Grace > Grace's Quotes

“listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go”
― E.E. Cummings

“Be of love (a little)
More careful
Than everything”
― E. E. Cummings

“You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and—
Just tired.
So am I.”
― E.E. Cummings

“I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
I fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)I want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)”
― E.E. Cummings

“Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., A Man Without a Country

“I can have oodles of charm when I want to.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“There ain't no devil, only God when he's drunk.”
― Tom Waits

“My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day.

I told them this story:
In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.”
― Tom Waits

“Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On”
― Tom Waits

“A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn't.”
― Tom Waits

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”
― Tom Waits

“Never have your wallet with you onstage. It's bad luck. You shouldn't play the piano with money in your pocket. Play like you need the money.
Tom Waits (to me, about 1986 or so)”
― Tom Waits

“The piano has been drinking, not me.”
― Tom Waits

“Oh, I'm not a percussionist, I just like to hit things.”
― Tom Waits

“When the weather's rough and it's whiskey in the rain it's best to wrap your savior up in cellophane.”
― Tom Waits

“I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”
― Tom Waits

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.”
― Tom Waits

“Most vagabonds i knowed don't ever want to find the culprit that remains the object of their long relentless quest. The obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending, the pursuit you see and never the arrest" - Tom Waits "Foreign Affairs”
― Tom Waits

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut