Typical New Jersey Quotes

In dealing with Syria's dictator ... only force counts. No cease-fire was attainable in Lebanon until the 16-inch guns of the battleship New Jersey started shelling Syria's proxies; suddenly, sweet reason prevailed in Damascus. ~ William Safire

I moved from Kentucky to Miramar, Florida, at about 8. I think I was in second grade. I still had my Southern accent, and down there, you got to experience a melting pot in full fury. All the kids I hung out with were, like, Sicilian kids from Jersey and New York. ~ Johnny Depp

I went to my last three years of high school in New Jersey. I just wanted to act, you know? ~ Stacey Dash

[Stephanie] That's not the point. I can't just let monkeys loose in Trenton.
[Lula] Why not? There's all kinds of crazy shit loose in Trenton. ~ Janet Evanovich

Because I first made my name as a rapper claiming South Central L.A., people often assume I'm strictly a West Coast cat. But my family was actually from back East. I was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Summit, an upscale town in north Jersey. ~ Ice-T

I loved New Jersey. I thought it was the greatest place in the world because on Halloween kids could start trick or treating right after school. Isn't that great? ~ Joel McHale

A small but typical example of how 'philosophy' sends out new shoots is to be found in the case of Georg Cantor, a nineteenth-century German mathematician. His research on the subject of infinity was at first written off by his scientific colleagues as mere 'philosophy' because it seemed so bizarre, abstract and pointless. Now it is taught in schools under the name of set-theory. ~ Anthony Gottlieb

Bib Block was sure that in any part of the country at all, whenever the name of this road was mentioned, people's hearts pivoted like Moslems to the east and flopped over. Sooner of later, he believed, at one stage of the journey or another, all roads led to the New Jersey Turnpike. ~ Kathryn Kramer

In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet's statistics. In search of data on the letters' relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases. He found a stock of twelve thousand E's, nine thousand T's, and only two hundred Z's. He and Morse rearranged the alphabet accordingly. They had originally used dash-dash-dot to represent T, the second most common letter; now they promoted T to a single dash, thus saving telegraph operators uncountable billions of key taps in the world to come. Long afterward, information theorists calculated that they had come within 15 percent of an optimal arrangement for telegraphing English text. ~ James Gleick

I had just done what she does in the story just about a year earlier - I moved from New Jersey and came to New York and was working at a bar, and you know, trying to make it. ~ Piper Perabo

They're in southern France. Oldest paintings ever found there. We're talking like thirty thousand years old. Scenes typical of the Paleolithic - horses, cattle, mammoths, that kind of thing. No pictures of humans but one depiction of a vagina, for what that's worth. The really interesting thing is what happened when they carbon-dated the place. They found pictures in the same room painted six thousand years apart. They looked identical."

"Okay. So?"

"So think about that. For six thousand years there was no progress and no evidence of any impulse to change anything. People were fine with the way things were. In other words, this is not a people experiencing spiritual desolation. You and I need new diversions nightly. These people didn't change a thing for sixty centuries. This is not a people tired of their snack routine."

The drumming outside escalates for a moment and then fades "back into a kind of ominous tolling.

"Melancholy," Periwinkle says, "had to be invented. Civilization had this unintended side effect, which is melancholy. Tedium. Routine. Gloom. And when those things were birthed, so were people like me, to attend to them. So no, it's not patriotism. It's evolution. ~ Nathan Hill

I was the Secretary of State of New Jersey in November 2000. I paid careful attention to the challenges that stemmed from inadequate voting systems in various places. ~ DeForest Soaries

St. Patrick's Day is a holy day for Roman Catholics in Ireland to pray and a day for drunk people to vomit with their pants down in New Jersey. ~ Margot Leitman

Anything your father said. People he might have mentioned."
"Amos," I blurted out, just to see his reaction. "He met a man named Amos."
Inspector Williams sighed. "Sadie, he couldn't have done. Surely you know that. We spoke with Amos not one hour ago, on the phone from his home in New York."
"He isn't in New York!" I insisted. "He's right - "
I glanced out the window and Amos was gone. Bloody typical. ~ Rick Riordan

I think you'll make a great Congressman, Sam Porter. The people of New York couldn't ask for anything better.
New Jersey."
What do you mean, New Jersey?"
I live in Jersey. That's my home state."
But what about people of New York? Don't we deserve honest representatives, too?" It was one thing when he was going to be her Congressman, but he was going to be someone else's Congressman, not hers?
New York has good representatives."
But not as good as you, Sam. We deserve the best."
Move to Jersey. ~ Kathleen O'Reilly

There's a high school in Camden, New Jersey, I call the Jill Scott School. It's the Camden Creative Arts High School. Those teachers and kids are so passionate about what they do, and 98 percent of the senior class went on to college. ~ Jill Scott

She had a collection of matchbooks from extravagant places, dropped here and there on tables in the dingy apartment she still shared with Gregg. They made it look as if she lived a gay, mad life. What a typical picture for anyone from out of New York: career girl's apartment, stockings drying over the shower rod, clothes flung helter-skelter in the rush to get to the office on time, to a date on time, a bottle of wine there too, wads of dust lying under the studio couch because you couldn't clean except weekends and sometimes not even then, and all those brightly colored matchbooks with names of well-known eating places, so that even if one managed only two good and sufficient meals a week one could still light one's cigarettes for the rest of the week with the memory. ~ Rona Jaffe

In a way, Jersey really supports rock, maybe more than New York City and Long Island. I know plenty of bands that tour and do much better at Starland or other clubs in New Jersey than others in the tri-state area. ~ Eddie Trunk

You want to be the first to do something. You want to create something. You want to innovate something...I often think of Edison inventing the light bulb. That's what I want to do. I want to drive over the bridge coming out of New York there and look down on that sea of lights that is New Jersey and say, `Hey, I did that!' ~ David Keirsey

About thirty truckers in Brighton, Colorado, refused to move their rigs in protest of the high cost of diesel fuel, fuel shortages, and the fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. Other drivers followed suit in Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, Nebraska, Connecticut, and Delaware. In New Jersey, the governor had to call on the National Guard to remove blockading trucks. The truckers complained that higher fuel prices and lower speed limits were threatening their profits. ~ Tom Lewis

We take off for New Jersey. Gigantic landscape of factories, bridges, and railroads. And then, suddenly, East Orange and a countryside as postcard as can be, with thousands of neat and tidy cottages like toys in the midst of tall poplars and magnolias. I'm shown in the little public library, bright and gay, which the neighborhood uses a lot - with a huge room for children. (Finally a country where the children are really taken care of.) ~ Albert Camus

I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too. ~ Paul Muldoon

In 1938, when I had decided that the only way to see the country was in a trailer, and I built the trailer which I still have and lived in it for eighteen months, and learned America from San Diego to the Canadian border, from Miami to New Jersey, and east to west in between. ~ Leslie Charteris

Political identities aren't about tax cuts. They are about tribes... This is the result of the incredible rise in political polarization in recent decades. It used to be that both the Republican and Democratic parties included both liberals and conservatives. Since parties contained ideological multitudes, it was hard for them to be the basis of strong, personal identities. A liberal Democrat in New Jersey didn't have a lot in common with a conservative Democrat in Alabama. But now that's changed. The parties are sharply sorted by ideology. What were once fractious coalitions have become unified tribes. ~ Ezra Klein

I was a kid living in New Jersey, who - I'd wanted to make movies since I was a little kid, so that came before music for me. But I started playing drums just as a hobby, and I wasn't even really into jazz that much. ~ Damien Chazelle

The Achilles Heel of the Americas was the lack of cultural confidence typical of new settlers. ~ Arthur Erickson

The biggest fight in my relationship with Danny regards his absurd claim that he invited the popular middle school phenomenon of saying "cha-cha-cha" after each phrase of the Happy Birthday song- an idea his ingenious sixth-grade brain allegedly spawned in a New Jersey Chuck E. Cheese and watched spread across 1993 America with an unprecedented rapidity. ~ Marina Keegan

Chris Christie is New Jersey's concern, not America's. ~ Henry Rollins

The refreshing serenity of mountains, streams and more forests in Pennsylvania gave way to small communities and the more thickly-settled towns of New Jersey. And finally, New York City.

It took us six days to get there, and as I crossed the George Washington Bridge I remember thinking how amazing this was. I was back in New York. A city that takes no crap.

I was back amongst Carefree Scamps who I could trust with my life ~ Karl Wiggins

In HEATHEN, R. Flowers Rivera remixes the classical and the Biblical, the usual and the typical until what we thought we knew of ourselves and others is new again. The mythic becomes particular; the particular becomes mythic in these fascinating poems of personalities and personas. Rivera's work is rich in empathy and invention. Heathen is a book of psalms for the present day. ~ Terrance Hayes

In the eight years before I became governor, there was zero net private sector job growth in New Jersey. Zero. For eight years. ~ Chris Christie

Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

I was born in New Jersey but grew up mostly in Florida. My dad died when I was 8. ~ John Joseph Adams

When I was 13, I moved from New Jersey to Germany with my family. The high school was so supportive of my dream to continue with my theater training; instead of taking PE, I would get credit for dance lessons. ~ Nina Arianda

Working on an essay versus a novel is like the difference between seeing to that curtain and seeing to New Jersey. ~ Sloane Crosley

I had a crazy life for a teenager. I lived in New Jersey, but I'd go to Vermont for three weeks, join a commune, take pictures with the guy I was dating, come back home, and post photos. ~ Halsey

I know California isn't a real destination. You can't get there from New Jersey, not simply by following a line drawn on a map. The process of arrival is more subtle and complex. It involves acts of contrition. You must appease the gods. You must find novel forms of penance. You must tattoo your children and look at the wonder. It's about conjuring and awakening and intuitions you wish you never had. ~ Kate Braverman

Girls Incorporated of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey continues to advance their cause and to strengthen their community by aspiring to open a Girl's Center for Philadelphia. ~ Robert Brady

Whenever I stumble over my own feet, or blurt out a thought that makes no sense at all, or leave the house wearing one pattern too many, I always think, It's okay, I'm from New Jersey. I love New Jersey, because it's not just an all-purpose punch line, but probably a handy legal defense, as in, Yes, I shot my wife because I thought she was Bigfoot, but I'm from New Jersey. ~ Paul Rudnick

I also love horseback riding in New Jersey. ~ Eva Herzigova

Manchester United could have any goalkeeper in the world. I was a 23-year-old kid from New Jersey who, from an early age, had to cope with Tourette's Syndrome, a brain disorder that can trigger speech and facial tics, vocal outbursts and obsessive compulsive behavior. ~ Tim Howard

Philly is more East Coast than Pittsburgh. It's closer to New Jersey and New York, so the vibe is way more fast-paced. ~ Wiz Khalifa