Walter Mitty Quotes

Walter Mitty: To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life. ~ James Thurber

On my drive from Salt Lake City to Moab, Utah, I passed an eighteen-wheeler with mud flaps on the rear tires. The flaps were black and featured the silver silhouette of a very statuesque naked woman. I'm sure you've seen this artistic expression in your travels.

I wondered: has this ploy ever worked, like some kind of perverted fishing lure? ~ Jim Flynn

Sean O'Connell: Sometimes I don't. If I like a moment, for me, personally, I don't like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it. ~ James Thurber

As a kid, I always wanted to be lots of things. I was a Walter Mitty type. I wanted to be in the French Foreign Legion, a detective, a doctor, a test pilot with a scarf, a fisherman who hauled in a tremendous marlin after a 12-hour fight. ~ Jonathan Winters

I had a huge imagination. My granddad says I was a bit of a Walter Mitty character. ~ Tom Hardy

Richard Nixon had a kind of Walter Mitty fantasy life. He was a man with a grandiose thoughts: dreams of not simply being president but maybe becoming one of the truly great presidents of American history. ~ Robert Dallek

Whoso desireth to govern well and securely, it behoveth him to have a vigilant eye to the proceedings of great princes, and to consider seriously of their designs. ~ Walter Raleigh

During one or two summers, as well as part-time during the school year, I worked for a small Canadian company which developed electrical instruments for military planes. ~ Walter Kohn

It is not fantasy's hot fire,
Whose wishes, son as granted, fly;
It liveth not in fierce desire,
With dead desire it doth not die;
It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart, and mind to mind,
In body and in soul can bind. ~ Walter Scott

Whole worlds exist beneath the surface. And maybe you can't see down there, Michael thought, but there's a part of you that knows. ~ Jess Walter

Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it. ~ Walter Chrysler

A person moving in zero gravity feels a pitiful helplessness. One wrong move and you find yourself spinning wildly. Everyone becomes a baby again in outer space, laboriously learning how to walk. ~ Ulrich Walter

A smile is ever the most bright and beautiful with a tear upon it. What is the dawn without the dew? The tear is rendered by the smile precious above the smile itself. ~ Walter Savage Landor

Fools should not have chapping sticks'; that is, weapons of offence. ~ Walter Scott

Why do I feel that ghosts are more real
Than these creatures of substance and matter?
Why does their song seem to drive me along
More than humanity's drivel and pratter? ~ Walter Jon Williams

I'm convinced that theatre is a horrible business. Make this the headline. You have to be on the spot every night as an actor. You are damn lonesome standing out there. ~ Walter D. Asmus

That hatred of the railroad was Winder's only original notion, and when he got mad that always came in some way. Everything else was what he'd heard somebody, or most everybody, say, only he always got angry enough to make it sound like a conviction. ~ Walter Van Tilburg Clark

People with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they're doing and, moreover, make you want to admire them for it. ~ Walter Isaacson

Loving confrontation can free both the oppressed from docility and the oppressor from sin. ~ Walter Wink

Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book. (Steven Levy) ~ Walter Isaacson

Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life. ~ Walter Lippmann

Hertzfeld recalled that Gates just sat there coolly, looking at Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it, I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it. ~ Walter Isaacson

Reading is like magic--I think I've made my case. Without the gift of words, this world's a crazy place! ~ Denise Walter McConduit

Henry Luce to his Time magazine writers: Tell the history of our time through the people who make it. ~ Walter Isaacson

What troubled people especially was not just the tragedy--or even the needlessness--but the element of fate in it all. If the Titanic had heeded any of the six ice messages on Sunday . . . if ice conditions had been normal . . . if the night had been rough or moonlit . . . if she had seen the berg 15 second sooner--or 15 seconds later . . . if she had hit the ice any other way . . . if her watertight bulkheads had been one deck higher . . . if she had carried enough boats . . . if the Californian had only come. Had any one of these "ifs" turned out right, every life might have been save. But they all went against her--a classic Greek tragedy. ~ Walter Lord

years. MICHAEL EISNER. Hard-driving Disney CEO who made ~ Walter Isaacson

You know I, I just think, that ah, things have a way of working themselves out. ~ Walter White

Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation. ~ Walter Cronkite

The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently," he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence. ~ Walter Isaacson

Avie Tevanian, a lanky and gregarious engineer at NeXT who had become Jobs's friend, remembers that every now and then, when they were going out to dinner, they would stop by Chrisann's house to pick up Lisa. "He was very sweet to her," Tevanian recalled. "He was a vegetarian, and so was Chrisann, but she wasn't. He was fine with that. He suggested she order chicken, and she ~ Walter Isaacson

The problem, this book will argue, is not just that law schools generate so many bad ideas - mistaken and benighted ideas, impractical and socially destructive ideas - but that those ideas follow a predictable pattern. They confer power on legal intellectuals and their allies - at least the power to prescribe, often the power to litigate. The movement that results - whether couched as public interest law, as minority empowerment law, or as international human rights law - is in fact a bid for power, whether naked or cleverly disguised. ~ Walter Olson

God made the rose out of what was left of woman at the creation. The great difference is, we feel the rose's thorns when we gather it; and the other's when we have had it for some time. ~ Walter Savage Landor

There's a big link between trains and film. One of the first filmed objects was a train. The clickety-clack of the projector and the clickety-clack of the train are similar. There is the idea of the voyage - every voyage is a story. I wonder if film would have been invented without the train. ~ Walter Murch

There is an ascendant feeling among the people that all achievement should be measured in human happiness. ~ Walter Lippmann

This American system of ours', he shouted, 'call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if only we seize it with both hands, and make the most of it'. A month later in New York I was telling this story to Mr John Walter, minority owner of The Times. He asked me why I had not written the Capone interview for the paper. I explained that when I had come to put my notes together, I saw that most of what Capone had said was in essence identical with what was being said in the leading articles of The Times itself, and I doubted whether the paper would be best pleased to find itself seeing eye to eye with the most notorious gangster in Chicago. ~ Claud Cockburn

The heart that once has been bathed in love's pure fountain retains the pulse of youth forever. ~ Walter Savage Landor

Ben was really a contrarian but he didn't use those terms because he was really buying value. ~ Walter Schloss

Take democracy. According to the common-sense meaning, a society is democratic to the extent that people can participate in a meaningful way in managing their affairs. But the doctrinal meaning of democracy is different - it refers to a system in which decisions are made by sectors of the business community and related elites. The public are to be only "spectators of action," not "participants," as leading democratic theorists (in this case, Walter Lippmann) have explained. They are permitted to ratify the decisions of their betters and to lend their support to one or another of them, but not to interfere with matters - like public policy - that are none of their business. ~ Noam Chomsky

Absurdities are great or small in proportion to custom or insuetude. ~ Walter Savage Landor

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry. ~ Walter Pater

So here comes Gabriel again, and what he says is "Good tidings of great joy ... for all people." ... That's why the shepherds are first: they represent all the nameless, all the working stiffs, the great wheeling population of the whole world. ~ Walter Wangerin

What do you think of Adolf Hitler?" Einstein replied, "He is living on the empty stomach of Germany. As soon as economic conditions improve, he will no longer be important. ~ Walter Isaacson

Our consumer culture is organized against history. There is a depreciation of memory and a ridicule of hope, which means everything must be held in the now, either an urgent now or an eternal now. ~ Walter Brueggemann

Take special care that thou never trust any friend or servant with any matter that may endanger thine estate; for so shalt thou make thyself a bond-slave to him that thou trustest, and leave thyself always to his mercy. ~ Walter Raleigh

I don't like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they're not very good scientists. They're more like stamp collectors. ~ Luis Walter Alvarez

When he was turning thirty, Jobs had used a metaphor about record albums. He was musing about why folks over thirty develop rigid thought patterns and tend to be less innovative. " People get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them, " he said. At age forty-five, Jobs was now about to get out of his groove. ~ Walter Isaacson

The last man to try to run for president advocating a tax increase was Walter Mondale. He lost 49 states in 1984, and the "I'll raise your taxes" reputation haunted him all the way to Minnesota last year, where he lost his 50th state in the Senate election. ~ Dick Morris

Hollywood is where they shoot too many pictures and not enough actors. ~ Walter Winchell

NOTE: For those who enjoy listening to music while they read, a soundtrack has been placed at the back of the book. So if - like the author - you believe that music and reading go together like peanut butter and chocolate, then you may want to skip to the back and start the music before you begin reading. Enjoy! ~ Mitty Walters

Couldn't you outgrow the little-girl fantasy? Couldn't love be gentler, smaller, quiter, not quite all-consuming? ~ Jess Walter

Any sensible family has a budget that lays out how much will be spent for household and other purposes. Without such planning, things would quickly go awry. ~ Walter Ulbricht

Desperate? That can be a justification for all kinds of behavior. ~ Jessica Walter

I must confess I took a couple or three jobs just for the money. ~ Jessica Walter

Is Dust immortal then, I ask'd him, so that we may see it blowing through the Centuries? But as Walter gave no Answer I jested with him further to break his Melancholy humour: What is Dust, Master Pyne?
And he reflected a little: It is particles of Matter, no doubt.
Then we are all Dust indeed, are we not?
And in a feigned Voice he murmered, For Dust thou art and shalt to Dust return. Then he made a Sour face, but only yo laugh the more. ~ Peter Ackroyd