Beth > Beth's Quotes

“My generation was secretive, brooding, ambitious, show-offy, and this generation is congenial. Totally. I imagine them walking around with GPS chips that notify them when a friend is in the vicinity, and their GPSes guide them to each other in clipped electronic lady voices and they sit down side by side in a coffee shop and text-message each other while checking their e-mail and hopping and skipping around Facebook to see who has posted pictures of their weekend.”
― Garrison Keillor

“It is a sin to believe evil of others but it is seldom a mistake.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Demagogues thrive in dim light.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Speak ill of no man, but speak all the good you know of everybody.”
― Ben Franklin

“Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life--and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next.”
― Dean Koontz, Fear Nothing

“Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy.”
― Dean Koontz

“Human beings can always be relied upon to exert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid. ”
― Dean Koontz

“Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton.”
― Dean Koontz

“Where there is cake, there is hope. And there is always cake.”
― Dean Koontz, Life Expectancy

“You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old.”
― George Burns

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously.”
― Tom Robbins

“Just because you're naked doesn't mean you're sexy. Just because you're cynical doesn't mean you're cool.”
― Tom Robbins

“There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid - but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself.”
― Tom Robbins

“Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.”
― tom robbins

“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

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

“A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.”
― Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home

“The most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.”
― Garrison Keillor

“When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.”
― Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America

“When NASA started sending up astronauts, they discovered that ballpoint pens don’t work in zero gravity. So they spent twelve million dollars and more than a decade developing a pen that writes under any condition, on almost every surface. The Russians used a pencil.”
― Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion Pretty Good Joke Book

“The rich can afford to be progressive. Poor people have reason to be afraid of the future.”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“Free enterprise runs on self interest. This is socialism and it runs on loyalty . . . if people were going to live by comparison shopping, the town would go bust . . . If you live there you have to take it as a whole. That's loyalty.”
― garrison keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“Never say anything bad about a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. By then he’s a mile away, you’ve got his shoes, and you can say whatever you want to.”
― Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion Pretty Good Joke Book

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.”
― Lemony Snicket

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“He had always had a passion for life and the idealism he had come across seemed to him for the most part a cowardly shrinking from it. The idealist withdrew himself because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain and since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself with despising his fellows. For Phillip, this type was Hayward, fair, languid, too fat now and rather bald, still cherishing the remains of his good looks and still delicately proposing to do exquisite things in the uncertain future; and at the back of this were whiskey and vulgar amours of the street.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“Because two propositions can be true at once," he said. "Because the world is imperfect. Because we are imperfect. Because sometimes we're called upon to do terrible things. And because we define ourselves in dying, which is," he indicated by motioning with his head toward the arena, "what this is. Give us at least that.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow