[archives]

[index]

• "Just because you're extra-smart, it doesn't mean you know anything."--Dave from my English class

• "One truth discovered is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world."--William Hazlitt

• "When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other." -- Eric Hoffer

• Chris Wallace: Evander, is a lifetime ban too severe?
  Evander Holyfield: No. Not if they give it.
  --- (on Mike Tyson's possible suspension.)

• "Always play with their minds." --Lucas, Empire Records

• "How come Andrew gets to get up. If he gets up, we'll all get up, IT'LL BE ANARCHY!"-Bender, The Breakfast Club

• "This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not argue about who killed who."
  --King of the Swamp Castle, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

• "Know your limits!!" Beth, refering to ugly women in bikinis at Darien Lake.

• [After Joel's Princeton interview]
  Lana: So, how're we doin'?
  Joel: Looks like University of Illinois!
  

• "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue!"--McCroskey, Airplane

• [Criswell]: "Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future." --Plan 9 From Outer Space

• "I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants." -- A. Whitney Brown

• "Uh, Dick? Excuse me, Rich? Will milk be made available to us?"--Bender, The Breakfast Club

• "A friend is someone who sees through you and still enjoys the view." --Wilma Askinas

• LISA: "No, I can't! I can't eat any of them!
  HOMER: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Lisa honey, are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
  LISA: No.
  HOMER: Ham?
  LISA: No.
  HOMER: Pork chops?
  LISA: Dad, those all come from the same animal!
  HOMER: Yeah, right Lisa. Some wonderful, magical animal..."
  ---The Simpsons, when Lisa decides to become a vegetarian.

• Steve McCroskey: Johnny, what can you make out of this?[Hands him a piece of paper]
  Johnny: This? Why, I can make a hat or a brooch or a pterodactyl ...
  - Airplane
  
  

• Bethy: I'm starving. I haven't eaten in three days.
  Me: Why?
  Bethy: I wasn't hungry.
  
  

• "In all due respect to Princess Diana ... someone like Mother Teresa, when she dies ... will we have anywhere near that kind of outpouring for her?" -- Michael Douglas, in an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC's Today show, hours before Mother Teresa died of a heart attack. [quoted in Newsweek.]
  
  

• "I loathe the bus. There has to be a more dignified mode of transportation."
  --Samantha, Sixteen Candles
  
  

• Supermodel Paulina Porizkova on THINKING: "When I model I'm pretty blank. You can't think too much or it doesn't work."
  
  

• "How come dumb stuff seems so smart while you're doing it?" -- Dennis the Menace
  
  

• "The greatest happiness of life it the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves." -- Victor Hugo
  
  

• "Sometimes when I feel like killing someone, I do a little trick to calm myself down. I'll go over to the person's house and ring the doorbell. When the person comes to the door, I'm gone, but you know what I've left on the porch? A jack-o-lantern with a knife stuck in the side of its head with a note that says "You." After that I usually feel a lot better, and no harm done." -- Jack Handey
  
  

• "You never know what you're going to do until you do it." -- Holden Caulfield

• "Love is . . . when you look into someone's eyes and you go, like, all the way into their soul.  And you both know, instantly." - My So-Called Life

• "This muffin is life.  On the outside it's good, but on the inside, it's bad." - Bethy

• "There is no human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise." - Gore Vidal

• "Inspector Clay is dead! Murdered! And someone's responsible!"- Detective, Plan 9 From Outer Space

•  "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it."--Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller's Day Off  

• "Promise yourself to live your life as a revolution and not just a process of evolution." - Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book

• Cliff on homophobia: "I'm not homophobic.  I just like to make fun of them."

• "Sometimes your brain gets in the way." - Erin C., from yearbook

• "You know you're in love when the same person who makes you so happy can make you so mad." - unknown (age 21)

• ""I wanted a perfect ending... Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity." - Gilda Radner

• "Love can sweep you off your feet and carry you along in a way you've never known before. But the ride always ends, and you end up feeling lonely and bitter. Wait. It's not love I'm describing. I'm thinking of a monorail." - Jack Handey

• Sad To Be So

  My friends ask me,
  "How good does it feel to be
  Free from that girl?"
  I just finger the wound that
  Is me and say,
  "Free? Yeah, I'm free, but I been
  Dying slow since Christmas."
  And I can't even wave
  My arm or smile at her, it hurts so bad.
  

  -Bruce Graham

• From my wacky journalism class....

  Lesley F.: I hate Spanish.  I just want to chew my ARM off in that class.

  Paul K.: [blank, disturbed look] Why would you want to chew your own arm off?!  

• "Friendships are fragile things, and require as much care and handling as any other fragile and precious thing." - Randolph S. Bourne

• "The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them." --Will Rogers

• "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." - Janis Joplin

• "Hey!  The van's on fire!" -- characters in Friday the 13th Part III,  before realizing it's just their parents smoking up 

• "We know of an ancient radiation that haunts dismembered constellations - a faintly glimmering radio station." - Cake, "Frank Sinatra"

• "People - they get trapped in their own history unless someone shows them a way out." -- Uncle Danny, Unstrung Heroes

• "I'm a biter." -- A little kid at someone's grad party, right before chomping on Sarah's arm.   "I was worried about having to get rabies shots after that," Sarah later said.

• One Halloween night, long ago....

  Kid : Are you a bunny?

  Jill: No, I'm a cat.

  Kid:  You are one fat bunny.

  -- Dialogue from the memory of my friend Jill, ocurring when Jill still dressed up as a cat and went trick-or-treating.  "Kid" is now a massive, 250 lb., six-foot tall wrestler. 

• "And for a moment I lose myself , wrapped up in the pleasures of the world.  I've journeyed here and there and back again, but in the same old haunts I still find my friends . . . I'll make the effort, love can last forever  . . . Tomorrow's just an excuse, and you can make it last, forever you . . ." -- "Thirty-Three," Smashing Pumpkins

• "Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied."-- Pearl S. Buck

• "You're aware the boy failed my grade school math class, I take it? And not that many years later he's teaching college. Now I ask you: Is that the sorriest indictment of the American educational system you ever heard? No aptitude at all for long division, but never mind. It's him they ask to split the atom. How he talked his way into the Nobel prize is beyond me. But then, I suppose it's like the man says, It's not what you know." - Karl Arbeiter, elmentary teacher of Albert Einstein]

• "Come back later. We're having a cat roast." -- workers at Deanna's house when asked by religious zealots if the owners were home.

• "Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being happy." -Robert Anthony 

• "There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it." - Mary Little

• "I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch when it itches ." - Alice Roosevelt Longworth

• "Want a thing long enough and you don't." -- Chinese proverb

• "Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else." -- James M. Barrie

• "High school's better than junior high. They call you names but not as much to your face."  - Mark Weiner, Welcome to the Dollhouse

• "If she were going into prison or something, it'd be different." -- my dad, attempting to console me about a friend leaving for college

• "Everyone should just wear a sign telling who they like. And if your signs match, great.  If they don't, no one makes fun of you, and you change your sign."  - Deanna

• "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick, author

• "For all intents and purposes, this was a love-fest." - ESPN anchor, describing the feeling after Mark McGwire's 62nd home run

• "Perhaps there's a larger lesson to be learned from learning to turn on a snowboard. Often times in life things will be going by too fast for us to remember what the hell we're supposed to do. It's at critical times as this that we must consider if it's better to push the turn, or just take a dive on our ass." -- Luke Seeman, former Northwestern student

• "Try a thing you haven't done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time, to figure out whether you like it or not." -- Virgil Thomson (Advice given at age 93)

• "Day was being destroyed by coming night, and the burst of orange in the sky was like a final flush of blood in the body's system before a being passes away." -- William Inge

• "Are you saying you can't get into his pants?" -- Johnny, not believing that Amanda can't fit into Max's size 27 khakis

• "Life is a gamble at terrible odds--if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it."  - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

• "If I had breasts, I'd weigh 150."  - Josh, on why he weighs less than Tracy

• "It is up to us to give ourselves recognition. If we wait for it to come from others, we feel resentful when it doesn't, and when it does, we may well reject it." -- Bernard Berkowitz

• "The higher up you go, the more sensitive you become. When you're struggling, you're like a fighter. You take the blows and just keep going." -- Alan Jay Lerner

• "I can be McGruff the Crime Dog, and she can be.... the cookie." -- Mike H., on possible costumes for him and his date to the Masquerade Ball

• "We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance." -- Japanese proverb

• "Love, I find, is like singing. Everyone can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much." -- Zora Neale Hurston

• "Shakespeare was an ass."  -- Cleo at 2 a.m., after hours of studying for a Lit. final

• "I just love the name -- 'Operation Desert Fox.' It brings to mind a topless pin-up, or what Playboy would call Miss Arizona in the magazine. I think Desert Fox is a much better name than Desert Storm." --David Sedaris, NPR commentator

• "Never underestimate the power of the Jimmy."  -- Pol, seconds before we ended up in a ditch in icy ski country

• "When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out." - Elizabeth Bowen

• "I just want to end it." -- Mike B., holding his ankle between the blades of a scissors

• "What the hell?  What is this?!  A CIRCUS?!" -- a resident of my dorm on the activities in her suite

• "Keep breathing." -- Sophie Tucker (1884?-1966)

• "There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror." -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

• "It doesn't matter if you're a guy or a girl, you have to do it." -- my roommate on dealing with phlegm

• "...Your love is better than chocolate, better than anything else that I've tried... and oh, love is better than chocolate.... Everyone here knows how to cry. And it's a long way down... It's a long way down to the place where we started from...." -- Sarah McLachlan, "Ice Cream"

• "Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps." - Emo Philips, comic

• "Men are very simplistic beings." -- Allie, my roommate

• "My parents keep asking how school was. It's like saying, 'How was that drive-by shooting?' You don't care how it was, you're lucky to get out alive." -- Angela, My So-Called Life

• "Put anything in my hands and I'll play with it." -- Amanda, on inanimate objects

• "Love is too weak a word. I lerve you. You know, I lo-ove you. I luff you. There are two "f's." I have to invent... of course I love you." -- Woody Allen

• "It's like, 'There's a walrus! And he's wearing a hat!' I don't think I'm getting the full meaning." -- Patrick from across the street, on New Yorker cartoons

• "I'd make a wonderful lesbian." -- Seth, so in touch with the female soul yet he keeps being rejected by heterosexual girls

• "A dork is a dork is a dork." - Judy Markey, author

• "That's what journalism's about. It's sounding stupid." - Greg, Daily Northwestern staffer

• "I think he's English. He looks inbred." -- Beth, on her crush

• "The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well." -- Joe Ancis

• "It'll finally happen and I'll probably call the police." -- Deanna on her wish of having someone she was in love with come to her window at night

• "I was told there'd be no math on this exam." -- Troy, Reality Bites

• "There's no place else with sun and palm trees, except Florida. And Florida's just a bunch of old people." -- my roommate on California

• "Sometimes someone says something really small, and it just fits into this empty place in your heart." -- Angela, My So-Called Life

• "I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry." -- Joseph Heller

• "The more girls, the better." -- Spencer B., on why he won't mind the freshmen girls next year

• "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet, Spaceballs

• "Could I hold your hand, then? Very softly? Could I just hold it and feel the bones underneath and sing them a little song? Could I do that?" -- Rachel Claff, in her play "Stricken"

• "I always wanted to be wild. I always wanted to be the bad child. But it just wasn't in me!" -- Janelle, after hearing her little sister was sent to the principal's office

• "I miss high school, where everyone was the same." -- Tara, 12/98

•  "Don't let your life pass you by ... Weep not for all the memories." -- Sarah McLachlan

• "Do you realize people are having SEX right now?" -- Janelle, 6/98, prom night

• "A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "Look, you're wasting footage. You have everybody come through a door." -- Script writer John Patrick's producer on the difference between writing for stage and film

• "It's the little things, they can pull you under." -- REM

• "Yours was a nice article. Everything else was pick-up this and sex that. I thought, 'What kind of a paper is this?'" -- My grandfather on my story in an alternative paper

• "How come I have to be the one analyzing him in microscopic detail and he gets to be the one with OTHER things on his mind?" -- Angela, My So-Called Life

• "It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backward. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forward."-- Kierkegaard, quoted in the New Yorker