David Shields Quotes
Are black people conscious of how excruciatingly self-conscious white people have become in their every interaction with black people? Is this self-consciousness an improvement? Maybe not, because I'm thinking of people in categories rather than as people, which is a famously dangerous thing to do.
Quotes to Explore
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I realized pretty soon that I have to do more than just play bass in the background way. So, I developed a kind of playing which only a handful of musicians accepted.
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I was quite nervous about meeting William's father, but he was very, very welcoming, very friendly, it couldn't have gone easier really for me.
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It sounds kind of stupid, but I've never not wanted to be a musician. It's been inside me since I was little so I don't know what else I would do.
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The marketability, the success of a book, ultimately rests with whether or not people will find the concept/characters/title/cover appealing.
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It's no longer a question of staying healthy. It's a question of finding a sickness you like.
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Speaking is physically difficult for me.
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I grew up with a pet iguana named Willy. We had a very contentious relationship. It turns out that iguanas are not meant to live in suburban homes.
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I'm into the whole American and New York vibe, not just because that's what's going on around me but because of the fit. A lot of guys are into the European cut, but I can't really pull that off with my body type - I'm tall and have big legs.
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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
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If we had this back, and in full measure; if society were infused by it, through and through, and men lived its life, and in its life, philosophy would take care of itself and the nature of our institutions would not matter.
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The Arab spring was not as radical as the French or Iranian revolutions. It did not pull out the deeply entrenched roots of the state. Instead, it was satisfied to replace the top of the pyramid with newly elected, but inexperienced, leaders.
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Do we care about these people that are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined? Those are the people I'm the most concerned about. Every night I think about this.
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Public and employer opinion often defeat society's best interests with a prejudice against middle-aged women.
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Sometimes, success almost haunts you. You want to be the best at everything you do and know you have to work hard.
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I never publicise in advance what I'm going to be singing because I never quite know until I start. I often change my mind halfway through. I sometimes throw in stuff about politics or Shakespeare or do songs in Yiddish.
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The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
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It's part of the job to compensate for outfit.
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New Orleans lives by the water and fights it, a sand castle set on a sponge nine feet below sea level, where people made music from heartache, named their drinks for hurricanes and joked that one day you'd be able to tour the city by gondola.
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I try to be aware of my kids' autonomy in terms of my Instagram, but I do post them a lot. I would never want to post something that would embarrass them or that later they'd feel some sort of shame for.
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I was basically a dork that hit the books and liked to build things and did all of the things that you weren't supposed to do to be popular. But somehow I ended up onstage, playing guitar in front of everybody else.
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When I work, I work non-stop and so hard that I barely get time to see anything but the set and home. So whenever I am done with one show, I go into my globetrotter mode and just pick a place and disappear for a while.
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Anytime you're writing stories about a group of people with whom you have limited experience, there's a lot of guesswork.
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When I got to the Mavericks people were all giving me advice - change this, change that - and one thing that I didn't do was fire anybody.
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Are black people conscious of how excruciatingly self-conscious white people have become in their every interaction with black people? Is this self-consciousness an improvement? Maybe not, because I'm thinking of people in categories rather than as people, which is a famously dangerous thing to do.
