Tag: Quotes

Donald Sutherland and Robert DeNiro – Quotes on the Acting Business, Interview Magazine

REZNOR: You thought, why’d they pick that take?

DASTMALCHIAN: Why did they pick me? To me, it was the only part of the movie that didn’t look like a real movie. It almost looked like home video. But process is everything to me, because I have no control when I walk away. If I love the process, which I really did on Late Night with the Devil, I genuinely let go. And then when it’s time to see the thing, I have no assumptions. I can think fondly of the experience making it. I’ve had experiences that were quite negative and then the product turned out fine, but I don’t really care for it.

REZNOR: That’s interesting. I had read long ago, at least I think I did, De Niro being asked, essentially, why are you in shitty movies? And his response was similar to yours. “It’s the process. I haven’t even seen some of the films, but I’m doing it because it was exciting to me, regardless of the context or the film that’s contained within. And I thought, “Really?” It felt like a stretch from my own perspective of being so attached to the work I do. But then again, scoring has opened my eyes to a lot of that same thing of, I’m part of the whole, I’m not the whole whole, and there’s a futility involved in trying to control things you can’t control.

DASTMALCHIAN: Yes.

How David Dastmalchian and Trent Reznor Tamed Their Demons

GUGINO: I’ll say two things, and then I’m really curious about your experience. One, on Red Hot, I was 18 and I was working with Donald Sutherland. He played my dad and, at one point towards the end of the shoot, he said, “Carla, do you know that feeling when you finish a job and you think you’re never going to work again?” I said, “Yes!” and I’m waiting for this advice, and he says, “It never ends.” That was great advice because he’s Donald Sutherland, he’s worked for his entire life, and if this man feels that way at this age, this is really good for me to remember.

Carla Gugino and Lena Headey Trade Hollywood War Stories

Intellect – Quotes from Emerson Essay

“The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual.”

“The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions..”

“Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where did he get this? and think there was something divine in his life. But no; they have myriads of facts just as good, would they only get a lamp to ransack their attics withal.”

“It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until by and by we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.”

“How wearisome the grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic, or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a single topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison also. I cannot see what you see, because I am caught up by a strong wind and blown so far in one direction that I am out of the hoop of your horizon.”

Intellect
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sufficient Unto the Day is the Evil Thereof – Aphorism, Meaning of

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” is an aphorism which appears in the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew chapter 6 — Matthew 6:34.

The wording comes from the King James Version and the full verse reads: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

It implies that we should not worry about the future, since each day contains an ample burden of evils and suffering.

Wikipedia


By Evelyn Simak, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14023625

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – Quotes from

Clementine: This is it, Joel. It’s going to be gone soon.
Joel: I know.
Clementine: What do we do?
Joel: Enjoy it.

[Mary reads to Dr. Mierzwiak out of “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations”; the lines are from Alexander Pope’s poem “Eloisa to Abelard”]
Mary: How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! / The world forgetting, by the world forgot / Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! / Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.

Joel: Constantly talking isn’t necessarily communicating.

[last lines]
Joel: I can’t see anything that I don’t like about you.
Clementine: But you will! But you will. You know, you will think of things. And I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me.
Joel: Okay.
Clementine: [pauses] Okay.

Mary: Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.
[they click glasses]
Mary: Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. Found it in my Bartlett’s.

Seeing God in the Everyday – Two Quotes

One of my favorite images can be found in the Book of Jeremiah, which is especially useful for those who fear God may be the evil trickster inviting them to change, only to trap them into a miserable life. Jeremiah’s God says otherwise: “‘Surely I know the plans I have for you,’ says the LORD, ‘plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope’” (Jer. 29:11). God wants only the best for you, says Jeremiah.

You may also find some newer, more modern, images like the God of Surprises, who astonishes you with new and unexpected invitations to grow. Or perhaps you’ll come up with images of your own. One Jesuit friend was once on a long cross-country trip and ended up stranded in an unfamiliar airport, with all his flights canceled. A cheery travel agent patiently helped him sort everything out so he could book a new flight. It was a striking image of God, he said: someone who helps you find your way home.

The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life
James Martin

“My, how foolish I am!” my friend cries, suddenly alert, like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven. “You know what I’ve always thought?” she asks in a tone of discovery, and not smiling at me but a point beyond. “I’ve always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don’t know it’s getting dark. And it’s been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I’ll wager it never happens. I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are”—her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone—“just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”

A Christmas Memory
Truman Capote

Tolstoy – A Calendar of Wisdom – September 26

All true wisdom and all true faith are clearly expressed in the same moral law.

All the world is subject to one law, and all thinking beings have the same basic intellect. Therefore, all wise men share the same idea of perfection.
—MARCUS AURELIUS

The more I dedicate my time to two things, the more they fill my life with ever-increasing pleasure. The first is the sky above me, and the second is the moral law within me.
—IMMANUEL KANT

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
—MATTHEW 7:12

Moral law is so obvious and clear that even people who do not know the law have no excuse for violating it. They have only one recourse: to deny their intellect, which they do.

A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul
Leo Tolstoy, Leo.

Trainspotting – Desultory Quotes

Mark “Rent-boy” Renton: [narrating] Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?

Mark “Rent-boy” Renton: [narrates] When you’re on junk you have only one worry: scoring. When you’re off it you are suddenly obliged to worry about all sorts of other shite. Got no money: can’t get pissed. Got money: drinking too much. Can’t get a bird: no chance of a ride. Got a bird: too much hassle. You have to worry about bills, about food, about some football team that never fucking wins, about human relationships and all the things that really don’t matter when you’ve got a sincere and truthful junk habit.

Diane: You’re not getting any younger, Mark. The world’s changing. Music’s changing. Even drugs are changing. You can’t stay in here all day dreaming about heroin and Ziggy Pop.
Mark “Rent-boy” Renton: It’s Iggy Pop.
Diane: Whatever. I mean, the guy’s dead anyway.
Mark “Rent-boy” Renton: Iggy Pop’s not dead. He toured last year! Tommy went to see him.
Diane: The point is, you’ve got to find something new.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117951/quotes/

Loss of WWI Youth – Chariots of Fire Speech

Master of Caius: I take the war list, and I run down it. Name after name which I cannot read, and which we – who are older than you – cannot hear without emotion. Names which will be only names to you, the new college, but which to us summon up face after face, full of honesty and goodness, zeal and vigor, and intellectual promise. The flower of a generation, the glory of England – and they died for England, and all that England stands for. And now, by tragic necessity, their dreams have become yours. Let me exhort you: Examine yourselves. Let each of you discover where your true chance of greatness lies. For their sakes – for the sake of your college, and your country – seize this chance. Rejoice in it, and let no power or persuasion deter you in your task.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082158/quotes/?ref_=tt_trv_qu

Waking Life – Quotes from


Waking Life


Soap Opera Woman: Excuse me.

Wiley: Excuse me.

Soap Opera Woman: Hey. Could we do that again? I know we haven’t met, but I don’t want to be an ant. You know? I mean, it’s like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one another, continously on ant autopilot, with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient, polite manner. “Here’s your change.” “Paper or plastic?’ “Credit or debit?” “You want ketchup with that?” I don’t want a straw. I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don’t want to give that up. I don’t want to be ant, you know?
…

Man on TV: A single ego is an absurdly narrow vantage from which to view this experience. And where most consider their individual relationship to the universe, I contemplate relationships of my various selves to one another.
…

Kim Krizan: Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration and this is where I think language came from. I mean, it came from our desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one another. And it had to be easy when it was just simple survival. Like you know, “water.” We came up with a sound for that. Or saber tooth tiger right behind you. We came up with a sound for that. But when it gets really interesting I think is when we use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we’re experiencing. What is like… frustration? Or what is anger or love? When I say love, the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person’s ear, travels through this byzantine conduit in their brain through their memories of love or lack of love, and they register what I’m saying and they say yes, they understand. But how do I know they understand? Because words are inert. They’re just symbols. They’re dead, you know? And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It’s unspeakable. And yet you know, when we communicate with one another and we feel that we have connected and we think that we’re understood I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion. And that feeling might be transient, but I think it’s what we live for.
…

Boat Car Guy: Man this must be like… parallel universe night. You know that cat that was just in here? Just ran out the door? Well, he comes up to the counter, you know, and I say “What’s the word, turd?” And he lays down this burrito and he kind of looks at me, kind of stares at me and says, “I have but recently returned from the valley of the shadow of death. I’m rapturously breathing in all the odors and essences of life. I’ve been to the brink of total oblivion. I remember and ferment the desire to remember everything.”

Wiley: So, what did you say to that?

Boat Car Guy: Well, I mean, what could I say? I said, “If you’re going to microwave that burrito, I want you to poke holes in the plastic wrapping because they explode. And I’m tired of cleaning up your little burrito doings. You dig me?”

Rikers – Quotes from Oral History

TAMI LEE, retired correction officer, 1989 to 2020: I never smiled for thirty years. I never smiled at that job one time. Sometimes I’d have to think about it—like, “Smile.” I didn’t want to smile so they could think I was playing with them because I was not playing with them.

CASIMIRO TORRES, detained various stints, 1980s to 2000s: I had a girl one time, I used to go to this twenty-four-hour store after I came out of prison, late at night, and after a few times she started calling me Smiley. I said, “Why do you call me that?” And she said, “Because you’ve never smiled.” And it had never occurred to me that I hadn’t smiled in years and years. I had my prison face on wherever I went. It’s something that clings to you, like the smell of shit. You have to really wash it off.

ANNA GRISTINA, detained 2012: I was in the bullpen, waiting at the processing area. There was a woman. These girls were going, “She needs to get to the doctor. She’s shaking on the floor.” A couple minutes later, everyone is screaming. The guards, they are having their lunch. This sergeant with braids, she says, “Shut the fuck up! Mind your own business!”

We were looking and we saw this woman from across the pen, froth coming out of her mouth. She’s having a seizure. She’s vomiting foam. The guard says, “Mind your business. You’re in enough trouble. Keep your mouth shut.” We came back from a lawyer visit, and they had taken her out on a gurney, dead. The guards had denied her medical, and she died. I don’t know her name or her age.

She [the woman who died] had covers over her body when they took her out. She had been screaming for hours for help. She had been half the day in the holding pen with no water, no nothing, having seizures. I’ll never forget the feeling of telling my lawyers a woman died in there and they shrugged their shoulders.

JERRY DEAN, detained 1987, 2003: The last day I was leaving Rikers when I was sixteen, I sat in the corner, they drive me upstate [to the Goshen Secure Center], and I remember somebody said, when you leave Rikers, don’t ever look back, don’t look back in the car or the bus, or else you’ll come back. So I didn’t want to look back.

Rikers: An Oral History
Graham Rayman, Reuven Blau

The Difficulty of Self Expression – Flaubert and Mayor Daley

Daley, who never lost his blue-collar Chicago accent, was known for often mangling his syntax and other verbal gaffes. Daley made one of his most memorable verbal missteps in 1968, while defending what the news media reported as police misconduct during that year’s violent Democratic convention, stating, “Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all – the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.” Daley’s reputation for misspeaking was such that his press secretary Earl Bush would tell reporters, “Write what he means, not what he says.”

Wikipedia

…human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to Pity.

Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert

Desultory Kierkegaard Quotes

No one teaches joy better than one who is joyful oneself.

Indeterminableness is the basis of dizziness … Therefore the remedy for dizziness is limitation; and in the spiritual sense all discipline is limitation.

The Omniscient One does not find out anything about the person confessing, but instead the person confessing finds out something about himself.

It is a slow death to let oneself be trampled to death by geese, and to let oneself be worn to death by envy is also a slow way of dying.

To pray is also to breathe, and possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing.

The Quotable Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard

Six Steps to Live By – Harvey Fierstein

1. Pursue the truth.
2. Learn something new.
3. Accept yourself and you’ll accept others, too.
4. Let love shine.
5. Let pride be your guide.
6. You change the world when you change your mind.

From the musical Kinky Boots, Harvey Fierstein/Cindi Lauper

I’ve also seen the quote credited to Robert Frost! Included in that speech was my off-the-cuff Twelve Step Program to Happiness. I was able to find a copy on the Internet and went through it with Cyndi. She picked through my twelve and came up with a brilliant Six Steps to Live By.

I Was Better Last Night
Harvey Fierstein