir, what have either
you or I to do with it?"
-Laurence Sterne,
Tristram Shandy (circa 1760)
-
December 1, 2002
:
"...And I wonder where I'll be in a year / Probably
be sittin' right here / And
if you know the answer / Don't tell me anyone /
'Cause I don't wanna know..."
-Roger Clyne (The Refreshments),
Don't Wanna Know
From the album Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy, (1996)
-
January 1, 2003
:
"[I]t is a characteristic of wisdom not to do
desperate things."
-Henry David Thoreau,
Walden (1854)
-
January 15, 2003
:
"On June 24, 1899, Cleveland pitcher Charlie Knepper
hit a double. The
Cleveland Plain Dealer
reported the next day that 'a hay wagon drawn by
lame horses could have reached third, but Knepper is no hay wagon and had no
lame horses to assist him.'"
-
From The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (2001)
-
February 1, 2003
:
"I want you to watch something now ... watch this!"
- Paul Maguire,
ESPN Sunday Night Football (pick a year)
-
February 15, 2003
:
Bill Munny:
Hell of a thing, killin' a man. Take away all he's got
and all he's ever gonna have.
The Schofield Kid:
Yeah, well, I guess he had it comin'.
Bill Munny:
We all got it comin', kid.
- David Webb Peoples,
The Unforgiven (1992)
-
March 1, 2003
:
"We are no longer in prehistoric times when whoever
had the biggest club would try to knock the other guy out so he could steal his
mammoth skin."
- Michele Alliot-Marie, French Defence Minister
(January, 2003) -
March 15, 2003
:
"'What is a country? A country is a piece of land
surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying
for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany,
Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting
in the war. Surely so many countries can't
all
be worth dying for.'"
(The old man to Nately)
- Joseph Heller,
Catch 22 (1955)
-
April 15, 2003
:
"I quit my job at WingWorld yesterday. I decided I
will not burn wings every day merely to give myself enough sustenance to be
able to continue working at WingWorld to make enough sustenance to continue
working at WingWorld to . . . The loop of evil. Who invents these McJobs,
anyway? They're work, but they're not a living. The undead working at unlabor."
- Douglas Coupland,
Shampoo Planet (1992)
-
May 1, 2003
:
"[H]e looked like he had without warning confronted
Doom itself, except that Doom had said to him:
'Calm down. It will be thirty or forty minutes yet before
I will want you. Be ready then but in the meantime stop worrying and tend to
your business.'
"
- William Faulkner,
The Reivers (1962)
-
May 17, 2003
:
"I fell down, but I'm not sure if I hurt myself yet."
(Dolly to Mommy)
- Bill Keane,
Family Circus: When's Later, Daddy? (1971)
-
June 1, 2003
:
"'[A]lls I know is that when Bill and I found out we
were going to get a break of $217 it made us feel all confident and we started
making a list of ways to spend the money. It was real hard to pick just one,
what with falling behind on the mortgage and needing to help the kids' schools
hold bake sales to keep math and spelling on the curriculum. But then we seen a
lot of our neighbors out stimulating the economy and that looked real fun. So
we went to the All-Mart and bought us a nice DVD player made in Malaysia. Next
thing you know, all these jobs started showing up.'"
- Joyce McGreevy,
America rejoices as Bush's $217 tax cut produces mass
wealth in Malaysia,
Salon.com
(5/28/03)
-
June 15, 2003
:
"It?s not hard to live through a day, if you can
live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends
there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of
days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand."
- Andre Dubus,
"A Father's Story" from The Times are Never So Bad (1983)
-
July 6, 2003
:
"That's the thing about girls. Every time they do
something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort
of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know
where
the hell you are."
- J.D. Salinger,
The Catcher in the Rye (1945)
-
July 15, 2003
:
"Something that I need to add / Her body is just a
fad / Her bleached blond hair / And her silky underwear / She's got a boyfriend
I'm sure / But how come she can't have one more?"
- Ben Kweller,
Dear Aunt Arctica
From the album "Restraining Bolt" (1997)
-
August 8, 2003
:
"Angelina save a place for me
I've been livin' someone else's life and now I've
got to be free
Turn your transistor on and let the music play
I try to keep the family satisfied
But there's gotta be more to life than just try,
try, try
Oh my other world is just a half a mile away"
- Billy Joel,
Half a Mile Away
From the album "52nd Street" (1980)
-
August 15, 2003
:
"Jesus would probably have the cereal."
- H.G. Miller,
Morning Calm Disrupted by Door-to-Door Religion (2/8/99)
-
September 1, 2003
:
"...the story of a star which has out-lived its
light; the soaring meteor which failed to explode in mid-air at the height of
its climb, but plummeted down to the same earth with the millions who, moments
before, had stared wide-eyed at its beauty."
