Becky > Becky's Quotes

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.”
― Ulysses S. Grant

“The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.”
― Philip K. Dick

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other’s bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love – think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere, behind them!”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“Books may well be the only true magic.”
― Alice Hoffman

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.”
― Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“There may be little room for the display of this supreme qualification in the retail book business, but there is room for some. Be enterprising. Get good people about you. Make your shop windows and your shops attractive. The fact that so many young men and women enter the teaching profession shows that there are still some people willing to scrape along on comparatively little money for the pleasure of following an occupation in which they delight. It is as true to-day as it was in Chaucer's time that there is a class of men who "gladly learn and gladly teach," and our college trustees and overseers and rich alumni take advantage of this and expect them to live on wages which an expert chauffeur would regard as insufficient. Any bookshop worthy of survival can offer inducements at least as great as the average school or college. Under pleasant conditions you will meet pleasant people, for the most part, whom you can teach and form whom you may learn something.”
― A. Edward Newton, A magnificent farce and other diversions of a book collector

“But my later experience has taught me two lessons: first, that things are seen plainer after the events have occurred; second, that the most confident critics are generally those who know the least about the matter criticised.”
― Grant, Ulysses S., Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: All Volumes

“The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait."

(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)”
― Anatole Broyard

“He's cutting the heart out of the American dream to own a home and have a good job ... and still he's popular

Tip O'Neill on Ronald Reagan”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
― Henry Ward Beecherr

“Fate is often like a canoe after you've lost your paddles.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“I had decided to become a bookseller because I loved good books. I assumed there must be many others who shared a love for reading and that I could minister to their needs. I thought of this as a calling.”
― Stuart Brent, The Seven Stairs: An Adventure of the Heart

“One of my many weaknesses as a journalist is that I can't ask perfect strangers about the masturbation habits of their ex-spouses, just me being a stuffed shirt again.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Psychics are like porno stars," I said. "Anybody can be one.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“A good American goes for it, just does it, slakes it, eats it, kills it, the more the better, damn the torpedoes!”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“We'd rather have satisfaction and the maximum titillation than real information, and so history, I insist to my good friend Steve Welch, isn't a cold sequential list of facts, it's a prize anthology of the best fiction.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Indeed factual stories are so cumbersome, ambiguous, unexciting, and difficult to understand most of the time that they are almost always instantly reconstructed and condensed for better emotional digestion into folktales with foreign villains and blue-eyed saviors.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Do you remember where the glory in Beowulf is?" I asked him. "It is out amid peril in strange lands pitted against monsters and the mothers of monsters. It isn't in the warm mead hall with roasted meats and the comfort of jesters and wenches.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“Why not relent, marry a reformed hooker, buy some old furniture and a ping-pong table, become a Cornhusker fan, open a dusty bottle of Kentucky straight, turn on the Rockies game, and enjoy the brief time you have left on this weird planet of sorrow?”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir