Julie > Julie's Quotes

“In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough. ”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.”
― George Carlin

“those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”
― James Joyce

“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
― John Locke

“If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”
― David Sedaris, Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays

“Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.”
― David Sedaris

“He took a sip of my father’s weak coffee and spit it back into the mug. "This shit’s like making love in a canoe."
"Excuse me?"
"It’s fucking near water.”
― David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

“Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings”
― David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

“If you aren't cute, you may as well be clever.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.”
― David Sedaris, Holidays on Ice

“On Undecided Voter​s: "To put them in perspective, I think​ of being​ on an airplane.​ The flight attendant comes​ down the aisle​ with her food cart and, eventually,​ parks​ it beside my seat.​ “Can I inter​est you in the chick​en?​” she asks.​ “Or would​ you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broke​n glass​ in it?”

To be undecided in this elect​ion is to pause​ for a moment and then ask how the chick​en is cooked.”
― David Sedaris

“On my fifth trip to France I limited myself to the words and phrases that people actually use. From the dog owners I learned "Lie down," "Shut up," and "Who shit on this carpet?" The couple across the road taught me to ask questions correctly, and the grocer taught me to count. Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. "Is thems the thoughts of cows?" I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window. "I want me some lamb chop with handles on 'em.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“This left me alone to solve the coffee problem - a sort of catch-22, as in order to think straight I need caffeine, and in order to make that happen I need to think straight.”
― David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.”
― David Sedaris

“The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you’re a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence.”
― David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

“I hate you' she said to me one afternoon. 'I really, really hate you.' Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help but take it personally.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon.

It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.”
― David Sedaris

“I read," I say. "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"

"I give."

"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest