Air Quotes - Page 99

It was very painful combing my hair. My grand-uncle was a Pentecostal bishop, and he was very strict: our hair couldn't be permed or straightened. So I just cut it all off.

When a man is in love very little is enough to throw him into despair and as little to enhance his joy to the utmost.

The laissez-faire argument relies on the same tacit appeal to perfection as does communism.

Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

Never get on an airplane if the pilot is wearing a hat that has more than three pastel colors.

Leftovers make you feel good twice. First, when you put it away, you feel thrifty and intelligent: 'I'm saving food!' Then a month later when blue hair is growing out of the ham, and you throw it away, you feel really intelligent: 'I'm saving my life!'

By common consent, gray hairs are a crown of glory: the only object of respect that can never excite envy.

The thought of people in this day and age sitting down to listen to a radio variety show on Saturday evening is rather implausible and was even more so in 1974 when we started “A Prairie Home Companion.” Thank goodness Minnesota Public Radio was too poor to afford good advice or the show never would've got on the air. We only did it because we knew it would be fun to do. It was a dumb idea. I wish I knew how to be that dumb again.

Revenge is barren of itself: it is the dreadful food it feeds on; its delight is murder, and its end is despair.

Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'.

I used to break a lot of clubs. I probably was a little different than your average junior player. I did have a lot longer hair and a lot more brown hair. But my demeanor, you know, really from maybe my second, third year on Tour, has gotten a lot more even keel.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

The whole music business in the United States is based on numbers, based on unit sales and not on quality. It's not based on beauty, it's based on hype and it's based on cocaine. It's based on giving presents of large packages of dollars to play records on the air.

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

When a youth was giving himself airs in the Theatre and saying, 'I am wise, for I have conversed with many wise men,' Epictetus replied, 'I too have conversed with many rich men, yet I am not rich!’.

But I like to swim. At high school, I tried out for the swim team. I shaved off all my body hair, and that extra burst of speed from all the bullies shouting Kill the fairy.

On a superficial level, I like girls with dark hair - I'm a sucker for that.

I crossed the room, and what you did was to feel my hair over and over again and in different ways, touch it, with the palm of your hand... felt it, strands of hair, with your fingers, touched it as if it were cloth, the way a child touches its favorite surfaces.

Reporters no longer ask for verification, thus they print charges no matter how outlandish they may seem, and once having done that, when the truth comes out, it's buried in the back page or never makes it on the air at all.

I'm known among my friends for saying things I probably shouldn't sometimes, but I have to get things out in the air.

Among well bred people a mutual deference is affected, contempt for others is disguised; authority concealed; attention given to each in his turn; and an easy stream of conversation maintained without vehemence, without interruption, without eagerness for victory, and without any airs of superiority.

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.

Why bother choosing a certain chair? Because that chair says something about you.

For indeed Christianity was complicit in the death of antiquity, and in the birth of modernity, not because it was an accomplice of the latter, but because it, alone in the history of the West, constituted a rejection of and alternative to nihilism's despair, violence, and idolatry of power; as such, Christianity shattered the imposing and enchanting facade behind which nihilism once hid, and thereby, inadvertently, called it forth into the open.