When I was a kid, phone calls were a premium commodity; only the very coolest kids had a phone line of their own, and long-distance phone calls were made after eleven, when the rates went down, unless you were flamboyant with your spending. Then phon...
I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slow...
[answering the phone in Firefly's office] Chicolini: Hello? No, not yet. All right, I tell him. Good-a-bye. [He hangs up] Chicolini: That was for you again. Rufus T. Firefly: I wonder whatever became of me? I should have been back here a long time ag...
Narrator: Sexual tension is an elusive thing, but Kathy had pretty good radar for it. It was like someone had turned a knob to the right, and the radio station clicked in so loud and clear it almost knocked her over. Once she became aware of the conn...
Harvey Milk: [First lines] This is Harvey Milk speaking on Friday November 18th. This is to be played only in the event of my death by assassination. During one of the early campaigns, I started opening my speeches with the same line and it sort of b...
Ahmad: When did you meet each other? Marie Brisson: In drugstore. He came to get his wife's medicines. [Ahmad sneers ] Marie Brisson: What? Ahmad: In our culture is laughing. Marie Brisson: But in our culture is mocking! [They discuss with each other...
I became passionate about nature filmmaking when I graduated from UCLA, and one of the things I always wanted to do was shoot really high quality film, so I got into time-lapse photography - so that means when you shoot a flower, you're shooting, lik...
When I was in college at Carnegie Mellon, I wanted to be a chemist. So I became one. I worked in a laboratory and went to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. Then I taught science at a private girls' school. I had three children and wait...
I loved science, and when I discovered Buddhist meditative practices and martial arts, I was able to bridge those ways of knowing the world into my own unique way. From that grew the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, which became my ...
I vowed to myself that when I grew up and became a theoretical physicist, in addition to doing research, I would write books that I would have liked to have read as a child. So whenever I write, I imagine myself, as a youth, reading my books, being t...
When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are goi...
Like many traditional feminists, I became one of the boys, only better. For a while it gave me a buzz to win at their game, but ultimately, that kind of power just goes nowhere. Traditional feminism excludes men and so perpetuates conflict. I am not ...
When I was younger, humans went to the moon when I was about 4 years old, and I imagined that as I got older and became an adult that traveling in space was going to be fairly common and something that we all did. So I grew up believing that I'll be ...
In the summer of 1966, I went to Mississippi to be in the heart of the civil-rights movement, helping people who had been thrown off the farms or taken off the welfare roles for registering to vote. While working there, I met the civil-rights lawyer ...
I wasn't sure of the exact mindset you should have when you go into a Test match. So I probably became too defensive when I played my first Test match. Short balls in one-day cricket, I have never thought of just defending.
I had acne late, in college. My skin used to be really flawless. Went to college, became a vegetarian, ate a lot of cheese - big mistake. Here I am trying to be healthy and I'm eating grilled cheese sandwiches and french fries every day, having mad e...
Men deprived of female company quickly became fearsome creatures, and Trevor believed you could argue that civilization was in fact the invention of women, or at least the invention of the men who wanted to please them. If it were not for the ladies,...
Christ can forgive you," he whispered, though he didn't believe it. There wasn't a hint of compassion in those ice-blue eyes. "That's grand," she said. Her features became again those of the pleasant brown-haired nurse. She smiled, pulled the pillow ...
He could see her planting violets on his grave, a solitary figure in a grey cloak. What a ghastly tragedy. A lump came to his throat. He became quite emotional thinking of his own death. He would have to write a poem about this. --from a Difference i...
The situation was extraordinary. How someone like Evangeline Jenner could have wrought such a change in St. Vincent, the most worldly of men, was difficult to understand. However, Westcliff had learned that the mysteries of attraction could not alway...
Her throat became very tight and she thought with despair that by now she should be used to this…being unwanted, being alone why in God’s name did it still hurt? Oh, how she wished she could be like Sebastian, with a wall of protective ice around...
