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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“I was extremely fortunate to live around the corner from a recording studio and to be chosen to have a paper route to make enough money to pay for the music lessons. I was one of the chosen few to have a job and to walk through the curtain at Stax Records was just an amazing thing for me to do at age 14.”

EnoughAgeJobsWalksPayRecordsLessonsPaperStudiosCornersChosenFortunateRoutesCurtainsAmazing ThingsAround The CornerRecording StudioMusic Lessons
Author:Booker T. Jones
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“I was extremely frustrated, almost at the point of giving up on coming up with a name for the project (because I'm awful at it), when I decided to play the 'put a pen somewhere on a map with your eyes closed' game with South Africa. About the 5th try was St. Lucia in South Africa, which coincidentally also happens to be an idyllic sub-tropical seaside resort town. The name seemed to fit with the mood of the music, and so after a while it just stuck.”

GivingTryingPlayHappensEyeGamesNamesFitGiving UpProjectsDecidedTownsSouthStuckMoodAwfulMapsPensSouth AfricaFrustratedResortsTropicalIdyllic
Author:St. Lucia
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“I was extremely lucky to get this project [Brief Interviews with Hideous Men]. It was one of those things that I worked on in college. A friend of mine asked me to do a stage reading of that book and I was just completely blown away because, at that point, I was like, 'Acting's having fun with your friends and making people laugh.'”

PeopleMenBookReadingFunActingLaughingStageMinesCollegeLuckyProjectsHaving FunInterviewsMaking People LaughHideousBlown Away
Author:John Krasinski
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“I was extremely shy of approaching my hero but he, as I found out, was sorely in need of company. By then almost completely blind, he was claustrated and even a little confused and this may help explain the rather shocking attitude that he took to the blunt trauma that was being inflicted in the streets and squares around him. 'This was my country and it might be yet,' he intoned to me when the topic first came up, as it had to: 'But something came between it and the sun.' This couplet he claimed (I have never been able to locate it) was from Edmund Blunden, whose gnarled hand I had been so excited to shake all those years ago, but it was not the Videla junta that Borges meant by the allusion. It was the pre-existing rule of Juan Perón, which he felt had depraved and corrupted Argentine society. I didn't disagree with this at all—and Perón had victimized Borges's mother and sister as well as having Borges himself fired from his job at the National Library—but it was nonetheless sad to hear the old man saying that he heartily preferred the new uniformed regime, as being one of 'gentlemen' as opposed to 'pimps.' This was a touch like listening to Evelyn Waugh at his most liverish and bufferish. (It was also partly redeemed by a piece of learned philology or etymology concerning the Buenos Aires dockside slang for pimp: canfinflero. 'A canfinfla, you see,' said Borges with perfect composure, 'is a pussy or more exactly a cunt. So a canfinflero is a trafficker in cunt: in Anglo-Saxon we might say a 'cunter."' Had not the very tango itself been evolved in a brothel in 1880? Borges could talk indefinitely about this sort of thing, perhaps in revenge for having had an oversolicitous mother who tyrannized him all his life.)”

ArgentinaJorge Luis BorgesEvelyn WaughJorge Rafael VidelaBawdEdmund BlundenJuan PeronLingustics
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable things you said as a child, the familial dramas—of having a portrait of yourself, all the while making yourself out to be a little brighter, a little more deep than deep down you knew you actually were. And though I hadn’t had more than three or four relationships, I already knew that each time the thrill of telling another the story of yourself wore off a little more, each time you threw yourself into it a little less, and grew more distrustful of an intimacy that always, in the end, failed to pass into true understanding.”

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Author:Nicole Krauss
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“I was far more the pragmatic American then than I am now. Now, watching my children grow, old enough to have some sense of where I've been, having suffered enough to be no longer terrified of suffering, and knowing something of joy, too, I know that we must attempt to be responsible for what we know. Only this action moves us, without fear, into what we do not know, and what we do not know is limitless.”

20th Century LiteratureBlack Literature
Author:James Baldwin
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“I was fascinated by Siegfried's wooden leg, a remembrance of the 1914 Battle of the Sommes, where he had earned the Iron Cross I Class for conspicuous bravery. He was proud of his service for the Fatherland; but as it turned out, the Fatherland wasn't proud of him. Just 13 years after he showed me how to play marbles and sit correctly on a horse, Siegfried and the whole Ermann family were gassed in Auschwitz for being Jewish ...”

HistoryHolocaustHitler S GermanyGermany In Wwii
Author:Alfons Heck
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“I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in English. I thought for sure there'd be a word in Irish but there is none. And then I looked in several other languages and could not find one, until I found the word Sh'khol in Hebrew. I'm still not sure why so many languages don't have a word for this sort of bereavement, this shadowing.”

ChildrenStillsFoundLostLanguageParentNot SureFascinatedBereavementHebrew
Author:Colum McCann
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“I was fascinated that one could have such perceptual changes, and also that they went with a certain feeling of significance, an almost numinous feeling. I'm strongly atheist by disposition, but nonetheless when this happened, I couldn't help thinking, 'That must be what the hand of God is like.'”

ThinkingHelpingFeelingsHandsCertainHappenedAtheistSignificanceWeedFascinatedMarijuanaDispositionHands Of GodMedical MarijuanaFunny MarijuanaFunny WeedNuminous
Author:Oliver Sacks
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“I was fascinated to learn from him just what a “mad” manic state was like from his point of view. He described it as a state of exhilaration; extreme high energy; racing thoughts; exaggerated self-confidence where there are no boundaries; and, a feeling of immortality. As Audley says, “You feel dangerously good.”

Mental HealthMemoirMental Health AwarenessMental Health StigmaMental Health AdvocateInspiring Story
Author:Patricia Lavoie
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