Tom Quotes - page 14
I always loved the grand dichotomies of life. Dogs and cats. Cats and mice. Like Tom and Jerry. But as someone who grew up in Central Europe I never understood how a mouse can live inside a wall. Walls are made of bricks! They are not hollow. Way later I came to understand, when I learned that US-American houses are just made of wood, and their walls are really hollow.
Johannes Grenzfurthner
I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm not concerned with your liking or disliking me. All I ask is that you respect me as a human being. I am not ashamed of my dark skin. You and every other white American should understand that we believe our color is an asset. Your dislike of my aggressiveness has no effect on me. I'm after something much more important than your favor or disfavor. You should at least respect me as a man who stands up for what he believes in. I am not an Uncle Tom. I am in this fight to stay.
Jackie Robinson
Where are you from?” Sophia asked.
Larry looked a bit startled. "I'm from here...Great-greats came over from Holland."
"You said ‘y'all.'"
Larry was confused....
"What was that about?" Anne-Solenne asked.
"It's totally a Southern way of talking. Iowa is a Northern state. Fought on the Union side in the Civil War. Never had slavery...Northerners don't talk like that, they don't drawl, they don't say ‘y'all'...”
"Or put the Stars and Bars on their bumpers,” said Julian...and pointed at a Confederate flag sticker on the back of Tom and Kevin's truck.
"Point being, it was not like that to my uncle...When he was born, the Civil War was only ninety years in the past-almost within living memory. It would have seemed weird for Northerners to paste the traitors' flag on their bumper or cop an accent from Alabama. But while he was alive-”
"The cultural border shifted north.
Neal Stephenson
In the middle of Tom Cruise's speech, there's this sudden, dramatic pull-in to his face, and there's tears in his eyes, and he says, "we live in a cynical world," and that's when my brother went, "FUCK YOU!" at the top of his... oh, my God. That was... it was such a horrible, rude thing to yell, and I was laughing so hard. I could not get the air in to make the sound of laughter. People ask me, "what is your favorite comedy of all time?" Jerry Maguire, when my brother yells, "fuck you!" at Tom Cruise. It is a 90-minute setup to one punchline. It's like not jerking off for ten years, and then painting the garage! Oh, my God, I'm seeing dead kings!
Patton Oswalt
I think Ushant describes it pretty well, with that epigraph from Tom Brown's School Days: "I'm the poet of White Horse Vale, sir, with Liberal notions under my cap!” For some reason those lines stuck in my head, and I've never forgotten them. This image became something I had to be. ... I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort - I mean I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form - all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I've always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do. And to study all the vowel effects and all the consonant effects and the variation in vowel sounds.
Conrad Aiken
Tom [Knapp] was a chemistry major at Princeton before the war; when he came back... he was a beach bum. And then one day he read that Dave Dodd was giving a night course in investments at Columbia. Tom took it on a non-credit basis, and he got so interested... that he enrolled at Columbia Business School where he got the MBA... He took Dodd's course again, and took Ben Graham's course. ...35 years later ...I found him on the beach ...he owns the beach!
Warren Buffett
Many aspects of Marty's story are disputed by the Church, which calls him a liar, a criminal, and an apostate. But the verifiable facts are as follows: he was a fully-paid-up Scientologist for 27 years, before quitting in 2004. For much of this time, he was a high-ranking executive in the Church, helping steer some of its most sensitive legal campaigns. He was also acquainted with many celebrity members, including Kirstie Alley, John Travolta, and Tom Cruise.
Mark Rathbun
Forty-odd years ago, there was a countercultural moment, a brief, shining moment, as it were, when the eyes of a generation glimpsed the Eden beneath the veil. However fleeting was this paradise, or however harsh has been its repression, its light nonetheless inspired a rowdy cohort of artists to carry its torch into the future. Tom Robbins is one of these unruly pioneers, and his frequently bestselling novels are so saturated in an uncontainable joie de vivre that they have remained virtually required reading throughout the years and decades since their initial publication.
Tony Vigorito
He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea which other men often express by the name of deity.
His Bible was the open face of nature, the broad skies, the green hills. He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds - or on persons devoted to them - have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.
When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a "dirty little atheist" he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished.
Thomas Edison
