Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut Quotes

Mary Jane. Listen. Please," Eloise said, sobbing. "You remember our freshman year, and I had that brown-and-yellow dress I bought in Boise, and Miriam Ball told me nobody wore those kind of dresses in New York, and I cried all night?" Eloise shook Mary Jane's arm. "I was a nice girl," she pleaded, "wasn't I? ~ J.D. Salinger

The thing that worries me is that I'm so different from other writers. Connecticut is just another state to me. And nature - well, nature is just nature. When I see a tree whose leafy mouth is pressed against the earth's sweet flowing breast, I think, 'Well, that's a nice-looking oak,' but it doesn't change my way of life.
Now I'm not going to stand here and run down trees and flowers. Personally, I have three snake plants of my own, and in a tearoom I'm the first one to notice the geraniums. But the point is, I keep my head. ~ Jean Kerr

There was a law in Connecticut - I believe it is still formally unrepealed - making it illegal for a man to kiss his wife on Sunday. ~ Bertrand Russell

Hedge funds are investment pools that are relatively unconstrained in what they do. They are relatively unregulated (for now), charge very high fees, will not necessarily give you your money back when you want it, and will generally not tell you what they do. They are supposed to make money all the time, and when they fail at this, their investors redeem and go to someone else who has recently been making money. Every three or four years they deliver a one-in-a-hundred year flood. They are generally run for rich people in Geneva, Switzerland, by rich people in Greenwich, Connecticut. ~ Cliff Asness

I came to Southbury because I wanted to live a more simple life. When I was a child, I saw lots of movies about happy people living in Connecticut. And ever since then, that was where I wanted to live. I thought it would be like the movies. And it really is. It's exactly what I hoped it would be. ~ Polly Bergen

Explaining the Jews in a Catholic school when you're Irish is like having to explain your country's foreign policy while on a vacation in France. You don't know what you're talking about and no matter what you say, they're not going to like it anyway. ~ John William Tuohy

My house in Connecticut is very quiet, and when I'm trying to concentrate, I don't even allow the cat inside my second-floor study. ~ Thomas Mallon

You know, the state of Connecticut is ... sometimes it's a provincial state. And I've been working very hard to get the endorsement of the people within our state, and ultimately, the ultimate endorsement is from the voters in the state of Connecticut. ~ Linda McMahon

There's a theme that appears in much of your work," I say to Maurice on my last visit to Connecticut, "and I can only hint at it because it's difficult to formulate or describe. It has something to do with the lines: 'As I went over the water/the water went over me' [from As I Went over the Water] or 'I'm in the milk and the milk's in me' [from Night Kitchen]."

"Obviously I have one theme, and it's even in the book I'm working on right now. It's not that I have such original ideas, just that I'm good at doing variations on the same idea over and over again. You can't imagine how relieved I was to find out that Henry James admitted he had only a couple of themes and that all of his books were based on them. That's all we need as artists - one power-driven fantasy or obsession, then to be clever enough to do variations… like a series of variations by Mozart. They're so good that you forget they're based on one theme. The same things draw me, the same images…"

"What is this one obsession?"

"I'm not about to tell you - not because it's a secret, but because I can't verbalize it."

"There's a line by Bob Dylan in 'Just Like a Woman' which talks about being 'inside the rain.'"

"Inside the rain?"

"When it's raining outside," I explain, "I often feel inside myself, as if I were inside the rain… as if the rain were my self. That's the sense I get from Dylan's image and from your books as well."

"It's strange y ~ Jonathan Cott

Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the "wrong crowd" read like tornado alerts in parent manuals ... It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren't planning to get a Ph. D. from Yale. ~ Mary Blakely

My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado, where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years, to San Francisco for one year, Connecticut for seven, Oregon for a couple years, and then I went to school. ~ Gus Van Sant

I was doing a play in New York, which we had done in New Haven, Connecticut. It was an American premiere of a play called The Changing Room written by a wonderful man named David Story. It was about a rugby team in the North of England. It got just screaming rave reviews. At that time, virtually every major critic went up to the Long Wharf Theater to see a new play like that. ~ Richard Masur

Connecticut would not be Connecticut if we cut $3.5 billion out of the budget. We are a strong, generous, hopeful people. We'd be taking $800 million out of education. You can't do that in this state. ~ Dannel Malloy

I need you, your boat and your equipment for a month, maybe two. I can't dive alone because I just don't know the waters well enough to risk it, and I don't have the time to waste. I have to be back in Connecticut by the end of August."
"To get more chalk dust under your fingernails."
She sat back slowly. "You have no right to criticize my profession."
"I'm sure the chalk's very exclusive at Yale," Ky commented. ~ Nora Roberts

In the laws of Connecticut, as well as in all those of New England, we find the germ and gradual development of that township independence which is the life and mainspring of American liberty at the present day. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Her voice was trained, supple as leather, precise as a knife thrower's blade. Singing or talking, it had the same graceful quality, and an accent I thought at first was English, but then realized was the old-fashioned American of a thirties movie, a person who could get away with saying 'grand.' Too classic, they told her when she went out on auditions. It didn't mean old. It meant too beautiful for the times, when anything that lasted longer than six months was considered passe. I loved to listen to her sing, or tell me stories about her childhood in suburban Connecticut, it sounded like heaven. ~ Janet Fitch

Some argue the days of furthering or bettering oneself through a liberl arts education are gone, but that's true only if "furthering and bettering" means "making more money" ... For many life reveals itself more intimately in literature than in ledgers. ~ Gina Barreca

Thought Experiment: You are a native of New York City, you live in New York, work in New York, travel about the city with no particular emotion except a mild boredom, unease, exasperation, and dislike especially for, say, Times Square and Brooklyn, and a longing for a Connecticut farmhouse. Later you become an astronaut and wander in space for years. You land on a strange, unexplored (you think) planet. There you find a road sign with an arrow, erected by a previous astronaut in the manner of GIs in World War II: 'Brooklyn 9.6 light-years.' Explain your emotion. ~ Walker Percy

My mother-in-law's last night on earth, a fox crossed our path in Branford, Connecticut, as we left the hospice. We knew somehow that it was her, as I now know the ravenous hawk came to take Ficre. Do I believe that? Yes, I do. Poetic logic is my logic. I do not believe she was a fox. But I believe the fox was a harbinger. I believe that it was a strange enough occurrence that it should be heeded. Zememesh Berhe, the quick, red fox, soon passed from this life to the next. ~ Elizabeth Alexander

Viola had a harrowing story about riding a bicycle west out of the burnt-out ruins of a Connecticut suburb, aged fifteen, harboring vague notions of California but set upon by passersby long before she got there, grievously harmed, joining up with other half feral teenagers in a marauding gang and then slipping away from them, walking alone for a hundred miles, whispering French to herself because all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her, wandering into a town through which the Symphony passed five years later. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

I am continuing to explore a run in the Senate from Connecticut, absolutely exploring it. In fact, I would say exploring it intensely. ~ Lawrence Kudlow

Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in Palo Alto, now lives like the British did in colonial India: ruling the place but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; to the person fortunate enough to own a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension, and viable public transportation doesn't even compute. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare? ~ Mike Lofgren

I'm always a people watcher. They always had us do that at the University of Connecticut where I went for my training. I got my B.F.A. in Acting there. ~ Austin Stowell

He had heard especially promising things about Philadelphia
the lively capital of that young nation. It was said to be a city with a good-enough shipping port, central to the eastern coast of the country, filled with pragmatic Quakers, pharmacists, and hardworking farmers. It was rumored to be a place without haughty aristocrats (unlike Boston), and without pleasure-fearing puritans (unlike Connecticut), and without troublesome self-minted feudal princes (unlike Virginia). The city had been founded on the sound principles of religious tolerance, a free press, and good landscaping, by William Penn
a man who grew tree saplings in bathtubs, and who had imagined his metropolis as a great nursery of both plants and ideas. Everyone was welcome in Philadelphia, absolutely everyone
except, of course, the Jews. Hearing all this, Henry suspected Philadelphia to be a vast landscape of unrealized profits, and he aimed to turn the place to his advantage. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

That is the way Connecticut goes, in a series of Marcelle waves; and Lock Willow Farm is just on the crest of one wave. The barns used to be across the road where they obstructed the view, but a kind flash of lightning came from heaven and burnt them down. ~ Jean Webster

The other day we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah," President Bush said at a Republican fund-raiser in Greenwich, Connecticut, on April 9. "He's one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States. He's not plotting and planning anymore. He's where he belongs. ~ Tim Weiner

We've sued out-of-state power plants that are polluting our air and led a coalition of attorneys general from Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and Massachusetts against efforts in the U.S. House of Representatives to remove critical environmental regulations that protect New York communities from toxic pollution. ~ Eric Schneiderman

One of the classic settings in fiction, a little world as reassuring as imperial St Petersburg or Victorian London, is suburban Connecticut in the 1950s. If you close your eyes, you can picture autumn leaves drifting down on quiet streets, you can see commuters in fedoras streaming off the platforms of the New Haven Line, you can hear the tinkle of the evening's first pitcher of martinis; and hear the ugly fights then, after midnight; and smell the desperate or despairing sex.
(Introduction to "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit") ~ Jonathan Franzen

In Connecticut, my understanding, although I haven't seen the actual litigation, is that they want to measure every other year and not provide annual assessment as is required in the statute. ~ Margaret Spellings

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"


I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut < ~ Wallace Stevens

And now, while he didn't particularly think any of these stories was a bit truer, he did realize that he didn't really know his wife at all; and that in fact the entire conception of knowing another person
of trust, of closeness, of marriage itself
while not exactly a lie since it existed someplace if only as an idea (in his parents' life, at least marginally) was still completely out-of-date, defunct, was something typifying another era, now unfortunately gone. Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her
the last part was a complete fiction, which made all the rest a joke. ~ Richard Ford

I prefer to use 'The Medieval Scapini Tarot' deck produced by U.S. Games Systems Inc., Stamford, Connecticut. The cards are beautiful, captivating and of excellent quality, and I endorse them wholeheartedly.

I should add that I have no connection with U.S. Games Systems, and this is an unbiased endorsement. That having been said, if U.S. Games Systems were appreciative of my comments, and offered me many free packs of cards (or large sums of money) as a charming gesture of goodwill, I should be happy to accept such tokens without compromising my integrity in any way. They might like to bear in mind that in future editions of this book my endorsements may have 'evolved' in the direction of other card companies who are, perhaps, a little more generous in their appreciation of my valuable judgements. ~ Ian Rowland

The only grown-up other than Jacob who ever came into his schoolroom was Eli Willard.

School was in session one day when the Connecticut itinerant reappeared after long absence, bringing Jacob's glass and other merchandise. Jacob seized him and presented him to the class. 'Boys and girls, this specimen here is a Peddler. You don't see them very often. They migrate, like the geese flying over. This one comes maybe once a year, like Christmas. But he ain't dependable, like Christmas. He's dependable like rainfall. A Peddler is a feller who has got things you ain't got, and he'll give 'em to ye, and then after you're glad you got 'em he'll tell ye how much cash money you owe him fer 'em. If you ain't got cash money, he'll give credit, and collect the next time he comes 'round, and meantime you work hard to git the money someway so's ye kin pay him off. Look at his eyes. Notice how they are kinder shiftly-like. Now, class, the first question is: why is this feller's eyes shiftly-like? ~ Donald Harington

I was raised in Connecticut. And I honestly wasn't aware that my dad was a celebrity until I moved to Los Angeles a year ago. ~ Bryce Dallas Howard