2020.11.28
I enjoy setting my two decades of blogging in the context of commonplace books - starting as text files on my Palm Pilot in 1997. As in the case of this book, it can just be a bunch of quotes. Garner lumps them by topic a bit, usually in clumps of 3 or 4, though the lumps are titled, so part of the pleasure is recognizing the commonality.
Anyway, here are my favorite quotes from it... usually I'm a little hesitant to bring in quotes wholesale, but what the hell. I especially like the Richard Avedon quote on how surfaces are all we have to work with.
I'm not much but I'm all I have.
One melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can't make old friends.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
If dolphins tasted good, he said, we wouldn't even know about their language.
I pick twenty [cherries] at a time and stuff them all into my mouth at once. They taste better like that.He is so right!
If you're not at the table, you're on the menu.
A wise old chef once told me: Wait till peas are in season, then use frozen.
The better a singer's voice, the harder it is to believe what they're saying.
Two of the saddest words in the English language are "What party?" And L.A. is the "What party" capital of the world.
The surface is all you've got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface.
Some exemplary unpleasant facts are these: that life is short and almost always ends messily; that if you live in the actual world you can't have your own way; that if you do get what you want, it turns out to be not the thing you wanted; that no one thinks as well of you as you do yourself; and that one or two generations from now you will be forgotten entirely and that the world will go on as if you had never existed. Another is that to survive and prosper in this world you have to do so at someone else's expense or do and undergo things it's not pleasant to face: like, for example, purchasing your life at the cost of innocents murdered in the aerial bombing of Europe and the final bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And not just the bombings. It's also an unpleasant fact that you are alive and well because you or your representatives killed someone with bullets, shells, bayonets, or knives, if not in Germany, Italy, or Japan, then Korea or Vietnam. You have connived at murder, and you thrive on it, and that fact is too unpleasant to face except rarely.
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.
Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.
Freedom isn't speaking your mind freely. Freedom is having the money to go to Mexico.
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Somebody put it on the Internet and it went bacterial.
When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you. Otherwise they call you arrogant.
My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.
You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
We're all just walking each other home.