- Hunter S. Thompson,
"Fame is a One-Way Ticket"
Command Courier,
(12/17/56)
-
September 21, 2003
:
"A very strong napkin size towelette saturated with
a pleasantly scented cleansing lotion. Cleans and refreshes hands and face
without soap or water, self dries in seconds. Leaves skin soft and smooth."
- Paul Jong,
The back of a Fresh Nap Moist Towelette packet, (8/18/03)
-
October 1, 2003
:
"JUMBO-TRON MENTALITY: When regular Tron just isn?t
enough.
The camera pans, suddenly you look up... IT?S YOU!!!
You?re in front of thousands! What will you do? How will you define yourself?
Will you flash the crowd, will you hit the person next to you and point at the
screen, or will you spill your beer and make the universal sign for ?Hey I?m On
F@#%ing TV!? What should I do? I?ve had way too many seven-dollar beers! I
know, I?ll hold my baby at a perilous height and shake her in the air, yes
shake my infant in front of thirty-five thousand people! Head whipping back and
forth like a crying bobble-head doll!
Lets review things you can shake: Ice cream,
martinis, moneymaker, NOT YOUR F@#%ING BABY!"
October 18, 2003
:
"
Held ?
Meetings and other events cannot be held. A person
would need large hands to hold a meeting."
- Janet Hallford, Collegian Manual 1995-1996 -
November 1, 2003
:
"There's something about a broken heart that makes
people become writers."
- Peter Farrelly,
The Comedy Writer (1998)
-
December 1, 2003
:
"[A]s we know, there are known knowns; there are
things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say
we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown
unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
- Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Secretary of the United
States of America
February, 2002
-
December 21, 2003
:
"What about mankind's presumed special relationship
with God? This is a conundrum for Christians. Jesus was
humanity's
savior and redeemer. He did not die for the dolphins
or the gorillas, and certainly not for the proverbial little green men."
- Paul Davies,
"E.T. and God"
The Atlantic Monthly
(Sept. '03)
-
January 4, 2004
:
"Hey, who took the cork of my lunch?"
- W.C. Fields,
Date Unknown
-
January 19, 2004
:
"One day we must come to see that peace is not
merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at
that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means."
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
-
February 1, 2004
:
"At the rate of three rejections a week, I should
catch up with Fitzgerald in thirty-six weeks. And that will still give me about
six years before I catch up with Hemingway."
- Hunter S. Thompson,
Letter to Ann Frick, published in The Proud Highway (6/26/59)
-
February 21, 2004
:
"It is a historical fact, sharing has never been
humanity's defining attribute."
- Michael Dougherty / Dan Harris / David Hayter,
X2: X Men United (2003)
-
March 3, 2004
:
"
Shinola
TM
,
a brand of shoe polish; used partly for a suggestion
of brown color, mainly for alliteration."
- Robert L. Chapman, Ph.D.,
American Slang - Definition of "not know shit from Shinola"
-
March 15, 2004
:
"'How often can a person regenerate fresh and witty
banter each and
every
time they bump into a person? . . . Human beings
weren't designed to bump into each other in hallways.'"
- Douglas Coupland,
Microserfs (1995)
-
April 4, 2004
:
"I made the remark that all writing was about loss.
And just as quick as you can imagine he said, 'All
your
writing is about loss.' And I thought, okay, he's
got my number. He taught me something about myself in a f--king hurry."
- Robert Towne referencing a conversation with
Norman Mailer,
Above the Line: Conversations About the Movies - Interviews by Lawrence Grobel
(2000)
-
April 18, 2004
:
"The notion of playing hero never entered his
unconvoluted brain, which at the moment was singularly focused on procreation.
Thirteen hundred pounds of saucy sea cow nooky had paddled into Booger's life,
and he was serene beyond distraction."
- Carl Hiaasen et al,
Naked Came the Manatee (1996)
-
May 22, 2004
:
"You've lasted longer than I think anybody else
could in that situation."
- An unnamed HR Director, while helping me fill out
paperwork for my severance package-
June 1, 2004
:
"Being unemployed sucks. The worst part is at night
when the voices come. You're a failure. You're thirty. You just ate Ramen
Noodles for dinner."
- Erik Moe,
Tales of a Young Urban Failure (1996)
June 15, 2004
:
"there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than
too late."
- Charles Bukowski,
'oh, yes' poem from
War All the Time (1984)
July 1, 2004
:
"...it was night and the night is always less cruel
than the day."
- Henry Miller,
Tropic of Capricorn (1938)
-
July 15, 2004
:
"Is there a line that I could write / That's sad
enough to make you cry?"
- Doug Hopkins (Gin Blossoms),
Found Out About You, from the album New Miserable Experience (1993)
-
August 1, 2004
:
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and
realize half of them are stupider than that."
