David Dickason > David's Quotes

“The problem with aging is not that it's one damn thing after another -- it's every damn thing, all at once, all the time.”
― John Scalzi - _Old_Man's_War_

“Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but in the very least you need a beer.”
― Frank Zappa

“I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.”
― David Sedaris

“The problem with Marxism is the proletariat isn’t going to rise up against capitalism and consumerism. The only time they’ll rise up is during a commercial break to either go to the bathroom or grab more beer.
”
― Jarod Kintz, Untitled

“Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it.

- The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“I don't think I've drunk enough beer to understand that.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

“Thirstily he set it to his lips, and as its cool refreshment began to soothe his throat, he thanked Heaven that in a world of much evil there was still so good a thing as ale.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Fortune's Fool

“A man who lies about beer makes enemies”
― Stephen King, Pet Sematary

“If God had intended us to drink beer, He would have given us stomachs.”
― David Daye

“Oh, this beer here is cold, cold and hop-bitter, no point coming up for air, gulp, till it's all--hahhhh.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Across the troubled maelstrom of time, people always need a beer.”
― Ellen Kushner, The Fall of the Kings

“She picked up the stout and took a sip. It slid down her throat like silk.”
― Sara Sheridan, British Bulldog

“The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue...”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“For a quart of Ale is a dish for a king.”
― William Shakespeare

“Among the early commercial adopters of wild beer were the Cottonwood Brewery of Boone, North Carolina, and Joe’s Brewery of Champaign, Illinois. Brewer John Isenhour gained a “cult status” for his production of beers with a lambic profile in the mid-1990s using wild yeast and bacteria that he kept active at various stages of the lambic fermentation cycle. John quite successfully marketed the “Lambic” to his rather conservative clientele in this central Illinois college town as “Belgian lemonade.”
― Jeff Sparrow

“I've never been thrown out of a pub, but I've fallen into quite a few”
― Benny Bellamacina, Philosophical Uplifting Quotes and Poems

“Whoever drinks beer, he is quick to sleep; whoever sleeps long, does not sin; whoever does not sin, enters Heaven! Thus, let us drink beer!”
― Martin Luther

“Scientists have invented a new strain of cannabis without the high. They celebrated with non-alcoholic beer and furious dry-humping.”
― Stephen Colbert

“It couldn't be the beer. Donnie McRory was certain of that. If you sent American beer out to be analyzed, the lab would probably phone up and say, 'Your horse has diabetes.”
― Sharyn McCrumb, Bimbos of the Death Sun

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico

“It's all a matter of paying attention, being awake in the present moment, and not expecting a huge payoff. The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.”
― Charles de Lint

“The best change you can make is to hold up a mirror so that people can look into it and change themselves. That's the only way a person can be changed."
By looking into yourself," Zia said. "Even if you have to look into a mirror that's outside yourself to do it."
"And you know," Maida added. "That mirror can be a story you hear, or just someone else's eyes. Anything that reflects back so you can see yourself in it.”
― Charles de Lint, Someplace to Be Flying

“The best artists know what to leave out.”
― Charles de Lint

“The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then pass a law saying, "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.”
― Peter De Vries

“A metaphor is a kind o' lie to help people understand what's true.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

“The trouble is you can shut your eyes but you can’t shut your mind.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

“A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

“The librarians were mysterious. It was said they could tell what book you needed just by looking at you, and they could take your voice away with a word.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith