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Years Ago Quotes

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“My other hobby, because I just love any job with a gavel, is auctioneer. And I so often have presided over charity auctions in New York that many years ago Sotheby's sent me my own gavel. Now, the Sotheby's gavel is infinitely more elegant--it came in a little velvet bag, with "Sotheby's" inscribed in gold. It hangs in my library. I feel that everyone has occasion to use a gavel at various times everyday, they just don't think of it.”

“Hitler can't walk over me as he might have done a year ago; I've seen to that. Don't forget that I have three million men, with every key position in the hands of my own people, Hitler knows that I have friends in the Reichswehr, you know! If Hitler is reasonable I shall settle the matter quietly; if he isn't I must be prepared to use force - not for my sake but for the sake of our revolution.”

“Two years ago, I was saying as I planted seeds in the garden, "I must believe in these seeds, that they fall into the earth and grow into flowers and radishes and beans." It is a miracle to me because I do not understand it. The very fact that they use glib technical phrases does not make it any less a miracle, and a miracle we all accept. Then why not accept God's miracles?”

“We use up words like 'spiritual' so fast in this culture. Twenty years ago spiritual had a distinct meaning. But now there's a lot of jack-off thinkers who just love to talk about the spiritual. And there is a lot of bogus - is bogosity a word? It should be - a lot of bogosity in these spiritual seekers. So you have to find another way to express it. I just call it 'how I fit'.”

“Several years ago we had an intern who was none too swift. One day he was typing and turned to a secretary and said, "I'm almost out of typing paper. What do I do?" "Just use copier machine paper," she told him. With that, the intern took his last remaining blank piece of paper, put it on the photocopier and proceeded to make five blank copies.”

“If you had come to me a hundred years ago, do you think I should have dreamed of the telephone? Why, even now I cannot understand it! I use it every day, I transact half my correspondence by means of it, but I don’t understand it. Thnk of that little stretched disk of iron at the end of a wire repeating in your ear not only sounds, but words-not only words, but all the most delicate and elusive inflections and nuances of tone which separate one human voice from another! Is not that something of a miracle?”

“Words can mean different things to different people. It is important to understand what people mean when they use a certain word. Let's make an example. Take the word gay. Fifty years ago, gay meant exclusively cheerfulness, lighthearted excitement, merry or bright colors. Today this word has a different meaning. You won't call a cheerful person gay because it could be understood as something else.”

“The economic system that the United States has is an evil empire. It's an economic system that's not fair, not just, and it's not democratic. And it will fall just like communism fell. The richest 1 percent now own 50 percent of the wealth. It didn't use to be that way. The average CEO 20 years ago made 20 times as much as the average employee. Now they make 212 times as much.”

“I tried to read The Dubliners, when I went to Dublin a couple of years ago. I think I only go thurogh the first story. Gnomon is such an interesting word. So many different uses for a word nooone has heard of, or uses these days. I googled some pictures of sundials to check that it was the tall shadow casting bit (it is) and then discovered that Saint Sulpice in Paris has a rather fascinating large gnomon- which I shall endeavour to see on my next visit to that fair city. Thanks for such a great word, which I shall try to remember.”

“I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I'm writing long sentences now, something I didn't use to do. I had some kind of breakthrough, five or six years ago, in Invisible, and in Sunset Park after that. I discovered a new way to write sentences. And I find it exhilarating.”

“Walking my dogs twice a day provides me with an opening and closing of my day, and I've learned to use those walks for a walking meditation, which had never occurred to me until a friend gave me Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn years ago. It helped me take advantage of moments that already existed in my day and turn them into something more expansive.”

“What bothers me is that I don't see the eagerness for a genuine solution to the political people on the opposite side. They want to continue to use the grievance, to use whatever happened hundreds of years ago that did not even happen to them, as a way of expressing how this country is failing or is less than decent and good.”

“We want to use cash. The reason we haven't used our cash two years ago, we just didn't find things that were that attractive. But when people talk about cash being king, it's not king if it just sits there and never does anything. There are times when cash buys more than other times, and this is one of the other times when it buys a fair amount more, so we use it.”

“I buy a tractor two years ago, and four-fifths of the tractor manual is about not tipping over, not raising the bucket high enough to hit high-tension wire... not killing yourself, basically. And in that manual, I found out - and it cost me a thousand dollars - that when the tractor is new, 10 hours into use of the tractor, you have to re-torque the lug nuts. If you don't, you will oval the holes. This is buried between the moron warnings. I never found it. I take the tractor in for its regular servicing, and they say my wheels are gone. How am I supposed to know that? "It's in the manual."”

“If you ignore somebody's record and only focus on something that happened 25 years ago when all they were doing even then was trying to stand up for a minority group that felt excluded and discriminated against, then I don't - I think that is a distortion of a person's record. I mean, a person's record is full, not just the parts that you want to use against them.”

“We're primarily interested in solving the problem of 20 million black people. And if integration is going to solve the problem tomorrow, then let's integrate. But since the Supreme Court issued its desegregation decision seven years ago, and you only have about six or seven percent integration now, on an educational level, that means that the black man trying to use integration as a means of solving his problem will be another 100 years just getting integration on an educational level.”

“The Iranian government is the government that supplied the arms on the Karin-A to the Palestinian Authority several years ago, they are the world's largest central banker for terrorism, if they thought it was in their interest to give a terrorist group a nuclear weapon to use against America or against Israel, I don't think they'd hesitate.”

“Any outside use of military power would at best furnish a temporary respite from the processes that we see playing out. We know that because we have been through all this before. The "surge" of several years ago was supposed to provide space and time for Iraqi political interests to work out their differences. 30,000 additional U.S. troops failed to lead to any working out of those differences, and the outcome is the mess we see today.”