September 1, 2004
:
"The Bible's claim to truth is not only far more
urgent than Homer's, it is tyrannical--it excludes all other claims."
- Erich Auerbach,
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946)
-
September 21, 2004
:
"Having intelligence and using it well are two very
different things."
- Kenneth C. Davis,
Don't Know Much About History (2003)
-
October 3, 2004
:
"This last account was taken by medieval clergy to
signify that the world was coming to an end, and there was great disappointment
when Monday came and everyone had to go back to work."
- Woody Allen,
"The UFO Menace" - Side Effects (1975)
-
October 18, 2004
:
"Look at the two candidates, and you choose the
smart one."
- James Taylor,
Vote For Change Tour - Washington D.C. (10/12/04)
-
November 1, 2004
:
"Remember when voting, use ink on your spots.
Then look at your ballot - and check it for
DOTS!
"
-
Official Sample Ballot and Voter Instructions (October, 2004)
-
November 15, 2004
:
"We forgive our great poets almost anything?suicide
(Sylvia Plath), homicide (Ben Johnson), incest (William Wordsworth), hubris
(Oscar Wilde), drunkenness (Edgar Allen Poe), insanity (Friedrich Nietzsche),
sexual excess of every description (Byron, Shelly, Houellebecqu?who not?). What
we are loathe to forgive is quiet respectability."
-
Cristina Nehring,
"Shakespeare in Love, or in Context" Atlantic Monthly (December, 2004)
-
January 1, 2005
:
"'Oh, it hurts.'
--'Tell me what's wrong.'
'Why does it hurt?'
--'Tell me what's wrong.'"
-
Fifth Wheel,
From the song "Retrospect" on the album "Hurts To Feel Good" (1999)
-
January 17, 2005
:
"The fact that Americans don't agree not only makes
us strong, it makes us money."
-
P.J. O'Rourke,
"Continental Divides" The Atlantic Monthly (January/February 2005)
-
May 15, 2005
:
"Fairly good: he blew off his right hand in 1864,
but remained keen on the sport."
-
Simon Winchester,
From a footnote in "The Meaning of Everything" (2003), in which he describes
Hucks Gibbs as a "keen huntsman and a good shot."
-
June 5, 2005
:
"Don't set your sights on the gods. Gods are to
humans what humans are to crawling bugs."
-
Homer,
Iliad, translated by Stanley Lombardo (1997)
-
June 20, 2005
:
"What's up?"
"I don't know," said Marvin, "I've never been there."
-
Douglas Adams,
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
-
July 5, 2005
:
"I'm one of those who doesn't think there is much
difference
between an atomic scientist and a man who cleans the
crappers
except for the luck of the draw--
parents with enough money to point you toward a more
generous death."
-
Charles Bukowski,
"Horsemeat" from War all the Time: Poems 1981-1984 (1984)
-
July 18, 2005
:
"YVONNE: Where were you last night?
RICK: That's so long ago. I don't remember.
YVONNE: Will I see you tonight?
RICK: I never plan that far ahead."
-
Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch,
Casablanca (1942)
-
August 8, 2005
:
"The parakeet made me realize how hard it is to
learn anything in life, and even then, there's no guarantee you might need it."
-
Douglas Coupland,
Life After God (1994)
-
September 18th, 2005
:
"The problems of national security, like those of
the national economy, have become so staggeringly complex, that they can no
longer be settled by common sense or past experience."
-
Daniel Bell,
Radical Right: "The Dispossessed" (1964)
-
October 5th, 2005
:
"You're so little and cute."
-
Melysa to Pepper, who is indeed little and cute
(2005)
-
December 19, 2005
:
"'The very rich are different from you and me.' .
. . Yes, they have more money."
- Ernest Hemingway,
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936)
-
February 18, 2006
:
"The biggest thing separating people from their artistic ambitions is not a
lack of talent. It's the lack of a
deadline
."
- Chris Baty,
No Plot? No Problem! (2004)
-
March 1, 2006
:
"Human beings weren't
designed
to bump into each other in hallways."
- Douglas Coupland,
Microserfs (1995)
-
March 22, 2006
:
"
Never
fall in love with an idea. They're whores: if the one you're with isn't doing
the job, there's always, always,
always
another."
- Chip Kidd,
The Cheese Monkeys (2001)
-
April 2, 2006
:
"The ballet opens at a carnival. There are refreshments and rides. Many people
in gaily colored costumes dance and laugh, to the accompaniment of flutes and
woodwinds, whil the trombones play in a minor key to suggest that soon the
refreshments will run out and everybody will be dead."
- Woody Allen,
"A Guide to Some of the Lesser Ballets" - Without Feathers (1972)
-
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