Alan Quotes

There is nothing wrong with the name White Settlement, and the majority here is proud of the name. ~ Alan Price

And something else came back, from that later first morning at Kensington Park Gardens: a sense that the house was not only an enhancement of Toby's interest but a compensation for his lack of it. ~ Alan Hollinghurst

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she'd read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art - she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle; looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene; a man in an office looking over Regent's Park, rain in the street outside - a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years. ~ Alan Hollinghurst

The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists. ~ Alan Watts

If poisons were ponies, I'd put my money on cyanide. ~ Alan Bradley

It was dawn by the time the detective showed up; tired and weary. Tired because he'd been called from his bed before dawn, weary because he'd spent his life looking at the bad side of human nature and that wasn't going to change. ~ Alan Furst

Somebody with Debbie Reynolds' features doesn't get cast as the Wicked Witch. ~ Alan Rickman

The habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns. ~ Alan Watts

Being that the *historical* Jesus was of pure Hebraic descent- lineage of Eber- He was not an Arab or of Arabic descent, therefore He was not dark skinned as most Israeli's are not."

~R. Alan Woods [2013] ~ R. Alan Woods

What I can't completely understand is most other people's fascination with what the famous among us do with their lips and the rest of their bodies. Why do ordinary people become the target of this curiosity simply by virtue of the fact that other people recognise their names and faces but know almost nothing else about them? ~ Alan Alda

Lao-tzu didn't actually say very much more about the meaning of Tao. The Way of Nature, the Way of happening self-so, or, if you like, the very process of life, was something which he was much too wise to define. For to try to say anything definite about the Tao is like trying to eat your mouth: you can't get outside it to chew it. To put it the other way round: anything you can chew is not your mouth. ~ Alan W. Watts

The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace liminality and adventure or continue to remain a religious ghetto for culturally co-opted, fearful, middle-class folk. ~ Alan Hirsch

Don't wait for the world to change. Change your mind about the world. ~ Alan Cohen

It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her ... Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high-frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signaling that Mary detested me. ~ Alan Bradley

I started out as a physicist; however, I am what I have become. I have evolved, with the help of many colleagues in the international scientific community, into an interdisciplinary scientist. ~ Alan J. Heeger

Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up. ~ Alan Watts

That's it then. Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas. ~ Alan Rickman

Change is unwelcome in prisons and hospitals. It is only their sameness which makes them tolerable to those kept captive within their walls. ~ Alan Bradley

Fictions are useful so long as they are taken as fictions. They are then
simply ways of "figuring" the world which we agree to follow so that
we can act in cooperation, as we agree about inches and hours, numbers
and words, mathematical systems and languages. If we have no
agreement about measures of time and space, I would have no way of
making a date with you at the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth
Avenue at 3 P.M. on Sunday, April 4. ~ Alan W. Watts

Everyone has a story with coca-cola people like Wayne Dyer even and people like Alan Rickman and many other people, so... they are dead so you can take it Coca-Cola is part of the history! ~ Deyth Banger

There is a ruthlessness to the creative act. It often involves a betrayal of the status quo. ~ Alan Watt

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it. ~ Alan Perlis

Sadly, our culture raises man to be strong and silent. Straight or gay, the pressure is on from the time we're very young to become our culture's John Wayne-style of man.
* The more pain I can take, the more of a man I am.
* Showing feelings is for women.
* The more I can drink, the manlier I am.
* Intimacy is sex; sex is intimacy.
* Only women depend on others.
* A man takes care of himself without help from others.
* No one can hurt you if you're strong.
* I am what I earn.
* It is best to keep your problems to yourself.
* Winning is all that really matters.
Where did this stuff come from? It's everywhere in our society from the movies heroes we love to the politicians we vote for. Our culture demands that man fit in a tightly defined role. ~ Alan Downs

Mr. Sambridge possessed a remarkably good mouthful of natural teeth for someone his age, whether ritually maintained or expensively corrected I could not tell.

As someone who has spent hours of agony strapped down in Dr. Frankenstein's chamber of dental horrors in Farrington Street, I could only respect - and hate - anyone who still possessed such a spotless set of choppers. ~ Alan Bradley

Alan Zweibel is the funniest writer in the world. He might be even funnier when he's naked, but I'm afraid to find out. ~ Dave Barry

The best place any Christian can ever be in is to be totally destitute and totally dependant upon God, and know it. ~ Alan Redpath

I love working if it's with people who are capable of having a good time. People with a little bit of enjoyment of what they do. If it's enormous pressure, and people feel that their lives are at stake, then it's agony. So I try to pick projects where I feel like I'm going to avoid those traps. ~ Alan Arkin

Awkwardly pressed up against him, the Princess seemed to take no notice of their proximity. In the dampness, though, her body heat was near palpable to Luke and he had to force himself to keep his attention on what he was doing. ~ Alan Dean Foster

For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of 'be drunk and be happy,' kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts. ~ Alan Sillitoe

Alan Moore does have a sheen of class. He's a smart guy, and I'm sure there was a metaphoric level, I'm not denying that, but let's face it. the main reason he was doing a super-hero comic was because he was working for a super-hero comic book company. ~ Chester Brown

All families are silly in their own way. ~ Alan Hollinghurst

When your sense of worth exceeds your conditions, conditions will shift to match your vision. ~ Alan Cohen

Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can't help being one. You can't deny that. And it's best to be a rebel so as to show 'em it don't pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking - so they say - but they're booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you're not careful. Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you're still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death. And if you're clever enough to stay out of the army you get bombed to death. Ay, by God, it's a hard life if you don't weaken, if you don't stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain't much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits. ~ Alan Sillitoe

A lot of directors prefer the solitude of the editing process, but I revel in the craziness of what a film set is. ~ Alan Parker

We see it as an eternal arena in which the individual is no more than a temporary stranger - a visitor who hardly belongs - for the thin ray of consciousness does not shine upon its own source. In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself - through our eyes and IT's. ~ Alan W. Watts

Truly creative people care little about what they have done, and a lot about what they are doing. ~ Alan Cohen

You are not a black hole that needs to be filled; you are a light that needs to be shined. ~ Alan Cohen

I did 'Quigley Down Under,' which is quite deliberately placed in Australia, which is a Tom Selleck, Alan Rickman, Laura San Giacomo film from '88, I want to say. ~ Ben Mendelsohn

The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature. ~ Alan Bennett

Forecasting our futures is built into our psyches because we will soon have to manage that future. We have no choice. No matter how often we fail, we can never stop trying. ~ Alan Greenspan

Alan was feeling strong. He did two push-ups and felt stronger still. ~ Dave Eggers

He had a problem, like any other problem. The problem just hadn't been well posed. The problem was: Should he leave Penny or not? ~ Alan Lightman

Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes. ~ Alan Moore

Isn't it strange, how one so afraid of contracting a fatal malady ... should so earnestly wish for death, as well? ~ Alan Brennert

But it's a poor church that cares only for what happens to a soul after it leaves this life.
-Damien ~ Alan Brennert

The tackles are coming in thick and thin now. ~ Alan Brazil

Life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished. ~ Alan W. Watts

Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word water is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism. ~ Alan W. Watts

Our goal as adults is not to love all books alike, or as few as possible, but rather to love as widely and as well as our limited selves will allow. ~ Alan Jacobs

It doesn't matter is you call it 'Obama-care' or 'Elvis Presley care' or 'I-don't-care care.' It cannot sustain itself in its present form. ~ Alan K. Simpson

Yaroo!" I shouted, and I didn't give a beetle's bottom who heard me. "Ya-rooo! ~ Alan Bradley

Our sense of time's passage is rooted not in one region of the brain but results from the combined working of memory, attention, emotion, and other cerebral activities that can't be singularly localized, Time in the brain, like time outside it, is a collective activity. ~ Alan Burdick

I do not think consciously of children [when writing] … I do know that children read me more intelligently than adults do. ~ Alan Garner

The first step in gaining the upper hand is always to seize the moral high ground, and to be able to do this with no more than a single word is nothing short of genius. I ~ Alan Bradley

The commitment of marriage can frequently arouse some rather peculiar behaviour in men and women alike, but the bizarre notion that one can change the character of one's mate seems to occur more often to women than to men. ~ Alan Jay Lerner

For optimal health and rejuvenation, we all need exercise, rest, time to feel deeply into ourselves, and meaningful and emotionally expressive human contact. ~ Alan Fogel

All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction. ~ Alan Lightman

We have always been herbalists and healers, Trad... ~ Trevor Alan Foris

You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it. ~ Alan Watts

People are lot like peanuts...
It's not what's on the outside that matters, and that damn shell just gets shucked into the trash anyhow. ~ Alan VanMeter

'After 17' is a song I wrote when my first daughter went to college, so that's kind of where I'm at in that part of my life. If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you'd say, 'Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,' but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn't apply to anybody that has a child. ~ Alan Jackson

It makes it fun. When an actor plays a character, you want what that character wants. Otherwise it doesn't look authentic. So I really want to defeat Jimmy - I mean Jimmy as the character. ~ Alan Alda

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money ... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination. ~ Alan Watts

I might be too emotional to be a manager. You love your players, don't you? And I'm not sure I could leave them out. I know how it feels. ~ Alan Smith

Out of Mind spring in-numerable things, conditioned by discrimination (i.e., classification) and habit-energy; these things people accept as an external world. ... ~ Alan W. Watts

One of the most unique aspects among many about the USA is that our transitions of 'power' have almost always been peaceful. This is very unique in all of history and in the world today. ~ R. Alan Woods

Alan Webb is the best thing to happen in this event, but professionals and collegiates don't want to lose to high school guys. I don't want to lose to no one. ~ Gabe Jennings

When, over lunch in Philadelphia, I ask the distinguished University of Pennsylvania historian, Alan Charles Kors about Cultural Studies, he shakes his head in dismay. "Cultural Studies," he laments, "is now dominant in all departments of literature and is increasingly big in history, sociology, and cultural anthropology, though less so in political science." His own capsule definition of Cultural Studies? "It sees culture as a means of assigning roles, power, obedience, and resources - and examines the way in which culture accomplishes that. ~ Bruce Bawer

When your intention is clear, so is the way. ~ Alan Cohen

People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people. ~ Alan Moore

People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it. ~ Alan Furst

We are no longer under the 'Law', but rather the Grace of God in Christ."

~R. Alan Woods [2013] ~ R. Alan Woods

Villa will probably play a lot worse than this and lose. ~ Alan Parry

All his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for. ~ Alan Hollinghurst

Well you know, all law is about injustice. ~ Alan Dershowitz

I think we're seeing privacy diminish, not by laws ... but by young people who don't seem to value their privacy. ~ Alan Dershowitz

People think cruises are for old folk, but they are amazing, as you get to see so many places, and you're never stuck as you're docked in a different port every day. ~ Alan Titchmarsh

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books. ~ Alan Furst

Alan said he'd known what to expect from de St Jorre from the kick-off, since in his preface this cretin speaks of banned books being burnt in the same way heretics were burnt by religious tyrants. Alan was quick to denounce the cruel inhumanity of liberal fuckwits who wantonly blurred the lines between human life and products of a literary culture that had yet to escape its commodity form. ~ Stewart Home

But as a property owner of Orlando, I wouldn't rent to someone who is gay any more than I would rent to a person who is a practicing witch. ~ Alan Chambers

I could have gone either north or south but decided to strike off north because it was my favorite direction. ~ Alan Bradley

When it came down to technical skill and ability of the two teams, Croatia were far superior. ~ Alan Mullery

Under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth ... The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit ... In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation ~ Alan Greenspan

What are we going to do, Dogger?'
It seemed a reasonable question. After all he had been through, surely Dogger knew something of hopeless situations.
'We shall wait upon tomorrow,' he said.
'But
what if tomorrow is worse than today?'
'Then we shall wait upon the day after tomorrow.'
'And so forth?' I asked.
'And so forth,' Dogger said. ~ Alan Bradley

In this age of vampires, what I love about 'True Blood' the most is that it's a post-modern take on it. 'Sookie Stackhouse' series author Charlaine Harris and 'True Blood' creator Alan Ball turned that whole mythology upside-down ... It's not just about vampires. It's about a lot of different things. ~ Michelle Forbes

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun. ~ Alan W. Watts

How we see ourselves and what we base our worth on are primary motivators throughout life. ~ Alan E. Nelson

We need innovation in education and dedication to the task before us. ~ Alan Autry

Mission is the practical demonstration, whether by speech or by action, of the glorious lordship of Jesus. ~ Alan Hirsch

One of the best ways to realize that age is an illusion is to have your body get older and realize that you are who you always have been. ~ Alan Cohen

By connecting to nowhere you must in turn connect to everywhere, in the course of which becoming wise. Nothing is permanent, but anything is possible. Everything dies, yet beauty and joy endure. We are incredibly powerful and infinitely weak. Again and again these paradoxes repeat, like colors of yarn in an elaborate woven rug. There ~ Alan Moore

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. ~ Alan Turing

It is generally forgotten that our guarantees of religious freedom were designed to protect precisely those who were not members of established denominations, but rather such (then) screwball and subversive individuals as Quakers, Shakers, Levellers, and Anabaptists. There is little question that those who use cannabis or other psychedelics with religious intent are now members of a persecuted religion which appears to the rest of society as a grave menace to "mental health," as distinct from the old-fashioned "immortal soul." But it's the same old story. ~ Alan W. Watts

I'm quite a curious person. I don't mind being the one who doesn't know things, a role I often play in QI. ~ Alan Davies

No matter what you say, or how much you talk, someone isn't really forgiven until you can stand beside them without wanting to slap them in the face. ~ Alan Heathcock

The trouble with a lecture is that it answers questions that haven't been asked. ~ Alan Alda

You can do more with 12 disciples than with 1,200 religious consumers. ~ Alan Hirsch

I remembered that Johnson had declared portrait painting to be an improper employment for a woman. "Public practice of any art and staring in men's faces is very indelicate in a female," he had said.
Well I'd seen Dr. Johnson's face in the book's frontispiece and I couldn't imagine anyone male or female wanting to stare into it for any length of time - the man was an absolute toad. ~ Alan Bradley

Good character consists of recognizing the selfishness that inheres in each of us and trying to balance it against the altruism to which we should all aspire. It is a difficult balance to strike, but no definition of goodness can be complete without it. ~ Alan Dershowitz

My job is to put words together and tell a story. If that doesn't work for you, it's not a war crime. ~ Alan Zweibel