Barbara > Barbara's Quotes

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.”
― Garrison Keillor

“A book is a gift you can open again and again.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.”
― Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home

“You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.”
― Garrison Keillor, Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon

“One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Evelyn was an insomniac so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that.”
― Garrison Keillor, Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon

“God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.”
― Garrison Keillor , Happy to Be Here

“It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Life is unjust and this is what makes it so beautiful. Every day is a gift. Be brave and take hold of it.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known. ”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon USA

“And then I stand in front of God's Throne squinting up at His blazing glory and He says, 'You had your opportunities, boy. But did you listen? No. You went on heedlesly reading that garbagey magazine with pictures of naked girls in it. How juvenile! I gave geese more sense than that.'

Please, God. I'm only fourteen years old. A teenager. Have mercy. Be loving.

I was,' says God. 'For eons. And look at what it got me. You.'

God turns in disgust, just the way Daddy does. 'Sorry, but I'm the Creator. I take it personally. There are slugs and bugs and night-crawlers I feel better about having created - I mean, there are sparrows - I've got my eye on one right now. Is that sparrow consumed with lust? No. He mates in the spring and that's the end of it. Consider the lilies. Do they think about lily tits all the time? No. They look not and they lust not, and yet I say unto you that you will never be half as attractive as they. Therefore, I say unto you, think not about peckers and boobs and all that nonsense and your Heavenly Father will see that you meet a good woman and marry her, just as I do for the sparrow and walleye - yea verily, even the night-crawler and the eelpout. But I've told you this over and over for nineteen centuries. And now, verily, it's too late. Time's up, buster. Lights out! Game's over!”
― Garrison Keillor

“Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.”
― Garrison Keillor, Good Poems

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual- become clairvoyant. We reach then into reality. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. It is in the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it.”
― Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

“In certain books—some way in the first few paragraphs you know that you have met a brother.”
― Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

“If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Y'know — Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about 'em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts . . . and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney,— same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then.
So I'm going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now'll know a few simple facts about us — more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lind-bergh flight.
See what I mean?
So — people a thousand years from now — this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. — This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

Said by the Stage Manager”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“Every man walks his own path, and every path has its fair share of locked doors. You never know who holds the key to a door you’ll need to open one day, so you best treat people as if they are all keyholders.”
― A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar

“When someone you love says goodbye you can stare long and hard at the door they closed and forget to see all the doors God has open in front of you.”
― Shannon Alder

“Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.”
― Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems, 1943-2004

“Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.”
― Richard Wilbur

“The world's big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”
― John Muir

“One always feel better when one has made up one's mind.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

“Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle