Odd Quotes - Page 20

• I write in praise of the solitary act: of not feeling a trespassing tongue forced into one's mouth, one's breath smothered, nipples crushed against the ribcage, and that metallic tingling in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve: unpleasure.

  Fleur Adcock

  Writing, Solitude, Feelings

  Fleur Adcock (2000). “Poems 1960-2000”, Bloodaxe Books Limited

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• In the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Insane, Behaviour, World

  "The 100 best nonfiction books: No24 - The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith (1958)" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. July 11, 2016.

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• It is indeed an odd business that it has taken this Court nearly two centuries to discover a constitutional mandate to have counsel at a preliminary hearing.

  Warren E. Burger

  Taken, Two, Justice

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• It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game; yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Football, Team, Writing

  Natalie Goldberg (2016). “Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within”, p.14, Shambhala Publications

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• I'm almost completely without family and it's a very odd feeling in life. I have no children.

  Walter Mosley

  Children, Feelings

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• Home. One place is just like another, really. Maybe not. But truth is it's all just rock and dirt and people are roughly the same. I was born up there but I'm no stranger here. Have always felt at home everywhere, even in Virginia, where they hate me. Everywhere you go there's nothing but the same rock and dirt and houses and people and deer and birds. They give it all names, but I'm at home everywhere. Odd thing: unpatriotic. I was at home in England. I would be at home in the desert. In Afghanistan or far Typee. All mine, it all belongs to me. My world.

  Michael Shaara

  Hate, Home, Rocks

  Jeff Shaara, Michael Shaara (2012). “The Civil War Trilogy 3-Book Boxset (Gods and Generals, The Killer Angels, and The Last Full Measure)”, p.501, Ballantine Books

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• Anybody who's been married to a man for forty odd years knows he's all talk.

  Michael Parkinson

  Men, Years, Married

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• The principle factor in my success has been an absolute desire to draw constantly. I never decided to be an artist. Simply, I couldn't stop myself from drawing. I drew for my own pleasure. I never wanted to know whether or not someone liked my drawings. I have never kept one of my drawings. I drew on walls, the school blackboard, odd bits of paper, the walls of barns. Today I'm still as fond of drawings as when I was a kid - and that was a long time ago - but, surprising as it may seem, I never thought about the money I would receive for my drawings. I simply drew them.

  Winsor McCay

  Wall, School, Kids

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• Funny as hell, searingly honest, and urgently real, Sam Pink's Rontel puts to shame most modern fiction. His writing perfectly captures the bizarre parade that is Chicago, with all its gloriously odd and wonderful people. This book possesses both the nerve of Nelson Algren and the existential comedy of Albert Camus.

  Joe Meno

  Real, Book, Writing

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• It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.

  Oliver Sacks

  Degrees

  Oliver Sacks (2011). “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain”, p.53, Pan Macmillan

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• Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.

  David Malouf

  Animal, Skins, Unseen

  David Malouf (2011). “The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World”, p.87, Black Inc.

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• I didn't mean to be a TV presenter, I just hated modeling. It feels very odd that it's turned into this 'It-girl' thing. What does that even mean? I wear clothes and I go out. It's so weird.

  Alexa Chung

  Girl, Mean, Clothes

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• In an odd way (the death of John Daly) is cheering news!

  Phil Jones

  Cheer, News, Way

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• We are the intelligent elite among animal life on earth and whatever our mistakes, [Earth] needs us. This may seem an odd statement after all that I have said about the way 20th century humans became almost a planetary disease organism. But it has taken [Earth] 2.5 billion years to evolve an animal that can think and communicate its thoughts. If we become extinct she has little chance of evolving another.

  James Lovelock

  Mistake, Taken, Animal

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• Of course I have the odd bad game like other players. But I can't accept that. Especially when things don't go right for United. It all means so much to me to be succesful here. It drives me crazy at times.

  Ruud van Nistelrooy

  Sports, Crazy, Mean

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• One does odd things. You see, when one's young one doesn't feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not “for good”; one thinks everything is a rehearsal - to be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.

  Sybille Bedford

  Thinking, One Day, Rehearsal

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• Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, the knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled times when I have a fair idea of what was happenng, in a general way, but cannot be sure of dates or places or even the exact order in which events took place.

  George MacDonald Fraser

  Order, Years, Ideas

  George MacDonald Fraser (1992). “Quartered safe out here: a recollection of the war in Burma”, Harvill Press

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• Basically the message is: Steal It! Art, music, culture, the odd book and the slab of cheese... the new will be built upon the ruins of the old.

  Buenaventura Durruti

  Art, Book, Ruins

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• When discussing organic evolution the only point of agreement seems to be: ‘It happened.’ Thereafter, there is little consensus, which at first sight must seem rather odd.

  Simon Conway Morris

  Sight, Agreement, Littles

  "Evolution: Bringing Molecules into the Fold". Work by Simon Conway Morris, January 7, 2000.

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• Like Godard, Tati is also remarkably appreciative of the odd beauty that can be revealed in the shapes, patterns and colors created by the technology of planned obsolescence.

  Vincent Canby

  Technology, Color, Shapes

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• Elegance? It may seem odd to non-scientists, but there is an aesthetic in software as there is in every other area of intellectual endeavour. Truly great programmers are like great poets or great mathematicians - they can achieve in a few lines what lesser mortals can only approach in three volumes

  John Naughton

  Intellectual, Three, Lines

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• I'm totally grateful for the fans my family has and I have; they gave me a lot of support when I was in treatment. But it was just odd, you know? It's stressful. Just the whole fact of being someone in the public eye.

  Jack Osbourne

  Grateful, Eye, Support

  "Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery". MTV.com, February 2003.

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• I am accustomed, as a professional mathematician, to living in a sort of vacuum, surrounded by people who declare with an odd sort of pride that they are mathematically illiterate.

  David Mumford

  Pride, Math, People

  "Mathematics without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation". Book by Michael Harris, 2015.

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• I suppose you can say I became an odd-job man.

  Lord Mountbatten

  Jobs, Men, Odd Jobs

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• And if we seem nutty to you and if we seem like an odd ball to you, just remember one thing. The mighty oak tree was once a nut just like me.

  Glenn Turner

  Nuts, Tree, Balls

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