Neat Quotes - page 8
Over Christmas we looked through boxes of family pictures and played a game we call 'Find Mom, find Mom's cigarettes.' There's one in every picture. We've got photos of her pregnant, leaning toward a lit match, and others of her posing with her newborn babies, the smoke forming a halo above our heads. These pictures gave us a warm feeling.
She smoked in the bathtub, where we'd find her drowned butts lined up in a neat row beside the shampoo bottle. She smoked through meals, and often used her half-empty plate as an ashtray. Mom's theory was that if you cooked the meal and did the dishes, you were allowed to use your plate however you liked.
David Sedaris
If you are not affected, if you are not hurt by what we do, then you will not do anything to stop it. The war will simply continue. As long as it is just the soldiers, these barbaric men with guns who kill each other, as long as the damage is far away, the destruction and death out of your sight, then no amount of hand wringing and moral outrage will make it end. If you are affected, if your farms, your crops are destroyed, your neat buildings in your perfect towns burned to the ground, then there will be a reason to stop this. War is not tidy, it is not convenient, it is everywhere. It has to be felt by everyone. War is hell.
Mike Jones
Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness,
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
Robert Graves
The bipolar world is over, but it not going to be replaced by a unipolar world empire that the United States controls alone. The world is already economically multipolar, and there will be a diffusion of power as the information revolution progresses, interdependence increases, and transnational actors become more important. The new world will not be neat, and you will have to live with that.
Joseph Nye
Esotericism, which is legal, but not too much fun, prescribes to our condition. But when one tries to follow a spiritual path, nothing much happens for most of us. Faced with this lack of results, the esoteric schools put the blame squarely on us rather than on any insufficiency in their doctrines or methods. Finally, they explain our failure by taking refuge in paradoxes. They tell us, for example, that we can attain only by not wanting to attain-a neat double bind.
Some esoteric schools caution the disciple not to practise the extraordinary powers which we will acquire in the course of our work. This is surely an extraordinary statement. Most of us can't muster the power to give up smoking, much less to levitate.
Robert Sheckley
Poor Naz. He wanted everything to be perfect, neat, wanted all matter organized and filed away so that it wasn't mess. He had to learn too: matter's what makes us alive-the bitty flow, the scar tissue, signature of the world's very first disaster and promissory note guaranteeing its last. Try to iron it out at your peril.
Tom McCarthy (writer)
I can offer you no final truths, complete and unchallengeable. But it's possible this one effort will provoke other efforts - both in support and contradiction of my position - that will help all of us understand our differences and perhaps even discover some basic agreement.
In the end, I'm convinced we will all benefit if suspicion is replaced by discussion, innuendo by dialogue; if the emphasis in our debate turns from a search for talismanic criteria and neat but simplistic answers to an honest - more intelligent - attempt at describing the role religion has in our public affairs, and the limits placed on that role.
And if we do it right - if we're not afraid of the truth even when the truth is complex - this debate, by clarification, can bring relief to untold numbers of confused - even anguished - Catholics, as well as to many others who want only to make our already great democracy even stronger than it is.
Mario Cuomo
Otherwise, I know I'm often wasting my breath and electronic ink saying this, but the "real-world” is a pretty weird place where lots of inexplicable things happen all the time, and I like to catch the flavor of that too. It just seems more modern and authentic to me as a storyteller. The "real world” doesn't come with the neat three-act structures and resolutions we love to impose on it, and if repeated doses of movie and TV-storytelling have convinced anyone that it does, it‘s time to get out and about a bit. The real world is filled with ghost stories, non sequiturs, inexplicable mysteries, dead ends and absurdities, and I think it's cool to season our comfortable fictions with at least a little taste of what actual reality is like.
Grant Morrison
