Way Quotes - Page 157

The grass is always greener over the septic tank.

When I had my first experiences of choral singing, the dissonance of those close harmonies was so exquisite that I would giggle or I would tear up, and I felt it in a physical way.

There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it

...the way to reform has always led through prison.

When I do something I have to do it all the way - that goes for music, with a high-hat, a snare drum, a rhyme, everything. I have to push it to the extreme. That's how I realized I have addictive behavior. Somebody told me this once, that the thing that makes me bad is the same thing that makes me good at other things.

Hope . . . is one of the ways in which what is merely future and potential is made vividly present and actual to us. Hope is the positive, as anxiety is the negative, mode of awaiting the future.

There is no way that we know what is going on between the African American and the Asian American. We don't understand what an Indigenous American is. We don't understand what a Latino American is

If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn't we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?

And you should never cut your hair 'cos I love the way you flick it off your shoulders

This is the age of bargain hunters. If it had been this way in biblical times, we'd probably have been offered another commandment free if we had accepted the first ten.

Let's have a moment of silence for all those Americans who are stuck in traffic on their way to the gym to ride the stationary bicycle.

It is what the Taoists say: The way to do is to be.

The writer's way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?

I'd like to make people who see me in comic pantomime on the screen feel the way Mark Twain makes his readers feel.

If we're not on them, they go back to their old ways.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

You will find that the Bible, if you want it to, will justify many things. St. Paul had a very male chauvinistic view of women. He would say things like women must not talk in church, must cover their heads, they mustn't talk and must remember that it was a woman who first tempted and this whole mess started because women messed us up. So you can read it in such a way that it justifies polygamy.

Faced with unmeasurables, people steer their way by magic. Before the invention of navigational instruments, a beautiful lady was carved on the prow of the boat to help sailors cross the ocean; and architects, grappling with the intangibles of design, select a guru whose work gives them personal help in areas where there are few rules to follow. The guru, as architectural father-figure, is subject to intense hate and love; either way, the relationship is personal, and necessarily one-to-one.

I don't see how I possibly could have come from where I entered the planet to where I am now if there had not been angels along the way.

We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

In some ways it's taken me decades to come clean and make honest work - and still to this day, sometimes I find myself wanting to hide behind my work and deny the more biographical aspects.

The sweetest path of life leads through the avenues of learning, and whoever can open up the way for another, ought, so far, to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind.

Every little bit of good I may do, let me do it now for I may not come this way again.

....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.

Each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.