Henry Luce: Now, I want them all to meet my people who will write their true stories, Naturally these stories will appear in Life magazine under their own bylines: For example, "by Betty Grissom", or "by Virgil I. Grisson", or... Gus Grissom: Gus! He...
Uncle Charlie: The cities are full of women, middle-aged widows, husbands, dead, husbands who've spent their lives making fortunes, working and working. And then they die and leave their money to their wives, their silly wives. And what do the wives ...
John: Hello, Paul. You are a perfectly healthy, sane and middle-class male yet last month you ran a straight razor across your wrist. Did you cut yourself because you truly wanted to die or did you just want some attention? Tonight, you'll show me. T...
Jeanine Pettibone: [following the disastrous Stonehenge performance] If it got solved, that would be alright, but it doesn't get solved. I mean what do you think happened out there? What got solved tonight? Ian Faith: For one thing that goes wrong......
Robert Hitchins: You don't understand. If we go back, they'll swamp the boat, they'll pull us right down, I'm tellin' you! Molly Brown: Knock it off. You're scaring me. C'mon girls! Grab an oar, let's go! Robert Hitchins: Are you out of your mind? We...
[Withnail and Marwood are lying in bed together, listening to a man coming inside the cottage. Withnail is cowering under the covers] Withnail: [whispering] He's going into your room. It's you he wants. Offer him yourself. [the bedroom door slowly op...
Tallahassee: Goddamn it, Bill fucking Murray! I had to get that out. I don't mean to gush. This is so surreal. I mean, you probably get this all the time. Maybe not lately, but I'm such a huge fan of yours. You know, I swear, I've seen every one of y...
Huma Rojo: There are people who think that children are made in a day. But it takes a long time, a very long time. That's why it's so awful to see your child's blood on the ground. A stream that flows for a minute yet costs us years. When I found my ...
Mrs. Random: Well who are you? David Huxley: I don't know. I'm not quite myself today. Mrs. Random: Well, you look perfectly idiotic in those clothes. David Huxley: These aren't *my* clothes. Mrs. Random: Well, where *are* your clothes? David Huxley:...
It's my birthday, by the way, and as of 2:05 this morning (the time of my birth in the middle of a snow storm on the Fort Dix army base in New Jersey) I'm 52 years old. I decided to say that because there's such in our culture for women...well, for e...
Not nearly enough. Not recently, anyway.” And she was sad about that. “I know,” he said, and kissed the back of her hand. “We’ll fix it. Get some sleep.” “Night,” she said, and watched him walk toward the door. “Hey. How’d you get...
But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn't understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot - see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As ...
Captain Owen Hartford, at your service.” He tipped his hat. Oh, so it was going to be like this, was it? She searched her memory for a good name. “Patience Corntower. Of Thorny Hollow way.” His grin went wide. “We are well acquainted. You may...
Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for an...
The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in o...
On my seventh birthday, my father swore, for the first of many times, that I would die facedown in a cesspool. On that same occasion, my mother, with all the accompanying mystery and elevated language appropriate for a prominent diviner, turned her c...
A farmer friend of mine told me recently about a busload of middle school children who came to his farm for a tour. The first two boys off the bus asked, "Where is the salsa tree?" They thought they could go pick salsa, like apples and peaches. Oh my...
It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of a church; and while youth and early middle-age, whil...
She was right: school was lonely. The eighteen and nineteen year olds didn't socialize with the younger kids, and though there were plenty of students my age and younger [...] their lives were so cloistered and their concerns so foolish and foreign-s...
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been a cat guy. Every night as I go to sleep, I have this particular fantasy I indulge in. Most men dream about naked women, but not me. I dream about being isolated in a mountainous forest in the middle o...
So what's the point, then, if we can't be happy? Why are we doing any of this?" "Oh, there's definitely happiness," Jack said, turning his back on the ocean and looking at her. "But it's just about moments, not ever-afters." He grinned. "Like when yo...
