There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees; and there are cities like Detroit that have to work for a living, whose reason for being might be geographical bu...
If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to ...
The lotus is the most beautiful flower, whose petals open one by one. But it will only grow in the mud. In order to grow and gain wisdom, first you must have the mud --- the obstacles of life and its suffering. ... The mud speaks of the common ground...
All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on thei...
I handed them a script and they turned it down. It was too controversial. It talked about concepts like, 'Who is God?' The Enterprise meets God in space; God is a life form, and I wanted to suggest that there may have been, at one time in the human b...
It's perfectly clear to me that religion is a myth. It's something we have invented to explain the inexplicable. My religion and the spiritual side of my life come from a sense of connection to the humankind and nature on this planet and in the unive...
[Lennie meets Joe - he works out that she was named after John Lennon] I nod. "Mom was a hippie." This is northern Northern California after all - the final frontier of freakerdom. Just in the eleventh grade we have a girl named Electricity, a guy na...
I've got two daughters who will have to make their way in this skinny-obsessed world, and it worries me, because I don't want them to be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I'd rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, o...
There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. If, for the sake of argument, 1 million are violent, that's a mere .000625 percent of them. I wonder who among you wants to be judged on such a tiny minority. Further, at 1.6 billion, if all Muslims - or ev...
I recently heard a talk about identity in which the speaker said it's almost as though we are born into a world in which we are constantly being labeled by others -- our parents, our friends, our family, and people we don't even know. Each person, fr...
Paul Hood: To find yourself in the negative zone, as the Fantastic Four often do, means all every day assumptions are inverted. Even the invisible girl herself becomes visible and so she loses the last semblance of her power. It seems to me that ever...
Roy Neary: Is that it? Is that all you're gonna ask me? Well I got a couple of thousand goddamn questions, you know. I want to speak to someone in charge. I want to lodge a complaint. You have no right to make people crazy! You think I investigate ev...
Brad Neary: I don't understand these fractions. Roy Neary: What's one third of sixty? Brad Neary: [bewildered] That's a fraction, I don't understand them. Roy Neary: [using a model train as an object lesson] Alright, let's say that this boxcar is six...
Ronnie Neary: Roy, what did it look like? Roy Neary: It was like an ice cream cone. Ronnie Neary: What flavor? Roy Neary: Orange. It was orange - and it wasn't like an ice cream cone. It was, it was more like a shell. You know, it was like this. Ronn...
Natasha Romanoff: The truth is a matter of circumstances, it's not all things to all people all the time. And neither am I. Steve Rogers: That's a tough way to live. Natasha Romanoff: It's a good way not to die, though. Steve Rogers: You know, it's k...
Lucy: [calmly] Don't worry about me, Gru! I'll be fine. I have survived lots worse than this... Okay, that's not entirely true [switches from calmly to frantically] Lucy: I'm actually kind of freaking out up here! Gru: [attempting to free her] Don't ...
Jack Lucas: Hey! Edwin! Hey, c'mon now, I told you about these people, they only mate with their own kind, it's called yuppie inbreeding. That's why so many of them are retarded and wear the same clothes. They're not human, they don't feel love, they...
Jack Brennan: Well, in boxing, you know, there's always that first moment, and you see it in the challenger's face. It's that moment that he feels the impact from the champ's first jab. It's kind of a sickening moment, when he realizes that all those...
Raoul Duke: And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the cre...
Psychiatrist: That's an unusual problem, Mr. Connors. Uh, Most of my work is with couples, families. I have an alcoholic now. Phil: Well you went to college, right? I mean, it wasn't veterinary psychology, was it? Didn't you take some kind of course ...
Helen: What kind of woman are you? How can you leave him like this? Does the sound of guns frighten you that much? Amy: I've heard guns. My father and my brother were killed by guns. They were on the right side but that didn't help them any when the ...
