David Goodis Quotes

He moved on down the alley, his feet walking forward and his brain swimming backward through a sea of time. It was a dark sea, much darker than the alley. The tide was slow and there were no waves, just tiny ripples that murmured very softly. Telling him about yesterday. Telling him that yesterday could never really be discarded, it was always a part of now. There was just no way to get rid of it. No way to push it aside or throw it into an ash can, or dig a hole and bury it. For all buried memories were nothing more than slow-motion boomerangs, taking their own sweet time to come back. This one had taken seven years. ~ David Goodis

He told himself she wasn't really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when they wanted to be in the clear. ~ David Goodis

I think the way to stop it is to shrug it off. Or take it with your tongue in your cheek. Sure, that's the system. At any rate, it's the system that works for you. It's the automatic control board that keeps you out there where nothing matters, where it's only you and the keyboard and nothing else. Because it's gotta be that way. You gotta stay clear of anything serious. ~ David Goodis

I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once. ~ Noah Baumbach

Her features were thin and her skin was pale and she was certainly not pretty. But it was an exciting face. It was terribly exciting because it radiated something that a man couldn't see with his eyes but could definitely feel in his bloodstream. ~ David Goodis

It's just that I'm curious, that's all. He usually walks alone" "Yeah, he's a loner, all right," the waitress murmured. "Even when he's with someone, he's alone. ~ David Goodis

The police, he imagined, were now walking around the parked car. He imagined their bandit chaser was parked beside the car and now they were walking around it and looking at it and not saying anything. Now they were inside it. They would see the interior of the automobile. They were tremendous, these police, because the next thing they would do was to look at each other. They would look around at the night air. They would just stand there. The police, he told himself, were marvelous when it came to just standing there. Sometimes they elaborated on it a little and pushed their caps back and forth on their heads. Nobody could push a cap back and forth on his head like a policeman. ~ David Goodis

It began with a shattered dream. ~ David Goodis

You've really earned it, he thought. You've played a losing game and actually enjoyed the idea of losing, almost like them freaks who get their kicks when they're banged around. You've heard tell about that type, the ones who pay the girls to burn them with lit matches, or put on high heeled shoes and step on their faces. That kind of weird business. And it's always the same question. What makes them that way? But you never took the trouble to figure the answer. What the hell, it was their private worry, it didn't concern you. ~ David Goodis

Stephen Covey's The 8th Habit ~ L. David Marquet

Everything in my life was about performance when I was doing 'The Partridge Family.' ~ David Cassidy

I'm deeply in love with my wife, and she's my best friend, and yet we share different viewpoints of life, which I think is one of the things that holds our marriage together. She came from Texas, and she has an optimistic view of life. I came from Detroit and have a very pessimistic view. ~ David Small

Our panaceas cure but few ails, our general hospitals are private and exclusive. We must set up another Hygeia than is now worshiped. Do not the quacks even direct small doses for children, larger for adults, and larger still for oxen and horses? Let us remember that we are to prescribe for the globe itself. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Damn it! I knew she was a monster! John! Amy! Listen! Guard your buttholes. ~ David Wong

The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.'

'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position.

'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what ~ David J. Schow

It's the perfect definition of a settlement. Both parties didn't get what they wanted. ~ David Geffen

It wasn't that I wanted to be a writer; I just didn't want to be stupid. ~ David Carr

That by listening to some music, by reading some books, by looking at paintings, and most important by hanging out with one another - by collaborating with one another and creating your own network - you can achieve something that is much better than what is out there. ~ David Amram

Listen to what children have to say-their windows to the soul are unclouded. ~ Sir David Baird, 1st Baronet

Writers need to be tough. This is not for the weak of will. And we have to realize that, yeah, it's never good enough. It's not like fixing a car where it's precise and we know what the end result will be definitively. ~ David Morrell

Abba Antony said, "Whatever you find in your heart to do in following God, that do, and remain within yourself in Him. ~ David Keller

Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air
to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Appreciation is a great virtue, and if husbands and wives expressed it more frequently in our homes, wives would be happier, and husbands would probably be more kind (Gospel Ideals, p. 475). ~ David O. McKay

I stay up nights and fiddle with my opera designs. It's a bit obsessive. That's why I can't do it all the time. ~ David Hockney

Oh, yeah. I grew up in Southern California in the 1960's. It was very different. I was an only child as opposed to having siblings. My brothers all lived with my step-mom. I am very close to them, but we were not raised in the same house. ~ David Cassidy

God does sometimes change our trying circumstances. But more often, He doesn't - because He wants to change us. ~ David Wilkerson

