Fran Kubelik: I never catch colds. C.C. Baxter: Really? I was reading some figures from the Sickness and Accident Claims Division. You know that the average New Yorker between the ages of twenty and fifty has two and a half colds a year? Fran Kubelik...
[first lines] Alice's sister: [reading from a history book] "... leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the Earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand..." Alice. [camera zo...
Dr. Emmett Brown: [Doc Brown is trying to read Marty's mind with a geodesic helmet and a suction cup] Erm, you want me to make a donation to the Coastguard Youth Auxilliary? Marty McFly: Doc, [pulls off suction cup] Marty McFly: I'm from the future. ...
Clara: Now, is it true that you've been injecting yourself with semen from baby pigs? Riggan: I'm sorry, what? Clara: As a method of facial rejuvenation. Riggan: Where did you read that? Clara: It was tweeted by @prostatewhispers. Riggan: No, that's ...
Murron: You're going to teach me to read, then? William Wallace: Aye, if you'd like. Murron: Aye! William Wallace: In what language? Murron: Ah, you're showing off now. William Wallace: That's right. Are you impressed yet? Murron: No. Why? Should I b...
[Harriet Johnson reads her letter to the Governor] Harriet Johnson: [quietly] To the honorable William J. LePetomaine, Governor... Townspeople: Louder! We can't hear you! Harriet Johnson: I'm not used to public speaking. [clears her throat] Harriet J...
Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an ...
I don't want to be around people who accept me as is, in my unrefined state of becoming. I consistently want people around me who push and encourage me to be my ultimate best, who bring out the inner diamonds. I want to be around those intellectual g...
I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around...
The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plug...
Consider a small child sitting on his mother's lap while she reads him a picture book. The picture book opens to a width that effectively places the child at the center of a closed circle - that of mother's body, arms, and the picture book... That ci...
A Book I Can Put Down I’m halfway through and I’ve gotten used to the way it wants to be read. This writer wants to spoon it up, wants to watch me swallow it. This writer makes a point of good deeds, clean living, god and country, when what I wan...
I wanted to cast doubt on the step he was about to take, to help him see there are other ways to live, other ways to seek knowledge, love...even self-transformation. I wanted to convince him his dignity depended on maintaining a free, skeptical attit...
…the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape…. You have not finished with it because you...
Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, 'The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!' The exclamation, to me so surprisin...
Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative to Christia...
When You Are Old" WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And lov...
Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch wit...
When the weather's nice, my parents go out quite frequently and stick a bunch of flowers on old Allie's grave. I went with them a couple of times, but I cut it out. In the first place, I don't enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery. Surrounded by de...
Then this must be my answer: We know that the attributes of God are infinite and it has always seemed strange to me that men have never given Him credit for common sense. It is hard to believe that He would have created so beautiful a world if He had...
If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me ... I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could ...
