Lake Wobegon Days Quotes

“If you lived today as if it were your last, you'd buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn't you?”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“He was admired for never being at a loss for words and never wasting any either.”
― garrison keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“You're such a big liar you gotta get your neighbor to call your dog.”
― garrison keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“The rich can afford to be progressive. Poor people have reason to be afraid of the future.”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“I can see how I could write a bold account of myself as a passionate man who rose from humble beginnings to cut a wide swath in the world, whose crimes along the way might be written off to extravagance and love and art, and could even almost believe some of it myself on certain days after the sun went down if I’d had a snort or two and was in Los Angeles and it was February and I was twenty-four, but I find a truer account in the Herald-Star, where it says: “Mr. Gary Keillor visited at the home of Al and Florence Crandall on Monday and after lunch returned to St. Paul, where he is currently employed in the radio show business… Lunch was fried chicken with gravy and creamed peas”.”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“If you can't read a simple goddam sign and follow one simple goddam instruction then get your fat butt the hell out of here.”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“Free enterprise runs on self interest. This is socialism and it runs on loyalty . . . if people were going to live by comparison shopping, the town would go bust . . . If you live there you have to take it as a whole. That's loyalty.”
― garrison keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“My God, rich people have the time to praise You if they want to, but the poor people are so busy, accept their work as praise because, my God, they don’t have time for everything.”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“... you are never so smart again in a language learned in middle age nor so romantic, brave or kind.”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“Good old Norwegian cooking: you don't read much about that, or about good old Norwegian hospitality.”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o'clock and time to get  up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o'clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulators that Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to achieve perfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was - as anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa,when his house burned down when Grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the rest of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor ( which faced north as his former bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and then moved in his mind to the house he'd grown up in, and in the end didn't know one day from another until he died." Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," but there's more than one kind of of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great-grandpa. He died of misdirection.”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“A major cause of injury to children is parents rushing to the scene. The panic reflex. Some children love to scream for the thrill of making immense people move fast. I remember that, on a quiet day, my sister and I in the backyard wondered, “Where’s Mom?” Upstairs, we thought. So I screamed, “MOM.” She made it down in two seconds. A good pair of wheels for an old lady.”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“He (coach) looks for size, speed being rare among Norwegians and Germans, and for malleability or what he calls attitude.”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“smake saa god vaer saa god du er saa snille mange takk mange mange takk.”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days