Controls is about fear, see. If you're afraid enough of the reprisals, you don't say no, you don't fight back, you don't run away. Saying yes is how you survive. It becomes normal. Horrible, but normal. Horrible, because it's normal. Now, lucky you can say 'Not standing up to him is giving him permission,' but if you've been fed this diet since the year dot, there is no standing up. Victims aren't cowards. Outsiders, like, they never have a clue how brave you have to be just to carry on. ~ David Mitchell

Politicians are addicted to spending and revenue extraction. As with an addict, there's little pause for moral or legal contemplation. ~ David Malpass

In Heaven there is no need for sex because there is no need for a shadow or illustration-just a need to enjoy it! ~ David Berg

You can't twist Al Sharpton's arm. ~ David Dinkins

Sports movies are a genre that I really respond to, but they can be done really poorly and really fall short. The good ones are just so good and inspiring and make you feel good. ~ David Walton

I consider myself a Chicagoan now, having lived in the city since I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in accounting. I came here often when I went to Maine West High School out in Des Plaines, which is a short drive west on the Kennedy or a short Blue Line ride toward O'Hare airport, the next-to-last stop in fact. My friends and I would take the Blue Line downtown and then transfer to the Red or Brown Line up to Belmont and Clark, our favorite part of the city when we were 16 and 17, mainly because of The Alley - a store that sold concert shirts, posters, spiked bracelets and stuff like that - and Gramophone Records, the electronic music store that took my virginity, so to speak. - 1st paragraph from Sophomoric Philosophy ~ Victor David Giron

just be what you want to be and you will be happy ~ David McDuff

The newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; ~ David Mitchell

For one measure of economic power was the ownership of sports teams - the Tigers had been owned by the Briggses, an old manufacturing family for whom the baseball park had been named, and the football team by William Clay Ford, Henry's brother - and in the early eighties the two newest owners, of the Tigers and the hockey Redwings, were pizza franchisers. ~ David Halberstam

Mr. Lennon would want me free, and I'd like to clear that up. ~ Mark David Chapman

There'll be no more big powers and oppressed poor - only fairness and justice for all, and eternal happiness. So if you're looking for the perfect city and the perfect government in the perfect country with perfect people, just wait a little while longer - it's coming ~ David Berg

After all, problems identified can be eliminated. ~ David Styles

You know, you only get to live life once, so there are two things that that yields. One is that there's no point in crying over spilt milk, but secondly you hate wasting time, energy, and whatever talent you've got. ~ David Miliband

I suppose a good director is like a teacher. I think that someone like David Cronenberg was very much like a teacher, because there's an openness, but a certain set of rules of behavior, and a certain conduct expected. But there's an atmosphere that's relaxed and conducive to exploration, and that is created by someone like Cronenberg. ~ Viggo Mortensen

As the pace of the campaign quickened, politics began to clash with Kennedy's innate sense of responsibility. – Arthur Schlesinger ~ David Pietrusza

Friendship is also a kind of medicine, and the markets for it, too, are sometimes black. ~ Gregory David Roberts

Someone did a study of the three most-often-heard phrases in New York City. One is "Hey taxi." Two is "What train do I take to get to Bloomingdales?" And three is "Don't worry, it's only a flesh wound. ~ David Letterman

There was no opiate like a French pillow. ~ David McCullough

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone - intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art. ~ David Foster Wallace

And Michael likes to read a lot. People don't realize that about him but he reads a number of books per week and he's fascinated just about every subject. ~ David Gest

I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You're not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know. ~ David Byrne

The human mind prefers something which it can recognize to something for which it has no name, and, whereas thousands of persons carry field glasses to bring horses, ships, or steeples close to them, only a few carry even the simplest pocket microscope. Yet a small microscope will reveal wonders a thousand times more thrilling than anything which Alice saw behind the looking-glass. ~ David Fairchild

If you really look at something, you can almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on. ~ David Foster Wallace

Larry David makes me laugh. ~ Mary J. Blige

All we have to do is ask and He will give us the wisdom that we need to get through the storm. ~ David Jeremiah

Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation. ~ David Foster Wallace

You are an Igbo woman and Igbo women are stronger than any form of pain. ~ S.A. David

Well you just have to own it, I suppose. Own the character, which is difficult. ~ David Wenham

As precious as life itself is our heritage of individual freedom, for man's free agency is a God-given gift. In sensing our responsibility to preserve it for ourselves and our posterity, let students and patriotic people ever keep in mind the warning voice of James Russell Lowell proclaiming: 'Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.'
There is a crying need today to have this truth heralded throughout the land that youth especially may appreciate and hold the freedom of the individual as sacred as did our revolutionary fathers ~ David O. McKay

So we draw lines around our property, our counties, our cities, our states, our countries. And, boy, do we act as if those lines are important. I mean, we go to war. We will kill and die to protect those boundaries. Nature couldn't give two hoots about our national boundaries ... ~ David Suzuki