Jack Finney Famous Quotes

Would you have references?"
"I'm awfully sorry but I haven't. I just arrived in New York, and don't know a soul. Except you." I smiled but she didn't smile back. She stood hesitating, and I said, "It's true that I'm an escaped convict, an active counterfeiter, and occasional murderer. And I howl during the full of the moon. But I'm neat. ~ Jack Finney

You live in the same kind of grayness as the filthy stuff that formed you. ~ Jack Finney

And that, my friend, is how the world ends. On the edge of a precipice, with one foot over the edge, it stops, turns and goes back, leaving an empty earth of birds and insects, wind, rain and rusting weapons. ~ Jack Finney

If we believe that we are just animals, without immortal souls, we are already but one step removed from pod people. ~ Jack Finney

Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now.

For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to ~ Jack Finney

Maybe I live in what is for me the wrong time. ~ Jack Finney

The human mind searches for cause and effect, always; and we all prefer the weird and thrilling to the dull and commonplace as an answer. ~ Jack Finney

It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions. ~ Jack Finney

I wrapped his pistol in his cap, and with the butt of the gun - not the end of the butt, but the side - hit him hard on the head. You read a lot about people being hit on the head and knocked out, but you don't read much about blood clots in the brain. In actual fact, though, it's a delicate matter, hitting a man on the head, ~ Jack Finney

My stubborn little witch," he said softly. "Don't believe for a clockwork minute that you are unlovable. If I were a mortal, a man not doomed to walk the earth as a haunted specter, I would be the first suitor in line. Please believe that."
She hiccupped. "You… you'd want to court me?"
Jack laughed. "Court you? I'd follow you around like Finney and stare at you all moony-eyed. I'd spend my days fending off your other would-be suitors, my evenings charming Flossie, and my nights stealing kisses at your window. ~ Colleen Houck

When you've heard one bagpipe tune, you've heard them both. ~ Jack Finney

We're a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We're destroying the great lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we've begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison into our children's bones, and we knew it. We've made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to pursued our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we're used to it. ~ Jack Finney

Stephen King consummately honors several traditions with his rare paperback original, 'Joyland.' He addresses the novel of carny life and sideshows, where the midway serves as microcosm, such as in those famous books by Ray Bradbury, Charles Finney and William Lindsay Gresham. ~ Paul Di Filippo

I went up a straight crooked lane and, I said 'No thanks, yes if yer please. ~ Jack Finney

The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing," he said reflectively, "but I'm not sure it will ever figure itself out. Everything else, maybe - from sub-atomic particles to the universe - except itself. ~ Jack Finney

But a doctor learns, because he has to, not to worry actively about patients until the worrying can do some good; meanwhile, they have to be walled off in a quiet compartment of the mind. They don't teach that at medical school, but it's as important as your stethoscope. ~ Jack Finney

He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist. ~ Jack Finney

Relationship building at a distance, through the filter of a computer, is ultimately ineffective for the sincere friend seeker, but it is ideally suited to the sociopath whose powers of manipulation are enhanced when he can operate not merely behind his usual masks but behind an electronic mask as well. ~ Jack Finney

The sunlight lying on an acre of farm land weighs several tons, believe it or not. ~ Jack Finney

As Einstein himself pointed out. He said we're like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can't see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it's there. ~ Jack Finney

Anyway, there's a time and place for everything, and while this may have been the place, it wasn't the time. ~ Jack Finney

When my father was a young actor, it is absolutely true that the vast majority were fairly middle class. Then all of a sudden, people like Albert Finney burst through and turned all that on its head. ~ Jack Davenport

Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again? ~ Jack Finney

It's you, Jack Henry. It will always be you in every song I sing. ~ Georgia Cates

Jack enjoyed watching Amanda's face in the candlelight, her expression by turns thoughtful, amused, and lively, those gray eyes gleaming more brightly than the polished silver.
Unlike the other women present, who picked at their food with appropriately feminine disinterest, Amanda displayed a healthy appetite. Apparently it was one of the privileges of spinsterhood, that a woman could eat well in public. She was so natural and straightforward, a refreshing change from the other sophisticated women he had known. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Mr. Pewter led them through to a library, filled with thousands of
antiquarian books.
'Impressive, eh?'
'Very,' said Jack. 'How did you amass
all these?'
'Well,' said Pewter, 'You know the person who always borrows
books and never gives them back?'
'Yes ... ?'
'I'm that person. ~ Jasper Fforde

Certain it is that work, worry, labor and trouble, form the lot of almost all men their whole life long. But if all wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how would men occupy their lives? what would they do with their time? If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature. In ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Memories and dreams are intermixed in this mad universe ~ Jack Kerouac

To be an artist is not about fame; it's about art, which is this intangible thing that has got to have lots of integrity, whereas being famous doesn't really take any integrity. But I think you have to admit that you want to be famous, otherwise you can't be an artist. Art and fame together are like a desire to live forever. ~ Damien Hirst

Rotten travesty. Yeah. Send me to jail for contempt. Try that. Go ahead. ~ Jack Kevorkian

Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else? ~ Jack Kerouac

No," Jack struggled to quip, "but ~ Linda Lael Miller

They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there - and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. ~ Jack Kerouac

I don't remember anything anybody said in any Jack Ford picture. Nothing happens except action. ~ Elia Kazan

Going There

Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life. ~ Jack Gilbert

I grew up once, I decided never to do it again ~ Benny Bellamacina

All work and no play doesn't just make Jill and Jack dull, it kills the potential of discovery, mastery, and openness to change and flexibility and it hinders innovation and invention. ~ Joline Godfrey

All dogs love God. They're wiser than their masters. ~ Jack Kerouac

I had to do this very aggressive, big score in a very short time, and knowing that in the beginning, middle, and end would be this very, very famous theme, but I still had to weave a score around it and make it work as a score was really challenging. ~ Danny Elfman

I think my sudden love for this girl is a truer expression of myself than anything. ~ Jack Kerouac

The Tale of Human Evolution

The subject most often brought up by advocates of the
theory of evolution is the subject of the origin of man.

The Darwinist claim holds that modern man evolved from ape-like
creatures. During this alleged evolutionary process, which is
supposed to have started 4-5 million years ago, some "transitional
forms" between modern man and his ancestors are
supposed to have existed. According to this completely
imaginary scenario, four basic "categories" are listed:

1. Australopithecus
2. Homo habilis
3. Homo erectus
4. Homo sapiens

Evolutionists call man's so-called first ape-like ancestors
Australopithecus, which means "South African ape."

These living beings are actually nothing but an old ape
species that has become extinct.

Extensive research done on various Australopithecus specimens by two world famous anatomists from England and the USA, namely,
Lord Solly Zuckerman and Prof. Charles Oxnard, shows
that these apes belonged to an ordinary ape species that
became extinct and bore no resemblance to humans.

Evolutionists classify the next stage of human evolution
as "homo," that is "man." According to their claim, the living
beings in the Homo series are more developed than
Australopithecus. Evolutionists devise a fanciful evolution
scheme by arranging different fossils of these creature ~ Harun Yahya

No negotiation is ever possible if you have to negotiate not only with the people in the room but also with some other committee in permanent session. ~ Jack Straw

I don't know that there were any rules for documentary photography. As a matter of fact, I don't think the term was even very precise. So as far as I'm concerned, the kind of photography I did in the FSA was the kind of photography I still do today, because it is based on passionate concern for the human condition. That is the basis of all the work that I do. ~ Jack Delano

I have always believed in the principle that immediate survival is more important than long-term survival. ~ Jack McClelland

There are people out there hiding all kinds of things. People who have all this success and all this fame and all this money, and yet there are secrets that they think if we found out about, it would be over for them. And it's a horrible way to live whether you're famous or not. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

Whether I will be remembered at all, I really don't get to choose, unless I shoot someone famous. It's not really anything I have much control over. ~ Henry Rollins

Though you can get smart from reading everything that a smart person writes, you cannot get famous from reading about everything that a famous person does or is said to have done. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It ain't fair. Gifts is divided so damn unevenly. Like God just left his damn sack of talents in a ditch somewhere and said, Go help yourselves, ladies and gents.Them's that get there first can help themselves to the biggest ones. In every other walk of life, a jack can work to get what he want. but ain't no amount of toil going get you a lick more talent than you born with. Geniuses ain't made, brother, they just is. and I just was not. ~ Esi Edugyan