Garrison Keillor Quotes - Page 4

I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.

If the marriage needs help, the answer almost always is have more fun. Drop your list of grievances and go ride a roller coaster.

Sex is not a mechanical act that fails for lack of technique, and it is not a performance by the male for the audience of the female; it is a continuum of attraction that extends from the simplest conversation and the most innocent touching through the act of coitus.

You don't have to justify a beautiful stroke of good luck. Accept it. Smile and say thank you.

Children can find other children to be pals. Children need fathers to be fathers.

A compassionate conservative is someone who electrocutes juveniles but lets them have a last 'make a wish'.

When it comes to finding available men in Minnesota, the odds are good, but the goods are odd.

Secret of life is to go through something harrowing that doesnt kill you...and to love one woman for the rest of your life.

Adolescence hits boys harder than it does girls. Girls bleed a little and their breasts pop out, big deal, but adolescence lands on a guy with both feet. . . . Your body is engulfed by chemicals of rage and despair, you pound, you shriek, you batter your head against the trees. You come away wounded, feeling that life is unknowable, can never be understood, only endured and sometimes cheated.

Ha! Easy for nuns to talk about giving up things. That's what they do for a living.

Give up your good 'Christian' life and follow Jesus

God plays a lot of jokes on us to get our attention.

An interesting thing about New York City is that the subways run through the sewers.

I am a cheerful man, even in the dark, and it's all thanks to a good Lutheran mother. . . . Mother was well composed, a true Lutheran, and taught me to Cheer up, Make yourself useful, Mind your manners, and above all, Don't feel sorry for yourself.

Spending time in a church does not make you religious, any more than spending time in a garage makes you a car.

When the New Yorker turned down work, they turned it down in such an elaborately gentlemanly way making apologies for their own shortsightedness. Undoubtedly it was their fault but somehow for some reason this fell short of the remarkably high standard that you by your own work have set for yourself. They had a way of rejecting my work that made me feel sorry for them somehow.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

Vodka is tasteless going down, but it is memorable coming up.

A married guy is responsible for everything, no matter what. Women, thanks to their having been oppressed all these years, are blameless, free as birds, and all the dirt they do is the result of premenstrual syndrome or postmenstrual stress or menopause or emotional disempowerment by their fathers or low expectations by their teachers or latent unspoken sexual harassment in the workplace, or some other airy excuse. The guy alone is responsible for every day of marriage that is less than marvelous and meaningful.

You've got work to do. Don't put this off. And don't take the long view, here. You know? Life is today and tomorrow and - and if you're lucky, next week.

We writers don't really think about whether what we write is good or not. It's too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.

America of the future will be all malls connected by interstates. All because your parents no longer can their own tomatoes.

Have interesting failures.... If you need to have a personal crisis have it now. Don't wait until midlife, when it will take longer to resolve.... Don't pity yourselves. Lighten up. Seek people with a sense of humor. Avoid humorless people-and do not marry one, for God's sake.

Marrying for sex is like flying to London for the free peanuts and pretzels. It's not the point of the thing, is it?

Not everyone has a Life's Work. Some people simply have a Life.