Anecdotes Quotes - Page 3

• He sits in his car at traffic lights on his way out sometimes and tries to estimate how many times he has sat here, waiting at these traffic lights on his way somewhere without you, hoping to meet someone with the capacity to consign you to an anecdote, to be eventually confused with others

  Elliot Perlman

  Confused, Light, Car

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• Riposte of "that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her nieces of being illogical," Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

  E. M. Forster

  Niece, Thinking, Rubbish

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• Despite his [Artie Shaw's] affectations of reclusiveness, he never tired of talking about himself, as countless long interviews reveal. I do not recall an anecdote he ever told me that was not in some way intended to convey a sense of his own superiority to everyone. . One wonders how a person of his character could produce such beauty.

  Gene Lees

  Tired, Character, Talking

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• Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.

  Irving Howe

  Writing, Suggestions, Sometimes

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• How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten.

  Washington Irving

  Character, Past, Thinking

  Washington Irving (2012). “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories”, p.70, Courier Corporation

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• Sports biography at its best. Rich in period detail, anecdote, and fresh perspective, Strong Boy paints both the good and the bad sides of success, as America's growing celebrity culture turned a simple Irish American gladiator into a national, in fact international hero. A very human story with profound parallels for our sports-obsessed culture today!

  Nigel Hamilton

  Sports, Strong, Hero

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• Due to the potent combination of my sexual recklessness and the slutty nature of some of the girls I have slept with, I have accumulated enough stories and anecdotes about abortion that they could name a Planned Parenthood clinic after me.

  Tucker Max

  Girl, Names, Abortion

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• I'm not an overnight success. My early publishing history, through my first five books, was unfortunate in many respects, typified by a couple of short anecdotes.

  John Lescroart

  Couple, Book, Firsts

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• I take pens and I write on the inside of my arm. When I'm with people and somebody says a really fascinating anecdote, or fact, or phrase, I'll write it on the inside of my arm. At the end of the day, I'll take the very best things that are on my arm and I'll copy them into a notebook that I always carry and only when the weather is absolutely terrible will I really key the very best of that notebook into the computer. At that point, it's all sort of censored twice - only the best things go from the arm to the book and only the best things go from the book to the computer.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Notebook, Writing, Weather

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• When other people first became aware of the cow, they expressed concern and anxiety. They suggested strategies for getting the animal out of Molly's parlor: remedies and doctors and procedures, some mainstream and some New Age. They related anecdotes of friends who had removed their own cows in one way or another. But after a while they had exhausted their suggestions. Then they usually began to pretend that the cow wasn't there, and they preferred for Molly to go along with the pretense.

  Alison Lurie

  Animal, Doctors, People

  Alison Lurie (2010). “The Last Resort”, p.48, Random House

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• The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Ideas, People, Important

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• I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the goodwilled imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided experience from its representation by anecdote.

  Ian Mcewan

  Intelligent, Temptation, Shadow

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• Raksin worked for Alfred Hitchcock, about whom one of the most famous Raksin anecdotes was spoken. The legendary director declared he wanted no music at all for the oceanic Lifeboat, because he felt audiences would wonder where the music was coming from in the middle of the sea. Raksin said, Ask Hitch where the cameras are coming from.

  Paul Zollo

  Writing, Sea, Cameras

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• During a frustrating argument with a Roman Catholic cardinal, Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly burst out: “Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?” The cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: “Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”

  Ross Douthat

  Years, Catholic, Church

  "A Time for Contrition". www.nytimes.com. March 28, 2010.

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• Statements about climate trends must be based on, er, trends. Not individual events or occurrences. Weather is not climate, and anecdotes are not statistics.

  Chris Mooney

  Science, Weather, Climate

  "Dear Donald Trump: Winter Does Not Disprove Global Warming" by Chris Mooney, www.motherjones.com. January 02, 2014.

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• History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Science, History, Transformation

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.1, University of Chicago Press

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• Anecdote: In a controversial way, Comedian and actor Bill Cosby sought to teach his son the pain of being lied to. Convinced his son had been dishonest regarding an issue, Cosby promised that if he told him the truth, he would not hit him. When his son did confess, Cosby did hit him. Seeing his son's shock and hurt, Cosby said he hoped this lesson had deepened his understanding of the anguish generated by a sense betrayal.

  Bill Cosby

  Hurt, Pain, Betrayal

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• Anecdote: Greatness Means Leading the Way. No stream is large and copious of itself, but becomes great by receiving and leading on so many tributary streams. It is so, also, with all intellectual greatness, It is only a question of someone indicating the direction to be followed by so many affluent; not whether he was richly or poorly gifted originally.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Mean, Greatness, Intellectual

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• Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

  Alice Munro

  Writing, People, Stories

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Sep 17, 2011

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• You must get beyond divertissement, sketch, anecdote, the interesting moment. You must get to the mystery of human personality. What is the line of the story that leads us to a point where we see or intuit something we haven't before?

  John L'Heureux

  Interesting, Personality, Stories

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• Anecdote: It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state.

  T. S. Eliot

  Real, Passion, Mean

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• Bill Pearson is definitely a man to talk to, especially in the afternoon when he's had a couple of drinks because he's got so many stories and anecdotes.

  Duncan Jones

  Couple, Men, Stories

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• Always have a book at hand, in the parlor, on the table, for the family; a book of condensed thought and striking anecdote, of sound maxims and truthful apothegms. It will impress on your own mind a thousand valuable suggestions, and teach your children a thousand lessons of truth and duty. Such a book is a casket of jewels for your housebold.

  Tryon Edwards

  Children, Book, Hands

  Tryon Edwards (1866). “World's Laconics: Or, The Best Thoughts of the Best Authors in Prose and Poetry”, p.236

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• Not afraid of poverty and drabness and who is untouched by it, untouched by the drunkenness of her friends; (she) who judges, selects, discards people with severity, who knows, when she is telling her endless anecdotes, that they are ways of escape, keeping herself all the more secret behind that profuse talk.

  Anais Nin

  Judging, People, Secret

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• During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?

  Kate Millett

  Depression, Voice, Boards

  Kate Millett (1990). “The Loony-bin Trip”, p.283, University of Illinois Press

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