Donald Ray Young Quotes

You people do not have to live like this!" the man pleaded. "We are humans, made in the image of God. No machine has the right to order us around." The man reached inside his box, no bigger than a foot square, and took out a small black book. "Here is the truth. Read it!"
Before anyone could act, one of the Sentries aimed its red eye at the babbling man, and shot out a deadly energy ray. With a final shout of defiance, the man fell to the ground, dead. The contents of his container spilling out onto the spaceport's floor. Marcellus looked down at the items, so precious to the man: they were copies of The Koran and The Bible. ~ Donald Allen Kirch

You don't read in your own field. You read in that field when you're young, so that you can learn. ~ Ray Bradbury

Four hundred or so people lived in Knockemstiff in 1957, nearly all of them connected by blood through one godforsaken calamity or another, be it lust or necessity or just plain ignorance. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

She thinks I've let myself down,' he was saying. 'But I haven't. I'm doing perfectly okay. Endless horizons are all very well when you're young. But get to your age, you've got to ... you've got to get some perspective. That's what kept going round in my head whenever she got unbearable about it. Perspective, she needs perspective. And I kept saying to myself, look, I'm doing okay. Look at loads of other people, people we know. Look at Ray. Look what a pig's arse he's making of his life. She needs perspective. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

I'm trying to break myself of that habit [of not writing out a first draft ] because I'm working on a couple novels and I know if I tried to write those books the way I wrote the stories it would take me years to finish. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I remember working with Ray Charles when I was quite young, and I would wonder, 'Why would he sing 'Georgia On My Mind' and 'I Can't Stop Loving You' every night?' I said, 'Oh my God if I have to sing these songs, if I have to sing 'I Can't Stop Loving You' one more night, I'm going to fall out.' Of course, I was young and I didn't understand. ~ Merry Clayton

You just don't heal that easy unless you're young. ~ Sugar Ray Leonard

At the Superdome, a young man came up to me holding a baby. He'd run out of diapers. He'd run out of medicine. His baby was sick. The guy's saying, 'Help me! Take my baby.' What could I do? That's the definition of helpless. ~ Ray Nagin

It won't work,' Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. 'No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen. ~ Ray Bradbury

In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music - you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards - they didn't get any money at first. They were all broke. ~ Iggy Pop

Men are nuts. Young men are crazy. We all love toys. I'm toy oriented. I write about toys. I've got a lot of toys. Hundreds of things. But computers are toys, and men like to mess around with smart dumb things. They feel creative. ~ Ray Bradbury

The amazing thing about Sweets [Edison] was that he exactly spoke the way that he played! He was really unique, the one and only. He was one of the greatest Blues players that I ever heard and played with. Nobody can play like Sweets man, nobody! Most of us, musicians, frequently quote Sweets' phrases in our solos. Like Lester Young, Sweets had a big influence on us musicians, especially when we play some Blues. ~ Ray Brown

There is an entire culture out there built around siphoning money from an athlete, and the young men and women who come through just feed the machine. ~ Ray Allen

I don't think young men or women should feel pressured into marriage. You shouldn't marry anyone, in my opinion, who you have to try hard for. ~ Rachael Ray

A lot of people get the wrong impression, think there's something romantic or tragic about hitting bottom. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I spent thirty-two years in a paper mill in southern Ohio, and before that, I worked in a meatpacking plant and a shoe factory. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

Ask any Ferrari, Porsche or Ray-Ban salesperson about their average customer and you will very likely hear that he is not, as the adverts would have us believe, a virile young footballer with shiny hair, a rippling six pack and a trouser pouch like a new punch bag. He is, in fact, a middle-aged bloke wearing more chins than he started life with and carrying the clear evidence of forty years of beer and pies slung across his midriff. ~ Richard Hammond

Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door, are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony ... ~ Ray Bradbury

A ray of wintery sunlight fell across the classroom, illuminating Lupin's gray hairs and the lines on his young face. ~ Anonymous

only 1 percent of children in the United States get the proper RDA levels of the essential nutrients from their diets.1Not only are children not getting proper nutrition for their growing bodies, they are establishing poor eating habits in childhood that usually persist into their adult years. It has amazed me how many of these young teenagers already have full-blown insulin resistance. ~ Ray D. Strand

I worked in a paper mill all my adult life and there were a lot of funny guys there. So you pick up on that. Even though something really bad might have happened to somebody you can still make a joke out of it. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

"Oh, ancient god, whatever your name," whispered Ahmed. "Help this lost son of a good father, this evil boy who meant no harm but slept in school, ran errands slowly, did not pray from his heart, ignored his mother, and did not hold his family in great esteem. For all this I know I must suffer. But here in the midst of silence, at the desert's heart, where even the wind knows not my name? Must I die so young? Am I to be forgotten without having been?" ~ Ray Bradbury

They's a lot of no-good sonofabitches out there."
Arvin asks, "More than a hundred?"
Willard laughed a little and put the truck in gear. "Yeah, at least that many. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

School typically doesn't prepare young people for real life - unless their lives are spent following instructions and pleasing others. In my opinion, that's why so many students who succeed in school fail in life. ~ Ray Dalio

Here are the world's first brothers, Abel and Cain, sons of Adam and Eve. They lived when the world was young, when everything was much different than it is today. It was before the days of income tax and smog and clogged highways and the terrible problems we struggle with. Yet, despite the fact that they enjoyed what we call "the simple life," they longed for something better, they hungered after God. For no matter how good life is, it is never good enough if you do not have God. Man is never satisfied without Him, and these boys hungered for God. Both had been told the way by which they could come to Him; this is implied in the account. But Cain chose to believe a lie, the lie that is still very evident today, that "one way is as good as another." He took the way that was easiest for him to work out and as a result he was rejected; for, of course, it is always a lie that one way is as good as another. That never works in anything- nature, life, or with God. ~ Ray C. Stedman

I took a correspondence course with a guy at Ohio University. He gave me ten exercises, and one of them resulted in the story "Bactine." It pleased me a lot more than anything else I'd ever done, so I kept messing around and by the time I got to Ohio State I'd written maybe eight stories. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

It's hard to live a good life ... It seems like the Devil don't ever let up. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

Don't get me wrong: I think that everyone should put forth an effort to do better, but let's face it, some of us are just plain luckier than others. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

Because of who we were, I already knew what we would do. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

We were scarecrows in blue uniforms. After a grand total of five days of blackboard instruction and fifty rounds at the NYPD firing range, my new police academy classmates and I were standing out on the sidewalks of central Brooklyn pretending to be police officers. They gave us badges. They gave us handcuffs. They gave us guns - standard police-issue Smith & Wesson .38 Specials. They told us, "Good luck." In early July 1966, riots had broken out in East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Brownsville, Brooklyn. Hundreds of angry young men were roaming the streets and throwing bottles and rocks. Already they had injured police officers and attempted to flip over a radio car. On one corner, police found eighteen Molotov cocktails. The borough commander was calling for reinforcements - and fast. ~ Ray Kelly

I'm not sure about 'absolute' happiness, but I am happiest when I go to bed at night knowing that I tried to do my best that day. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

Basically, Sam Phillips recorded Bill Haley, Johnny Cash, and all those other Memphis guys; Chuck Berry played the top two strings; Elvis appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show above the waist; the Beatles made all the girls squirm by singing about wanting to hold their "hands"; Ray Davies got lost in a sunset; Pete Townshend smashed his guitar; Brian Wilson heard magic in his head and made it come out of a studio; the Rolling Stones urinated on a garage door; and then (skipping a bit) you've got Joey Levine and Chapman-Chinn and Mott the Hoople and Iggy and the Runaways and KISS and the Pink Fairies and Rick Nielsen and Jonathan Richman and Johnny Ramone and Lemmy and the Young brothers and Cook and Jones and Pete Shelley and Feargal Sharkey and Rob Halford ... and Foghat. You get what I'm saying. It didn't happen in a vacuum, but it did happen, and now here we are in the aftermath. ~ Frank Portman

I am sorry for your disappointment,' he continued, glancing into her face. Their eyes having met, became, as it were, mutually locked together, and the single instant only which good breeding allows as the length of such a look, became trebled: a clear penetrating ray of intelligence had shot from each into each, giving birth to one of those unaccountable sensations which carry home to the heart before the hand has been touched or the merest compliment passed, by something stronger than mathematical proof, the conviction, 'A tie has begun to unite us.' Both faces also unconsciously stated that their owners had been much in each other's thoughts of late. Owen had talked to the young architect of his sister as freely as to Cytherea of the young architect. ~ Thomas Hardy

You can't be a pussy all your life Todd. Someday you're just gonna have to say fuck it. ~ Donald Ray Pollock