Whitney Balliett Quotes
Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.

Quotes to Explore
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I breathe martial arts every day of my life.
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Now, everybody knows my music. So that's really cool. A lot of kids know it. Now, when I go to a sports game, everybody knows my name.
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I am obsessed with the whole Victoriana thing, the whole Jack the Ripper London era, the grayness of it, the haunted feeling of it, all ancient and bloody.
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There's a great freedom in writing by yourself. You can write anything you want.
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Know your priorities and identify the five powerful action steps that you intend to take to move your initiatives forward each day. If you go to a tree with an ax and take five whacks at the tree every day, it doesn't matter if it's an oak or a redwood; eventually, the tree has to fall down.
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'Independents' - the industry term for companies that have more capital and know-how than the typical 'wildcatter' - can grow either by exploring and finding reserves or by buying a company that already has them.
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The Constitution shall never be construed... to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.
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I try to do things I love or care about for some reason.
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The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.
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I like pastels and lighter shades on darker skins. I feel like it lifts everything and accentuates being chocolate.
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A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.
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Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.
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It's pretty easy to get sucked into a vortex of others and what their thoughts are and letting other people's judgments of you make you actually believe them about yourself. And sometimes you just need people to remind you that none of it means anything.
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Three women in my family, close relatives, have had breast cancer, and two have died from it, and still I never thought it could happen to me. I didn't even regularly check my breasts.
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What you really want to do is sit down and find a place that you can control government spending and raise more revenue.
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When I look back, I'm definitely proud of what I did. It kind of allows me to move forward and reset my goals.
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I don't want to discuss my breasts with the whole world!
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I have a love affair with tomatoes and corn. I remember them from my childhood. I only had them in the summer. They were extraordinary.
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Government experts have estimated that ANWR reserves would only provide enough oil for six months of U.S. oil consumption. In addition, the oil industry itself has estimated that it would take 10 years to bring this oil to the market.
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But tell me, this physician of whom you were just speaking, is he a moneymaker, an earner of fees, or a healer of the sick?
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And luckily, for whatever reason, I've found people who are interested in living with and owning and existing around the DNA of my mind, which is my visual work. I've found collectors who are willing to put money down to live with my work. So I can't criticize the whole mechanism. But I can criticize it as an artist, in spite of the fact that I benefit from it. And there are problems with it.
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I think punk, pop-punk, and rock music is all meshed together and I think good music is good music.
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The exciting thing about getting a label together and doing press for it is that hopefully some 15-year-old girl who is the only feminist in her junior-high class will hear about it and be like, "Oh, cool, I hadn't heard of that, I'm going to check it out."
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Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.