Sam > Sam's Quotes

“Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?”
― Mark Twain

“It's always easier to say good-bye when you know it's just a prelude to hello.”
― Maureen Johnson, The Last Little Blue Envelope

“Take it from me, there's nothing like a job well done. Except the quiet enveloping darkness at the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam after a job done any way at all.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“Salt. Wound. Together at last.”
― Maureen Johnson, 13 Little Blue Envelopes

“Gas Attendant: "Thata ain't no etch-a-sketch. Thats one doodle that can't be un-did home skillet.”
― Diablo Cody, Juno: The Shooting Script

“My eyes rolled over to my best friend, Kate Green, who was doodling intricate flowers all over her notes and looked like she was thoroughly entertaining herself.”
― Courtney Allison Moulton, Angelfire

“But without ego," Diego said, "your writing is just scribbles in a journal. Your art is just doodles. Ego demands that what you do is important enought that you be given money to work on it." He gestured to the hotel around us. "It demands that what you say is important enough that it be published or shown to the world.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“Let the pleasure of doodling led us to writing as decoration rather than to the peculiarly abstract sort of representation it inclines towards: the making of signs to look through rather than at.”
― Robert Kaplan, The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero

“And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking.”
― Bob Dylan

“Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean.”
― Bob Dylan

“Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.”
― Bob Dylan

“You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
― Bob Dylan

“If you want to keep your memories, you first have to live them.”
― Bob Dylan

“The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time.

The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is.

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside.

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“To live outside the law you must be honest.”
― Bob Dylan

“After all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.”
― Bob Dylan

“Stars don’t beg the world for attention; their beauty forces us to look up.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo

“Shine your light so bright, and no one will need a telescope to see you.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo

“Stars shine so they can see the world, not so the world can see them.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo

“Breaking from the herd is better than getting lost in it.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo

“Almost everyone can describe the bottom of the mountain.”
― Roy A. Ngansop

“Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“We are … the un-proud non-possessors of objects whose chief substance is that of the transient symbol. Our Puritan fear of the love of things turns out to have been groundless after all, for we do not love things or even possess them: they pass through our lives as barium passes through the digestive tract, unassimilated, their function merely to flash signals along the way.”
― Ralph Caplan

“Be the one who sets the trend, not the one who follows it.”
― Isaac Mashman

“Feeling uncomfortable about a situation is oftentimes the indicator that growth is about to take place.”
― Isaac Mashman

“Because everyone is doing it doesn't make it right and because you stand out doesn't make it wrong. Just find a path that you can defend.”
― Temi 'T Quest' Sholeye

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
― Albert Einstein