Robert Corey > Robert's Quotes

“Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.”
― John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

“Cults In Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace,”
― Henry Doktorski, Gold, Guns and God: Swami Bhaktipada and the West Virginia Hare Krishnas: Vol. 2: A Pioneer community

“Nilkanta Halder, The Indian Gardener”
― Kate Singh, The Frugal Life: How a Family Can Live Under $30,000 and Thrive

“Mary Karr’s Lit”
― Henriette Ivanans, In Pillness and in Health: A Memoir

“Ruth was funny. Her bowling was awful; she just sort of paddled up to the line and dropped the ball. Plok.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“I couldn’t tell, and I cared not at all. It was not her sex appeal but the obvious relish with which she devoured the hamburger that made my pulse begin to hammer with excitement”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“I’d have a store with a row of vending machines in it. You’d push some buttons and out would come your Big Mac, shake, and fries, all prepared automatically. We could do that; I’m sure Jim Schindler could work it out. But we never will. McDonald’s is a people business, and the smile on that counter girl’s face when she takes your order is a vital part of our image.”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“we were accused of having torn down a Greek Revival “landmark” building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so we could build a McDonald’s on the site. The writers failed to mention that the building was a wreck. It had been vandalized and burned before we bought it. The city of Cambridge had refused to designate it as a landmark building.”
― Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

“When people ask me how to start a small business, I say: “Go open one up.” Then grind it out. Make a profit. No one wants”
― David R. Thomas, Dave's Way: The Story of Wendy's and Its Founder

“keep people fired up.”
― David R. Thomas, Dave's Way: The Story of Wendy's and Its Founder

“Dostoevski, Flaubert, Dickens, Hemingway, Faulkner”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Not as rabid a fan as, say, Nicholson Baker, but I do believe that The Poorhouse Fair, Of the Farm, and The Centaur are all great books, maybe classics. And even since ’81’s Rabbit Is Rich—as his characters seemed to become more and more repellent, and without any corresponding sign that the author understood that they were repellent—”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“None of the other famous phallocrats of Updike’s generation—not Mailer, not Exley or Roth or even Bukowski—excites such violent dislike.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“his foray into the futuristic-dystopic tradition of Huxley and Ballard and soft sci-”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“tortoiseshell specs they love to take off and nibble the arm of, plus”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Suppose, let’s say, you’ve got a candidate who says polls are bullshit and totally refuses to tailor his campaign style to polls, and suppose then that new polls start showing that people really like this candidate’s polls-are-bullshit stance and are thinking about voting for him because of it, and suppose the candidate reads these polls (who wouldn’t?) and then starts saying even more loudly and often that polls are bullshit and that he won’t use them to decide what to say, maybe turning “Polls are bullshit” into a campaign line and repeating it in every speech and even painting Polls Are Bullshit on the side of his bus… . Is he a hypocrite? Is”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way — hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing. (back to text)”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“feel a bit like the character in the novel Kim who signed his letters, "Written by Sobrao Satai, Failed Entrance Allahabad University".”
― Bhakta Jim, The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim

“Robert Lifton wrote a book called Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism.”
― Bhakta Jim, The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim

“the others were ex-Moonies and ex-Divine Light Mission.”
― Bhakta Jim, The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim

“Naked Lunch”
― Trish MacEnulty, The Hummingbird Kiss: My Life as an Addict in the 1970s

“neckbones”
― Trish MacEnulty, The Hummingbird Kiss: My Life as an Addict in the 1970s

“Dolly had some type of fucked up eating disorder that Beagles can get because of their heightened sense of smell.”
― Joseph William Simmons, Memories of Turtle

“Finally, I set some reassuring limits to whatever tribulations I might have to endure. First, I would always have a car. In Key West I drove my own; in other cities I used Rent-A-Wrecks, which I paid for with a credit card rather than my earnings. Yes, I could have walked more or limited myself to jobs accessible by public transportation. I just figured that a story about waiting for buses would not be very interesting to read. Second,”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

“She personally read Sam Walton’s book (his autobiography, Made in America)”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

“Dretske.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“F.R.G.-era BMW cycle”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“squads up the Comm. Ave. hills into East Newton”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“In Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge,”
― David "Awol" Miller, AWOL on the Appalachian Trail

“William Styron’s Darkness Visible, Elyn Saks’s The Center Cannot Hold, Kay Redfield Jamison’s Night Falls Fast, Madness by Marya Hornbacher, and, of course, genius Daniel Smith’s masterpiece on anxiety, Monkey Mind. (Full disclosure:”
― Maria Bamford, Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere