Dana Stabenow > Dana's Quotes

“Live your life in such a way that the Westboro Baptist Church will want to picket your funeral.”
― Brandon Fibbs

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
― William Morris

“Hell is the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do...For me that conception of hell lies in two words: Too late!”
― Gian-Carlo Menotti

“There's nothing militant about Jesus. I don't read anything like that in any of the gospels. Peter drew his sword and cut off the servant's ear, and Jesus said, "Put back thy sword, Peter." But Peter has had his sword out and at work ever since.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“Daddy always said that Christmas is a joyous season when suicides and holdups and shoplifting and like that reach a new high and that the best place to spend the whole thing is a Moslem country.”
― Patrick Dennis, The Joyous Season

“Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“What's friendship's realest measure?
I'll tell you. The amount of precious time you'll squander on someone else's calamities and fuck-ups.”
― Richard Ford

“What did I want?
I wanted a Roc's egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword,. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get u feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a like wench for my droit du seigneur--I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.
I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, "The game's afoot!" I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin.
I wanted Prestor John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be--instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road

“Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it like Ahab with the White Whale. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone. Even in matriarchal societies I doubt that there were ever female Beowulfs. Women lie with gods and demons but they don’t go looking for monsters to fight with. Ariadne gave Theseus a clew but the Minotaur was his business.”
― Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary

“Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset.”
― John D. MacDonald

“You're born. You live. You go on some diets. You die.”
― Opus

“Before it is science and career, before it is livelihood, before even it is family or love, freedom is sound sleep and safety to notice the play of morning sun.”
― Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb

“Ancient astronauts didn't build the pyramids. Human beings built the pyramids, because they're clever and they work hard.”
― Gene Roddenberry

“One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.”
― Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent

“For I think we may look upon our little private war with death somewhat in this light. If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a journey, he will have a bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon all his extravagances as so much gained upon thieves....So every bit of brisk living, and above all when it is healthful, is just so much gained upon the wholesale filcher, death. We shall have the less in our pockets, the more in our stomachs, when he cries stand and deliver. --An Inland Voyage”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“You can't throw too much style into a miracle.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.”
― E.B. White, Essays of E.B. White

“There commenced an epic snit.”
― Michael Perry, Truck: A Love Story

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

“If cyberspace can screw with you, it will.”
― Dana Stabenow

“When you put four Alaskans into a room, you have five marriages, six divorces, and seven political parties.”
― Dana Stabenow

“Suicide by Alaska.”
― Dana Stabenow, A Deeper Sleep

“That's some f***ing doorman you've got there, Ms. Shugak.”
― Dana Stabenow, A Cold Day for Murder

“A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.”
― Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World as Stage

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“Now have ado with a man!”
― Ellis Peters, The Virgin in the Ice

“How is your writing going, Michael?"

"Still from the top of the page on down, Mrs. Raglan.”
― Frederic Raphael, After the War

“Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices.”
― Pearl Cleage, Deals With the Devil: And Other Reasons to Riot

“Live with intention.
Walk to the edge.
Listen Hard.
Practice wellness.
Play with abandon.
Laugh.
Choose with no regret.
Appreciate your friends.
Continue to learn.
Do what you love.
Live as if this is all there is.”
― Mary Anne Radmacher