Roy Blount, Jr. Quotes
According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
Quotes to Explore
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You can't show up at the bedside and then turn on your skills. You have to keep your game sharp all the time.
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I'm inspired every time I see a role I'd like to play, an actor turn in a well crafted performance, a story I'd like to tell, direct or produce.
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That's the American way. If little kids don't aspire to make money like I did, what the hell good is this country?
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I don't think about tennis 24/7. I enjoy time on the lake at my Florida home and just being lazy on the sofa.
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I'm very much bigger than I was, so what? It's not really fatness, it's development.
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The queers of the sixties, like those since, have connived with their repression under a veneer of respectability. Good mannered city queens in suits and pinstripes, so busy establishing themselves, were useless at changing anything.
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Talent is God-given; be humble. Fame is man-given; be thankful. Conceit is self-given; be careful.
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There is a ghost here. A lonely, heartbroken spirit. The ghost of everything that could've been and never was.
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Man's music is seen as a means of restoring the soul, as well as confused and discordant bodily afflictions, to the harmonic proportions that it shares with the world soul of the cosmos.
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I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. Bu t my intellectual development was retarded,as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.
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The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall: but in charity there is no excess; neither can angel nor man come in danger by it.
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The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.
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Parents who wish to train up their children in the way they should go must go in the way in which they would have their children go.
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Philosophical systems are wholly true for their founders only.
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Nice writing isn't enough. It isn't enough to have smooth and pretty language. You have to surprise the reader frequently, you can't just be nice all the time. Provoke the reader. Astonish the reader. Writing that has no surprises is as bland as oatmeal. Surprise the reader with the unexpected verb or adjective. Use one startling adjective per page.
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We are sorry for the inconvenience, but this is a revolution.
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At the beginning of summer it always feels like there's so much time ahead: whole empty calendar pages of sunshine, warm sea breezes, midnight thunderstorms, and running barefoot in the grass. Enough afternoons to do every single thing you wanted to do and even some days left over to do nothing at all. But somehow summer fills up and flies by -Lily
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Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig.
