Dad and I leave town in the early dark. It's the second Sunday of the holidays, and we pack up the old blue car with enough clothes for summer and hit the road. It's so early he's wiping hills of sand piled in the corners of his eyes. I wipe a few te...
Jeff Hudson started me on a path that was key, and as life goes on it's become a mantra to me. It's that you're born into a family, your family of origin, and you're stuck with it. Once I recognized that, it freed me up to have a different kind of fa...
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a s...
Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said -- and I will never forget it -- "When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to th...
Pecans are not cheap, my hons. In fact, in the South, the street value of shelled pecans just before holiday baking season is roughly that of crack cocaine. Do not confuse the two. It is almost impossible to make a decent crack cocaine tassie, I am t...
It has taken me four years to figure this out. If we live long enough, we all will experience this. Don’t ever predetermine how you think that you should feel on an anniversary of a tragic event in your life, such as a death of a loved one, or on a...
Princess Ann: I hate this nightgown. I hate all my nightgowns, and I hate all my underwear too. Countess: My dear, you have lovely things. Princess Ann: But I'm not two hundred years old. Why can't I sleep in pajamas? Countess: Pajamas? Princess Ann:...
Princess Ann: I have to leave you now. I'm going to that corner there and turn. You must stay in the car and drive away. Promise not to watch me go beyond the corner. Just drive away and leave me as I leave you. Joe Bradley: All right. Princess Ann: ...
V: It is to Madame Justice that I dedicate this concerto, in honor of the holiday that she seems to have taken from these parts, and in recognition of the impostor that stands in her stead. Tell me Evey, do you know what day it is? Evey Hammond: Um, ...
Don't you feel that at this rate there isn't much in it? In what? In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it? Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you're glad to be alive; it's a good enough day for anything, and y...
Oliver Queenan: We have a question: Do you want to be a cop, or do you want to appear to be a cop? It's an honest question. A lot of guys just want to appear to be cops. Gun, badge, pretend they're on TV. Dignam: Yeah, a lot of people just wanna slam...
Frank Costello: Have a seat, Bill. [Costigan sits down at Costello's dinner table] Frank Costello: [while eating crab] Do you know John Lennon? Billy Costigan: Yeah, sure, he was the president before Lincoln. Frank Costello: Lennon said, "I'm an arti...
I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things.
So as near as I could tell the end of the world began roughly about the time that Billy Carver’s butt rang about halfway through the War of 1812.
My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger" - Billy Connolly
And in the evening After the fire and the light One thing is certain: Nothing can hold back the light Time is relentless And as the past disappears We're on the verge of all things new
Whatever your situation might be, set your mind to whatever you want to do and put a good attitude in it, and I believe that you can succeed. You are not going to get anywhere just sitting on your butt and moping around.
My attitude goes back to my childhood. I used to audition for theatrical roles, and you can't stand out in a room full of ambitious eight-year-old girls by acting the wallflower. I realised then that I couldn't do things half-heartedly.
I was baptized as an infant. I was confirmed as an adolescent; I was active in my church's youth group and in my university student group. I was married before the church's altar; trained at the church's seminaries, ordained deacon and priest at age ...
I am just postmodern enough not to trust 'postmodern' as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be poli...
When I was on the road with Billy Bragg, it was cool because I was doing the whole thing solo and travel a lot by myself, which I quite like. I mean, I love being with friends, but it's kind of nice having that alone time.
