Peter > Peter's Quotes

“Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“You have a choice. Live or die.
Every breath is a choice.
Every minute is a choice.
Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“...I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like "It" were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading William James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down. Where, I ask you, have I been, that no true word of Madame Glyn's literary feats has come to me?

But even those far, far better informed than I must work a bit over the opening sentence of Madame Glyn's foreword to her novel" "This is not," the says, drawing her emeralds warmly about her, "the story of the moving picture entitled It, but a full character study of the story It, which the people in the picture read and discuss." I could go mad, in a nice way, straining to figure that out.

...Well it turns out that Ava and John meet, and he begins promptly to "vibrate with passion." ...
...It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam launches."

-Review of the book, It, by Elinor Glyn. Review title: Madame Glyn Lectures on "It," with Illustrations; November 26, 1927.”
― Dorothy Parker, Constant Reader: 2

“...It's not that she has not tried to improve her condition before acknowledging its hopelessness. (Oh, come on, let's get the hell out of this, and get into the first person.) I have sought, by study, to better my form and make myself Society's Darling. You see, I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock about a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen, but I thought that maybe I might be the girl to start the vogue. I would become brilliant. I would sparkle. I would hold whole dinner tables spellbound. I would have throngs fighting to come within hearing distance of me while the weakest, elbowed mercilessly to the outskirts, would cry "What did she say?" or "Oh, please ask her to tell it again." That's what I would do. Oh I could just hear myself."

-Review of the books, Favorite Jokes of Famous People, by Bruce Barton; The Technique of the Love Affair by "A Gentlewoman." (Actually by Doris Langley Moore.) Review title: Wallflower's Lament; November 17, 1928.”
― Dorothy Parker, Constant Reader: 2

“Hence," goes on the professor, "definitions of happiness are interesting." I suppose the best thing to do with that is to let is pass. Me, I never saw a definition of happiness that could detain me after train-time, but that may be a matter of lack of opportunity, of inattention, or of congenital rough luck. If definitions of happiness can keep Professor Phelps on his toes, that is little short of dandy. We might just as well get on along to the next statement, which goes like this: "One of the best" (we are still on definitions of happiness) "was given in my Senior year at college by Professor Timothy Dwight: 'The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.'" Promptly one starts recalling such Happiness Boys as Nietzche, Socrates, de Maupassant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Poe.”
― Dorothy Parker, Constant Reader: 2

“It is that word 'hunny,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”
― Dorothy Parker, Constant Reader: 2

“[...] nothing comes from comfort but the fear of losing it, and that's exactly where my generation made its big mistake. Yet discomfort's no good either. There's just no winning, is there? Do it one way and lose your soul; do it the other way and lose your livelihood. You guys who run the world, you've got all the bases covered.”
― Duke Haney, Banned for Life

“[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.”
― Simon Van Booy

“The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back.”
― Abigail Van Buren

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx

“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
― Woody Allen

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde