William Empson Quotes
The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.
Quotes to Explore
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I joined the Army at 19 as a soldier and spent about four and a half years with them. Then I broke my back in a freefall parachuting accident and spent a year in rehabilitation back in the U.K.
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I am very much a girly girl as well as being this tough, athletic fighter. I grew up a tomboy. I got my first four wheeler when I was eight. I got my first dirt bike shortly after. So, I have a lot of these manly qualities, I guess you would say. But, I also like to go get dressed up every weekend.
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When you run the marathon, you run against the distance, not against the other runners and not against the time.
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When I'm in my 50s, I kind of think I'll want to be in a garden.
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My mom says that when I was a little kid, I always used to say I wanted to be an actor, but I don't remember that.
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I am going to change the world, and I'm talking to everybody in the possible world that I can get to that can help me to do that.
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All I suggest is to make K-12 like higher education. Higher education in the United States is the best in the world because these institutions compete with each other for your tuition dollar. Let's just bring competition to public education.
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You might think the thinner version of yourself is going to be the most positive or confident, but that's not how it is for me. When I'm over 200 pounds, that's when I'm the most confident version of myself.
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You just have to re-wire your brain when you're shifting from the stage to the screen or the silver screen or the HD flat screen.
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You can talk about and think about Muslims as you want, but you can't stop Muslims from building a mosque. You can hate Muslims from the comfort of your house or publicly, but when that becomes stopping Muslims from building a mosque or worshipping, then we are crossing the line into something else.
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Sure, 'Les Miserables' can be melodramatic. And seeing the musical instead of reading the novel will save you some time and spare you the long part where Hugo goes on and on about the Parisian sewer system. But I would hate for the novel to lose that.
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The men and women of my generation are heirs to that great collective success which has been admired worldwide and of which we are so proud. It is now up to us to pass it on to the coming generations.
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Communicating with teenage girls is easy unless you're an adult, and then it's like having someone take a pair of pliers and, one-by-one, yank off your fingernails through your ears.
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I'm privileged to have had some success, but I've never forgotten what it was like to queue for a half-crown gallery seat for 'Oliver!' which is why I ensure that there are £20 day tickets for 'Miss Saigon' and that the balconies in my theatres are as comfortable as I can possibly make them.
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Unlike many Californians or New Yorkers, college football is a religion down south.
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We grew up as kids watching those movies and we were exposed to themes of civil rights, unfairness, bigotry and fathers struggling against the kind of mob of the town, so you remember how you felt as a kid being taken seriously, that you are part of the human drama.
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Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.
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A man notices a woman's figure when she walks in a room. Women have eight million words for blue; a man says dark blue or light blue.
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We did a lot of those road trips, all the mandatory stuff that you should when you're a kid, like Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon and the Sequoias and the western coast.
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The bottom line is that there is a lot more that could and should be done to help people with nutrition and exercise.
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[I am fascinated by stupidity] because normal intelligence is boring. Two plus two makes four - finished. You have no possibilities! Stupidity is infinite. Two plus two can make billions of different numbers.
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Was she the same person to-night as last night? Was she two persons? If she was only one, which one? Or was she a mere vessel of receptiveness, a transparent vessel into which other people poured their view of her, and she instantly reflected the exact colour of their opinion?
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Talking about auditions, you never know what anyone else is thinking.
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The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.
