Phyllis > Phyllis's Quotes

“If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”
― David Sedaris, Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays

“I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.”
― Bill Bryson, Lost Continent: Travels In Small-Town America

“While I fear that we're drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we're defined by what embraces us.”
― J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar: A Memoir

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“It takes just as many men to build a sturdy man, son, as it does to build a tower. You will look back on this time and remember remarkably little of it, excpt the extent to which I tried or did not try.”
― J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar: A Memoir

“I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“The moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep.”
― Alice Hoffman , Practical Magic

“There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.”
― Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

“So be sure when you step, Step with care and great tact. And remember that life's A Great Balancing Act. And will you succeed? Yes! You will, indeed! (98 and ¾ percent guaranteed) Kid, you'll move mountains.”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go!

“Have you ever noticed how ‘What the hell’ is always the right decision to make?”
― Terry Johnson, Insignificance

“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

“My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that?”
― Bob Hope

“Ordinarily, anyone who made such a remark to my face would go to the top of my short list for strychnine.”
― Alan Bradley, Speaking from Among the Bones

“Most of all, we love a good study. Newscasters know instinctively that the best way to get people’s ears to perk up is with these five words: “A new study has found.” It matters little what follows next. A new study has found that red wine is good for you / kills you. A new study has found that homework dulls the brain / enlarges it. We especially like studies that lend credibility to our own idiosyncrasies, as in, “A new study has found that people with messy desks are smarter” or “A new study has found that moderate daily flatulence improves longevity.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

“They always said, that once you've been to Milwaukee, you're never the same.”
― Fannie Flagg, The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion

“There is nothing more precious walking on this earth than you are. You are a child of God. So hold up your head and believe in yourself.”
― Lynda Blackmon Lowery, Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March

“Every once in a while, Momma would make me go to Sunday school with Joey. Even though it was just a bunch of singing and coloring in coloring books and listening to Mrs. Davidson, I had learned one thing. I learned about getting saved. I learned how someone could come to you when you were feeling real, real bad and could take all of your problems away and make you feel better. I learned that the person who saved you, your personal saver, was sent by God to protect you and to help you out.”
― Christopher Paul Curtis, The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963

“I wish that in order to secure his party’s nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickenson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Two Sleepy People”, Johnny Cash’s “Five Feet High and Rising”, and “You Got the Silver” by the Rolling Stones...What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“A man is the stories he tells about himself and most of those stories are lies. And never look too closely if you uncover his lies, it will humiliate you both. Its best to just live with the bullshit.” Then her mother kissed her head, patted her cheek, told her she was safe.”
― Dennis Lehane, Since We Fell

“Eve was not taken out of Adam's head to top him, neither out of his feet to be trampled on by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected by him, and near his heart to be loved by him.”
― Matthew Henry

“Here’s what I believe: 1. If you are offended or hurt when you hear Hillary Clinton or Maxine Waters called bitch, whore, or the c-word, you should be equally offended and hurt when you hear those same words used to describe Ivanka Trump, Kellyanne Conway, or Theresa May. 2. If you felt belittled when Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables” then you should have felt equally concerned when Eric Trump said “Democrats aren’t even human.” 3. When the president of the United States calls women dogs or talks about grabbing pussy, we should get chills down our spine and resistance flowing through our veins. When people call the president of the United States a pig, we should reject that language regardless of our politics and demand discourse that doesn’t make people subhuman. 4. When we hear people referred to as animals or aliens, we should immediately wonder, “Is this an attempt to reduce someone’s humanity so we can get away with hurting them or denying them basic human rights?” 5. If you’re offended by a meme of Trump Photoshopped to look like Hitler, then you shouldn’t have Obama Photoshopped to look like the Joker on your Facebook feed. There is a line. It’s etched from dignity. And raging, fearful people from the right and left are crossing it at unprecedented rates every single day. We must never tolerate dehumanization—the primary instrument of violence that has been used in every genocide recorded throughout history.”
― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss