Studs Quotes

So people are ready. I feel hopeful in that sense. ~ Studs Terkel

The American idea of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American idea of masculinity. Idea may not be the precise word, for the idea of one's sexuality can only with great violence be divorced or distanced from the idea of the self. Yet something resembling this rupture has certainly occurred (and is occurring) in American life, and violence has been the American daily bread since we have heard of America. This violence, furthermore, is not merely literal and actual but appears to be admired and lusted after, and the key to the American imagination.

All countries or groups make of their trials a legend or, as in the case of Europe, a dubious romance called 'history.' But no other country has ever made so successful and glamorous a romance out of genocide and slavery; therefore, perhaps, the word I am searching for is not idea, but ideal.

The American IDEAL, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American IDEAL of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and f****t, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that is is virtually forbidden - as an unpatriotic act - that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood. ~ James Baldwin

The issue is jobs. You can't get away from it: jobs. Having a buck or two in your pocket and feeling like somebody. ~ Studs Terkel

Tom Paine was a great American visionary. His book, Common Sense, sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in a population of four or five million. That means it was a best seller for years. People were thoughtful then. Hope is one thing. But you need to have hope with thought. ~ Studs Terkel

I'm not an optimist. I'm hopeful. ~ Studs Terkel

An agnostic is a cowardly atheist. ~ Studs Terkel

The total cost of the Federal Arts Project was only $23 million. Many of these paintings, sculptures and prints were given to museums, courthouses, public buildings. . .. I think that today those in museums alone are worth about $100 million. ~ Studs Terkel

I had grown up as a fan of Studs Terkel. In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often. ~ Dave Eggers

Dorothy Day said - and I'm sure that Kathy Kelly would say the same thing - 'I'm working toward a world in which it will be easier for people to behave decently.' Now, think about that: a world in which it will be easier for people to behave decently. ~ Studs Terkel

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel ~ Studs Terkel

A man? If I need a man, wouldn't you think I'd have one of my own? Must I wait for you? ~ Studs Terkel

They want to keep the government 'out of our bedrooms.' What are they talking about? I have to live in their society, remember. And I built my house, which means I built my own bedroom. The government told me how far apart the studs had to be in my bedroom wall, they dictated how thick the sheetrock had to be, they mandated how far apart the sheetrock screws had to be, they had policies on the configuration of those sheetrock screws, they have laws on the size of the windows and what kind of glass I can have in them, and there are stern legal warnings on the mattress tags. What do you mean, you want to keep the government out of our bedrooms? The president is probably contemplating, right this minute, the establishment of a bedroom czar. ~ Douglas Wilson

Someone who does an act. In a democratic society, you're supposed to be an activist; that is, you participate. It could be a letter written to an editor. ~ Studs Terkel

I don't know why you would trade a stud pitcher. ~ Anna Benson

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell. ~ Studs Terkel

It is still the arena of those who dream of the City of Man and those who envision a City of Things. The battle appears to be forever joined. The armies, ignorant and enlightened, clash by day as well as night. Chicago is America's dream, writ large. And flamboyantly. ~ Studs Terkel

I don't know what I'd like to do. That's what hurts the most. That's why I can't quit the job. I really don't know what talents I may have. And I don't know where to go to find out. I've been fostered so long by school and didn't have time to think about it. My father's in watch repair. That's always interested me, working with my hands, and independent. I don't think I'd mind going back and learning something, taking a piece of furniture and refinishing it. The type of thing where you know what you're doing and you can create and you can fix something to make it function. At the switchboard you don't do much of anything. ~ Studs Terkel

Bianca knew how to surround herself with some dangerous-looking, well-built studs - each of whom had an ass you could bounce a quarter off of and get back perfect change. ~ Avery Flynn

With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, 'Studs, you're an optimist.' I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what's the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven. ~ Studs Terkel

Last year I picked up the New York Times and there was a story about a kid from Dartmouth who was bragging that he never left his room, and made dates and ordered pizza with his computer. The piece de resistance of this story was that he had two roommates, and he was proud of the fact that he only talked to them by computer. ~ Studs Terkel

In the meantime, I would work in the relief office and I began interviewing people . . . and found out how everybody, in order to be eligible for relief, had to have reached absolute bottom. You didn't have to have a lot of brains to realize that once they reached that stage and you put them on an allowance of a dollar a day for food - how could they ever pull out of it? ~ Studs Terkel

I'll never forget that Depression Easter Sunday. Our son was four years old. I bought ten or fifteen cents' worth of eggs. You didn't get too many eggs for that. But we were down. Margaret said, 'Why he'll find those in five minutes.' I had a couple in the piano and all around. Tommy got his little Easter basket, and as he would find the eggs, I'd steal 'em out of the basket and re-hide them. The kid had more fun that Easter than he ever had. He hunted Easter eggs for three hours and he never knew the difference. (Laughs.) "My son is now thirty-nine years old. And I bore him to death every Easter with the story. He never even noticed his bag full of Easter eggs never got any fuller. . . . ~ Studs Terkel

One day I visited a guy who had made a fortune as a broker. He was sitting in his office with his computer. I hire people from here and make deals from this room, he told me. Then he took me to the trading room. Nobody was talking to anybody else, the place was silent as a tomb, they were all sitting there watching their terminals - a great word, terminal. I tell you, it scares the crap out of me. ~ Studs Terkel

I began to see how everything was so wrong. When growers can have an intricate watering system to irrigate their crops but they can't have running water inside the houses of workers. ~ Studs Terkel

Go to work and be a Hollywood stud, drive your four wheel drive right into the mud. ~ John Mellencamp

You can work next to a guy for months without even knowing his name. ~ Studs Terkel

The history of sex is the history of glimpses: first ankles, then cleavage, then knees. More recently, tattoos, navel rings, tongue studs, underwear ... (p. 92). ~ Geoff Dyer

All the other books ask, 'What's it like?' What was World War II like for the young kid at Normandy, or what is work like for a woman having a job for the first time in her life? What's it like to be black or white? ~ Studs Terkel

They would sit and talk and tell us their hard luck story. Whether it was true or not, we never questioned it. It's very important you learn people as people are. ~ Studs Terkel

The poor are so busy trying to survive from one day to the next, they haven't the time or energy to keep score. ~ Studs Terkel

Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not forlong, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own. ~ Studs Terkel

I'm celebrated for celebrating the uncelebrated. ~ Studs Terkel

Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt. ~ Studs Terkel

Work is born in us. We take to it kindly or unkindly. The terms may be easy or harsh, but the contract is binding. ~ Studs Terkel

We are the most powerful nation in the world, but we're not the only nation in the world. We are not the only people in the world. We are an important people, the wealthiest, the most powerful and, to a great extent, generous. But we are part of the world. ~ Studs Terkel

We hear the term independent contractors in Iraq. Independent contractors? Mercenaries! ~ Studs Terkel

I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence
providing they have the facts, providing they have the information. ~ Studs Terkel

What I remember most of those times is that poverty creates desperation, and desperation creates violence. ~ Studs Terkel

I want to praise activists through the years. I praise those of the past as well, to have them honored. ~ Studs Terkel

Nonetheless, do I have respect for people who believe in the hereafter? Of course I do. I might add, perhaps even a touch of envy too, because of the solace. ~ Studs Terkel

My doctors were of one mind: unless something was immediately done, I had maybe six months to live. A quintuple bypass was suggested. Quintuple! I was impressed, though somewhat disturbed because I was in the middle of work on a new book. ~ Studs Terkel

Never go to bed with someone whose problems are greater than yours. ~ Studs Terkel

Reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation. ~ Studs Terkel

Though we labor with our minds, this place we can relax in was built by someone who can work with his hands. And his work is as noble as ours. I think the poet owes something to the guy who builds the cabin for him. ~ Studs Terkel

I guess I was seeking some balance in the wildlife of the city as Rachel Carson sought it in nature. In unbalanced times, balance is as difficult to come by as Parsifal's Grail. ~ Studs Terkel

I think it's realistic to have hope. One can be a perverse idealist and say the easiest thing: 'I despair. The world's no good.' That's a perverse idealist. It's practical to hope, because the hope is for us to survive as a human species. That's very realistic. ~ Studs Terkel

It was an exciting community, where we lived in Washington. The basic feeling - and I don't think this is just nostalgia - was one of excitement, of achievement, of happiness. Life was important, life was significant. ~ Studs Terkel

When I get kind of low, I'd think about a verse I learned at one time, when everybody was fighting me. It went something like this: He has no enemies, you say, My friend, the boast is poor. He who hath mingled in the fray Of duty that the brave endure Must have foes. If he has none, Small is the work he has done. He has hit no traitor on the hip, Has cast no cup from perjured lip, Has never turned the wrong to right, He's been a coward in the fight. ~ Studs Terkel

I have a big mouth, and I never met a petition I didn't like, so of course in the McCarthy days I got in trouble. ~ Studs Terkel

I have known a number of Don Juans who were good studs and who cavorted between the sheets without a psychiatrist to guide them. But most of the busy love-makers I knew were looking for masculinity rather than practicing it. They were fellows of dubious lust. ~ Ben Hecht

Everybody's entitled to that forty acres and a mule. You're going to do the work, but you have to have something to work with. If you don't have a job, where do you go from there? You hear people say Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you don't even have shoes. You're barefooted. What are you going to pull yourself up by? Our country owes every citizen of the United States of America a means of livelihood. Not a handout, but a way to make it. ~ Studs Terkel

Why are we born? We're born eventually to die, of course. But what happens between the time we're born and we die? We're born to live. One is a realist if one hopes. ~ Studs Terkel

For the next century, we've got to put together what we so carelessly tore apart with so little concern for those who were gonna follow us ... You've got to sound off. ~ Studs Terkel

I wanted to be at my parents' house when electricity came. It was in 1940. We'd all go around flipping the switch, to make sure it hadn't come on yet. We didn't want to miss it. When they finally came on, the lights just barely glowed. I remember my mother smiling. When they came on full, tears started to run down her cheeks. After a while, she said: "Oh, if we only had it when you children were growing up." We had lots of illness. Anyone who's never been in a family without electricity - with illness - can' t imagine the difference. ~ Studs Terkel

This I remember. Some people put this out of their minds and forget it. I don't. I don't want to forget it. I don't want it to take the best of me, but I want to be there because this is what happened. This is the truth, you know. History. ~ Studs Terkel

You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist. ~ Studs Terkel

I'm sure that in Germany people also took an oath of secrecy. We know what that eventually led to. If it works that way with us, the sanctions for breaking the secrecy are nothing compared to the sanctions there could be if we're silent. All ~ Studs Terkel

I want a language that speaks the truth. ~ Studs Terkel

I came to college to study, Cass, not to whore myself out to drunken frat boys!"
She gaffawed. "Whatever, darlin', you won't be thinking of studying when your ankles are wrapped 'round some stud's neck as he wears you like a necklace, tickling your belly button from the inside! ~ Tillie Cole

When you become part of something, in some way you count. It could be a march; it could be a rally, even a brief one. You're part of something, and you suddenly realize you count. To count is very important. ~ Studs Terkel

In all jazz, and especially the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them - sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been "down the line," as the song puts it, know what this music is about…. White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality, and do not any longer understand it. The word "sensual" is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either. ~ James Baldwin

Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue.
"Oy!" yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. "There's a fackin' queue!"
Never apologize, advises Lloyd George. Say it again, only this time, ruder. "I know there's a 'fackin' queue'! I already queued in it once and I am not going to queue in it again just because Nina Simone over there won't sell me a ruddy ticket!"
A colored yeti in a clip-on uniform swooped. "Wassa bovver?"
"This old man here reckons his colostomy bag entitles him to jump the queue," said the skinhead, "and make racist slurs about the lady of Afro-Caribbean extraction in the advance-travel window."
I couldn't believe I was hearing this. ~ David Mitchell

I'm not up on the Internet, but I hear that is a democratic possibility. People can connect with each other. I think people are ready for something, but there is no leadership to offer it to them. People are ready to say, 'Yes, we are part of a world.' ~ Studs Terkel

What's it like to be that goofy little soldier, scared stiff, with his bayonet aimed at Christ? What's it like to have been a woman in a defense-plant job during World War II? What's it like to be a kid at the front lines? It's all funny and tragic at the same time ~ Studs Terkel

Studs are the easiest way to add some edge to your outfit. ~ Brad Goreski

There was a drugged sanctimoniousness about the sappy-looking birds seated in the lobby. Studs felt that there wasn't a man or a regular guy among them. ~ James T. Farrell

I never drove a car. I'm hopeless that way. I press the wrong buttons on the tape recorder. But if the person I'm interviewing helps me out, that person feels needed. People need to feel needed. ~ Studs Terkel

Think of what's stored in an 80- or a 90-year-old mind. Just marvel at it. You've got to get out this information, this knowledge, because you've got something to pass on. There'll be nobody like you ever again. Make the most of every molecule you've got as long as you've got a second to go. ~ Studs Terkel

The answer is to say 'No!' to authority when authority is wrong. ~ Studs Terkel

Ruby Bates, one of the young white girls, was a remarkable person. She told me she had been driven into prostitution when she was thirteen. She had been working in a textile mill for a pittance. When she asked for a raise, the boss told her to make it up by going with the workers. She told me there was nothing else she could do ... Ruby Bates was a remarkable woman. Underneath it all - the poverty, the degradation - she was decent, pure. Here was an illiterate white girl, all of whose training had been clouded by the myths of white supremacy, who, in the struggle for the lives of these nine innocent boys, had come to see the role she was being forced to play. As a murderer. She turned against her oppressors ... I shall never forget her. ~ Studs Terkel

Every day I'd say I look different. Sometimes I look really formal, sometimes I love the classic Stella McCartney, Chloe Sevigny and Gwyneth Paltrow thing. Other days I like being rock star and wearing leather jackets and studs. I love wearing Burberry - it's the perfect combination of formal and punky. ~ Ellie Goulding

All you need in life is truth and beauty and you can find both at the Public Library. ~ Studs Terkel

We would have two less championships here if it was not for Manu Ginobili. In my eyes, he's the stud of the world. ~ Gregg Popovich

After the stock market crash, some New York editors suggested that hearings be held: what had really caused the Depression? They were held in Washington. In retrospect, they make the finest comic reading. The leading industrialists and bankers testified. They hadn't the foggiest notion what had gone bad. You read a transcript of that record today with amazement: that they could be so unaware. This was their business, yet they didn't understand the operation of the economy. The only good witnesses were the college professors, who enjoyed a bad reputation in those years. No professor was supposed to know anything practical about the economy. ~ Studs Terkel

The Grand Illusion, one of the great war films of all time. ~ Studs Terkel

People are ready to say, 'Yes, we are ready for single-payer health insurance.' We are the only industrialized country in the world that does not have national health insurance. We are the richest in wealth and the poorest in health of all the industrial nations. ~ Studs Terkel

«He grins and straightens, wings high and regal behind him. I glare at his costume. It's so typical him. A mix of medieval and rock star: brown leather forearm guards with studs over a ruffle-cuffed white shirt, and a cavalier doublet in burgundy with a gold lace overlay. The hem hits above his muscled thighs, so the skintight burgundy hose taper smoothly into knee-high brown boots, leaving nothing to the imagination. Worst of all, he has a crown.
He dressed as a fairy king. The irony doesn't escape me.
I scowl.
"Problem, luv?" He looks down on me from behind a gold lace half mask while adjusting the ruby-jeweled crown over his blue hair with velvet-clad hands. Tiny moth corpses are suspended in the rubies, like stained-glass fossils.
I shake my head. "I'm pretty sure you'll be the only one wearing anything tight enough to need a codpiece. Always have to be the showstopper, don't you?"

"Oh, I assure you, what I chose to show is only the start.» ~ A.G. Howard

Once you wake up the human animal, you can't put it back to sleep again. ~ Studs Terkel

What was I thinking?" Chiron cried. " I can't let you get away without this."
He pulled a pen from his coat pocket. It was an ordinary disposable ballpoint, black ink, removable cap. Probably thirty cents.
Gee," I said. "Thanks."
Percy, that's a gift from your father. I've kept it for years, not knowing you were who I was waiting for. But the profecy is clear to me now. You are the one.
I remembered the feild trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when I'd vaporized Mrs. Dodds. Chiron had thrown me a pen that turned into a sword. Could this be...?
I took off the cap, and the pen grew longer and heavier in my hand. In half a second, I held a shimmering bronze sword with a double-edged blade, a leather=wrapped grip, and a flat hilt riveted with gold studs. It was the first weapon that actually felt balanced in my hands.
The sword has a long and tragic history that we need not go into," Chiron told me. "It's name is Anaklusmos."
Riptide," I translated, surprised the Ancient Greek came so easily.
Use it only for emergencies" Chiron said, "and only against monsters No hero should harm mortals unless absolutely, of course, but this sword wouldn't harm them in any case. ~ Rick Riordan

You can borrow my two-carat diamond stud earrings," Aphrodite said. I stopped and looked back at her. "Huh?" She shrugged. "That's as close to a declaration of love as you're gonna get from me. ~ P.C. Cast

My great inspiration has always been Studs Terkel, who is a wonderful American oral historian. He was a radio DJ at first, interviewed a lot of jazz musicians, and at some point started to interview Americans about work. ~ Hans Ulrich Obrist

You painted armless beings, swimming in blinding color, and they had to exist like that forever. Could they see you with all those tiny, scattered eyes? Or did they only see the heaven and hell of their own shining realm, anchored to the studs in the wall by a piece of twisted wire? ~ Anne Rice

I was born in the year the Titanic sank. The Titanic went down, and I came up. That tells you a little about the fairness of life. ~ Studs Terkel

It's a strange thing. I hardly find anybody today who doesn't agree that the ledger should not determine how we live. Most people think it's terrible that the pollution in Lake Michigan is being decided by how much it'll cost companies to cure it. People are realizing that an environment is being created that will be as dangerous for capitalists to live in as well as for the working people...that it's insane to let major things be decided on the basis of black figures and red figures. I find temperate people saying today that the business-motivated system isn't a safe thing to have around. ~ Fred W. Thompson

Who knows Bob's name in this outfit - let alone his lame child's? ("The last place I worked for, I was let go," recalls the bank teller. "One of my friends stopped by and asked where I was at. They said, 'She's no longer with us.' That's all. I vanished.") It's nothing personal, really. Dickens's people have been replaced by Beckett's. ~ Studs Terkel

Marvin Miller, I suspect, is the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis. ~ Studs Terkel

People ask what those women saw in me. Let's face it, I wasn't a bad-looking stud. But that's not it. It's the music; it's standing up there under the lights. A lot of women just flip; looks have nothing to do with it. You call Mick Jagger good-looking? ~ Artie Shaw

I find labels "liberal" and "conservative" of little meaning. Our language has become perverted along with the thoughts of many of us. ~ Studs Terkel

On the evening bus, the tense, pinched faces of young file clerks and elderly secretaries tell us more than we care to know. On the expressways, middle management men pose without grace behind their wheels as they flee city and job. ~ Studs Terkel

I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly-line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people. ~ Studs Terkel

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse. ~ H.L. Mencken

A lot of my comic influences are distinctly American: Woody Allen and Bob Hope, for example. They were always the underdogs who were using wit to sort of battle their way through. And it seems to me that a lot of contemporary U.S. comedies are shot through with losers. None of the characters in 'The Big Bang Theory,' for instance, are studs. ~ Stephen Merchant

One night a guy hit his head on a welding gun. He went to his knees. He was bleeding like a pig, blood was oozing out. So I stopped the line for a second and ran over to help him. The foreman turned the line on again, he almost stepped on the guy. That's the first thing they always do. They didn't even call an ambulance. The guy walked to the medic department
that's about half a mile
he had about five stitches put in his head. The foreman didn't say anything. He just turned the line on. You're nothing to any of them. ~ Studs Terkel

The whole program of unemployment insurance, Social Security, was a confession of the failure of our whole social order. And confession of failure of Christian principles: that man, in fact, did not look after his brother. ~ Studs Terkel

His legs remembered the correct position for squatting down with toys. He played. He fit the round male studs into the round female grooves. He got some thinking done as he hunkered down on his fallen-sleep legs. ~ Colson Whitehead

Well sir, I may not be a for-real cowboy ... But I am one hell of a stud! ~ Jon Voight

What I bring to the interview is respect. The person recognizes that you respect them because you're listening. Because you're listening, they feel good about talking to you. When someone tells me a thing that happened, what do I feel inside? I want to get the story out. It's for the person who reads it to have the feeling ... In most cases the person I encounter is not a celebrity; rather the ordinary person. "Ordinary" is a word I loathe. It has a patronizing air. I have come across ordinary people who have done extraordinary things. (p. 176) ~ Studs Terkel

I had a grungy period and looked like a tramp for a very long time - my mum really hated it! I destroyed her entire '70s wardrobe by putting studs into everything - I thought I was really cool. But it's good to experiment - I even had dreadlocks at one point. ~ Clemence Poesy

That's what we're missing. We're missing argument. We're missing debate. We're missing colloquy. We're missing all sorts of things. Instead, we're accepting. ~ Studs Terkel

Georgia gulped as the entire doorway suddenly filled with a man she didn't recognize. She'd been expecting Jesper MacMillian.
This was definitely not Jesper MacMillian.
This man had a rich black complexion. His head was bald- whether by nature or design, she couldn't be sure. Tiny studs flashed in his ears. He wore a beautiful black suit, painstakingly tailored to fit his massive shoulders. Dark tattoos curled just above his pressed white collar, and down below the edges of his cuffs.
His face was neither kind nor unkind. He studied her with vague disinterest, his eyes quiet and guarded beneath solid brows. ~ Laura Oliva