Wikstrom Telephone Quotes

I'll fix it up with Mum and Dad, then I'll call you. I know how to use a fellytone now - "
"A telephone, Ron," said Hermione. "Honestly, you should take Muggle Studies next year ... ~ J.K. Rowling

It's hard for people now to remember just how enormous the world was back then for everybody, and how far away even fairly nearby places were. When we called my grandparents long distance on the telephone in Winfield, something we hardly ever did, it sounded as if they were speaking to us from a distant star. We had to shout to be heard and plug a finger in an ear to catch their faint, tinny voices in return. They were only about a hundred miles away, but that was a pretty considerable distance even well into the 1950s. Anything farther - beyond Chicago or Kansas City, say - quickly became almost foreign. It wasn't just that Iowa was far from everywhere. Everywhere was far from everywhere. ~ Bill Bryson

I think the phrase 'computer-literate' is an evil phrase. You don't have to be 'automobile-literate' to get along in this world. You don't have to be 'telephone-literate.' Why should you have to be 'computer-literate'? ~ Alan Cooper

I traced the outline of the Sharpie schoolgirl on the mouse pad, thinking. Talking on a telephone was like talking with your eyes closed. It made you braver and more honest, because it was like talking to yourself. It was why I'd always sung my new songs with my eyes closed. I didn't want to see what the audience thought of them until I was done. Finally, I said, "I've been trying not to be my father my entire life. Not because he's so horrible, but because he's so impressive. Anything - anything I do can't possibly compare. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

In 1978 zip or postcodes were introduced in the Netherlands; they consist of four numbers followed by a space and then to capital letters and are replaced before the name of the town... they referred to the city block in a given street in which the house occurs and thus the Dutch postal code book is the size of a telephone book. ~ Bruce Donaldson

I observed an eighteen-year-old friend of one of our daughters talking to his mother on the telephone. As he hung up the phone in frustration he said, "She makes me so angry, she's always telling me what to think and where to go and how to do things." He was obviously upset and filled with anger. I told him he had one of two choices. He could either continue to practice being right, or practice being kind. If you insist on being right you will argue, get frustrated, angry, and your problem will persist with your mom, I explained. If you simply practice being kind, you can remind yourself that this is your mom, she's always been that way, she will very likely stay that way, but you are going to send her love instead of anger when she starts in with her routine. A simple statement of kindness such as, "That's a good point, Mom, I'll think about it," and you have a spiritual solution to your problem. ~ Wayne W. Dyer

Hannah sat down again and leant back against the tall head of the hall chair. He was right. Yes, he was right. She must have been mad to go on like she had. Good Lord! She hadn't given him the message from Mrs Beggs. Again she was on her feet, but her voice still sounded angry as she called down the hall, 'I forgot to give you a message, from Mrs Beggs. She wanted to know if you were going there tomorrow or Saturday.' There was a moment's silence before his door opened and he came back into the hall and went to the telephone. She remained standing where she was until she heard him say, 'Hello, Beggie. ~ Catherine Cookson

Tell me about yourself - your struggles, your dreams, your telephone number. ~ Peter Arno

Alexa had rushed off downstairs following the telephone call, and Lucien explained to Trey that she had been researching this Ring of Amon for some time now and that she would need to see the new data. The ~ Steve Feasey

Sometimes a director is making three films. Perhaps he is shooting a film in Madras and a film in Bombay and he can't leave Madras as some shooting has to be done, so he directs by telephone. The shooting takes place. On schedule. ~ Satyajit Ray

I had a baby at 19 and was a grandmother by 39. Now, my children lend me their children to take them off to Brittany. It's divine. I'm quite exceptionally lucky. I've never had a week without having all three of my daughters on the telephone. ~ Jane Birkin

When I'm governor ... I'll be the first governor with a listed telephone number. ~ Kinky Friedman

I had two chances to fail [working for Disney]. The first one, they said was "too juvenile." The second one was,they give you general areas to work in. They said, "Set 'My Fair Lady' in ancient Egypt."I came up with this idea about an Egyptian princess, and I gave her, as a sidekick, a little scarab. I had a telephone meeting with the executive "handling" me, and he said, "I looked over the notes. Very cute. But lose the beetle.Beetles don't talk." Well, how do you answer that? I said, "Excuse me just a moment, I've got a teacup calling me on the other line." ~ Charles Busch

For example, it's only about 20 years ago the people in that community would have got telephone lines, and it would be only about in the 1950s that electricity came to that part of the world. Television wouldn't have come till 1970. ~ John McGahern

I watch for emergent technologies and pay attention to what people say they'll be good for, then see what we actually use them for. It never occurred to me that a tiny telephone with a wireless transceiver would do whatever it is that it's done to us. ~ William Gibson

As I reach the grand foyer, I see Jean-Baptiste and Gaspard step through the front door.
"You're here!" I cry.
"I had planned on taking a couple more hours to rest up," Gaspard explains with a grin, "however, we received this almost indecipherable text message on our mobile telephone ... "
Jean-Baptiste holds up his cell phone like it's a piece of alien machinery. "And I quote, 'Dudes, it's going down now. Get your sorry asses over here stat.' With such an eloquent request, how could we resist?" he remarks drily. But there is a ghost of a smile at the edge of his lips, and I know that he and Gaspard wouldn't miss this for anything in the world. ~ Amy Plum

Apart from these parental physical jerks, he did not train his body; he merely inhabited it. A friend had once shown what he called gymnastics for the intelligentsia. You took a box of matches and threw its contents on the floor, then bent down and picked them up, one by one. The first time he tried it himself, he lost patience and stuffed all the matches back in handfuls. He persevered, but the next time, just as he was bending down, the telephone went, and he was needed at once; so the housekeeper was detailed to pick up the matches instead. ~ Julian Barnes

What I'm seeing is a generation that says consistently, 'I would rather text than make a telephone call.' Why? It's less risky. I can just get the information out there. I don't have to get all involved; it's more efficient. I would rather text than see somebody face to face. ~ Sherry Turkle

While the Rumanian Radio was serializing (without my permission) How to be an Alien as an anti-British tract, the Central Office of Information rang me up here in London and asked me to allow the book to be translated into Polish for the benefit of those many Polish refugees who were then settling in this country. 'We want our friends to see us in this light,' the man said on the telephone. This was hard to bear for my militant and defiant spirit. 'But it's not such a favourable light,' I protested feebly. 'It's a very human light and that is the most favourable,' retorted the official. I was crushed.
A few weeks later my drooping spirit was revived when I heard of a suburban bank manager whose wife had brought this book home to him remarking that she had found it fairly amusing. The gentleman in question sat down in front of his open fire, put his feet up and read the book right through with a continually darkening face. When he had finished, he stood up and said:
'Downright impertinence.'
And threw the book into the fire.
He was a noble and patriotic spirit and he did me a great deal of good. I wished there had been more like him in England. But I could never find another. ~ George Mikes

The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that's really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It's like there's some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy. The worst-feeling thing that happened today was at lunch when Michael Pemulis told Mario he had an idea for setting up a Dial-a-Prayer telephone service for atheists in which the atheist dials the number and the line just rings and rings and no one answers. It was a joke and a good one, and Mario got it; what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only one at the big table whose laugh was a happy laugh; everybody else sort of looked down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability. The whole issue was far above Mario's head ... ~ David Foster Wallace

Listen." The voice is extremely loud, and I am forced to hold the telephone away from my ear.
"I don't know who you are, or why you have Jack's phone, but he is my boyfriend, and - "
Boyfriend? What is a boyfriend? Perhaps it is something like a beau.
"Is he engaged to you, then?" I hope not.
"What? No. Of course not."
"Oh, what a relief. He is my true love, and you do not sound very nice."
"What? Listen, you ... "
And then, strangely enough, she calls me a female dog. ~ Alex Flinn

The Viennese wash everything. Where else in the world does the government hire public servants to wash public telephone booths and the glass over traffic lights? Every time I see someone doing these things, I smile like a child. ~ Jonathan Carroll

Reality wasn't a syllogism like "Socrates is a man - all men are mortal - hence Socrates is mortal," but more like "Helga is a human being - all telephone booths have been vandalized - hence Helga must die." Or like: "Hitler is a human being - all Jews are animals - hence all Jews must die. ~ Harry Mulisch

Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you'll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel lonely? Good! Assuming you can write clear English (or Norwegian) sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.
To write a poem you have to have a streak of arrogance ( ... ) when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. You, the same person who said that, also said this. The adhesive force is your way of writing, not sensible connection. ~ Richard Hugo

In terms of the stars, the only ones I cast were Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins. I was in Los Angeles working and a lot of this took place on the telephone. I'd met Maggie [Smith] once and I'd come back-stage, which I'm usually loathe to do because as an actor you don't want people coming back because you want to get home [laughs]. ~ Dustin Hoffman

What about the hero of The House on the Strand? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the book? I don't really know, but I rather think he was going to be paralysed for life. Don't you? ~ Daphne Du Maurier

It's essential for an actor to have a hobby for the time when the telephone doesn't ring. ~ Bradford Dillman

When You Have Forgotten Sunday: The Love Story


-- And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a Wednesday and a Saturday,
And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday --
When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed,
Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon
Looking off down the long street
To nowhere,
Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation
And nothing-I-have-to-do and I'm-happy-why?
And if-Monday-never-had-to-come -
When you have forgotten that, I say,
And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell,
And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang;
And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner,
That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner
To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles
Or chicken and rice
And salad and rye bread and tea
And chocolate chip cookies --
I say, when you have forgotten that,
When you have forgotten my little presentiment
That the war would be over before they got to you;
And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed,
And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end
Bright bedclothes,
Then gently folded into each other -
When you have, I say, forgotten all that,
Then you may tell,
Then I may believe
You have forgotten me well ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

Nothing man has discovered or imagined is to be named with the steam engine. It has no fellow. Franklin capturing the lightning, Morse annihilating space with the telegraph, Bell transmitting speech through the air by the telephone, are not less mysterious - being more ethereal, perhaps in one sense they are even more so - still, the labor of the world performed by heating cold water places Watt and his steam engine in a class apart by itself. ~ Andrew Carnegie

Speaking of novels,' I said, 'you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust's rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described - by Cocteau, I think - as "a mirage of suspended gardens," and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski's (and Lyovin's) thick neck, and a cupid's buttocks for cheeks; but - and now let me finish sweetly - we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking "human interest": it is there, it is there - maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Tut! Magic, indeed! As if there weren't marvels enough without magic. Pictures traveling by telephone, and men bouncing up and down on the moon? Trees and floors and children growing? There are your real marvels. ~ Jane Louise Curry

When the 'New York Times' revealed the warrantless surveillance of voice calls, in December 2005, the telephone companies got nervous. ~ Barton Gellman

Perhaps the one comforting thought I got out of this whole disgusting affair was that over the years when the government was tapping my telephone, it must certainly have heard some home truths from me about themselves, often couched in good Anglo-Saxon terms. ~ Helen Suzman

In England if something goes wrong
say, if one finds a skunk in the garden
he writes to the family solicitor, who proceeds to take the proper measures; whereas in America, you telephone the fire department. Each satisfies a characteristic need; in the English, love of order and legalistic procedure; and here in America, what you like is something vivid, and red, and swift. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Think of it: the lowest common denominator in being digital is not your operating system, modem, or model of computer. It's a tiny piece of plastic, designed decades ago by Bell Labs' Charles Krumreich, Edwin Hardesty, and company, who thought they were making an inconspicuous plug for a few telephone handsets. Not in their wildest dreams was Registered Jack 11 - a modular connector more commonly known as the RJ-11 - meant to be plugged and unplugged so many times, by so many people, for so many reasons, all over the world. ~ Nicholas Negroponte

Like a small business, a novel cannot afford to carry dead weight, even if it is a close family member.
It is likewise unnecessary to introduce a mother and/or father into a narrative - usually through the medium of a long telephone call on the subject of 'How's things?' - to demonstrate that the protagonist does, like all mammals, have parents. ~ Howard Mittelmark

I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. ~ Margaret Atwood