Calvin Trillin > Quotes

“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”
― Calvin Trillin

“Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.”
― Calvin Trillin

“Health food makes me sick.”
― Calvin Trillin

“The price of purity is purists.”
― Calvin Trillin

“When someone reaches middle age, people he knows begin to get put in charge of things, and knowing what he knows about the people who are being put in charge of things scares the hell out of him.”
― Calvin Trillin, With All Disrespect

“Why in the world are you a Republican?”
― Calvin Trillin, About Alice

“I never did very well in math-I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.”
― Calvin Trillin

“By the way, did you fellows know that a hummingbird weighs as much as a quarter? Do you think a hummingbird also weighs the same as two dimes and a nickel? But then she asked a question of her own: How do they weigh a hummingbird?”
― Calvin Trillin, Enough's Enough

“...the existential paradox we all experience; we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die.”
― Calvin Trillin

“She believed in the principle of enoughness."
from "About Alice”
― Calvin Trillin

“understand what Ernest Becker meant when he said something like ‘To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything,”
― Calvin Trillin, About Alice

“Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?”
― Calvin Trillin, Feeding a Yen: Savoring Local Specialties, from Kansas City to Cuzco

“your children are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary”
― Calvin Trillin, About Alice

“All White House hopefuls we forewarn:
You'll have to prove that you were born.
Before Trump hits the state of granite,
He must identify the planet
Where he first took on human form -
A place where blowhards are the norm.”
― Calvin Trillin, Dogfight: The 2012 Presidential Campaign in Verse

“As far as I'm concerned, 'whom' is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.”
― Calvin Trillin

“If Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the Union, how come
'Lincolnesque' just means tall?”
― Calvin Trillin, Enough's Enough

“I am firmly committed to the proposition that whoever is in power is exceedingly silly.... And that goes for the opposition as well.”
― Calvin Trillin, With All Disrespect

“School plays were invented partly to give parents and easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities.”
― Calvin Trillin, About Alice

“Paull has his own style, which is folksy, not canned.
Religion? He's got one. His prophet's Ayn Rand.
By Rand's eerie theories he's fervently gripped,
So he won't do flip-flops. He long ago flipped.”
― Calvin Trillin, Dogfight: The 2012 Presidential Campaign in Verse

“I suppose it's possible that the Sundance Kid didn't like to make much of his birthdays — they may have struck him as just another reminder that his draw was getting slower by the year—but what if he truly liked a major celebration? What if he looked forward every year to marking the day of his birth with what they used to call in the West 'a real wingding, with pink balloons and a few survivors'?”
― Calvin Trillin, Travels with Alice

“For Alice, of course, the measure of how you held up in the face of a life-threatening illness was not how much you changed but how much you stayed the same, in control of your own identity.”
― Calvin Trillin, About Alice

“Would I be commenting on Amy Fisher?
Was that the sort of subject that someone who hoped to become poet laureate should discuss? Would those British laureates who had traditionally written about royal birthdays and royal jubilees have dealt with such goings on?”
― Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet: My Life As a Doggerelist

“Was the Buffalo chicken wing invented
when Teressa Bellissimo thought of splitting it in half and deep frying it and serving it with celery and blue-cheese dressing? Was it invented when John Young started using mambo sauce
and thought of elevating wings into a specialty?”
― Calvin Trillin, Third Helpings

“Someone who managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.”
― Calvin Trillin, About Alice

“Reporters also tend to love trials. It may be that we are transfixed by a process in which the person being asked a question actually has to answer it. He cannot say he would rather not comment. He cannot tell an anecdote on a different subject. He has to answer the question—under oath that he is telling the truth.”
― Calvin Trillin, Killings

“Do my ears deceive me, or can I actually hear the sounds of worms turning? You say a turning worm makes no sound? But how about a chorus of turning worms?”
― Calvin Trillin, Too Soon To Tell

“Going out? Are you going out? He's not going out? What do you mean he's not going out? Are you out here because you're still mad that they moved the Dodgers to L.A.? Are you going out or not? You're not going out? I guess you're not going out — huh? You mean go out parking in the evenings? Are you going out to park? Mr. Tepper, he asked at one point, did you ever — if you were in the middle of an interesting story in the paper or perhaps an interesting conversation with somebody who dropped in to talk to you while you were parking — notice that the meter had run out and therefore go out and put more money in the meter? If we're both keeping an eye out, what does it hurt?”
― Calvin Trillin, Tepper Isn't Going Out

“The question about those aromatic advertisements that perfume companies are having stitched into magazines these days is this: under the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, is smelling up the place a constitutionally protected form of expression?”
― Calvin Trillin

“among married couples the person who actually makes out the mortgage check is likely to be more cautious about spending money than the person who doesn't. There is something sobering about sending away that much money every month in the knowledge that, rain or shine, you'll have to come up with the same amount of money the next month and the month after that.”
― Calvin Trillin, About Alice

“No sophisticated study of public opinion is needed to establish the fact that in the United States, North or South, a white life is considered to be of more value than a Negro life.”
― Calvin Trillin, Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America