Turn-on Quotes - Page 6

• Gratitude is like a flashlight. If you go out in your yard at night and turn on a flashlight, you suddenly can see what's there. It was always there, but you couldn't see it in the dark.

  Dawna Markova

  Gratitude, Dark, Night

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• I mean, I could go ahead and cut my head off in the guillotine, and it looks great, ... Well, now you turn on CNN and guys are really getting their heads cut off. ... As insane as our fantasy world gets, it's nowhere near as scary as reality.

  Alice Cooper

  Mean, Cutting, Reality

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• But I, in the chilling twilight stand and wait At the portcullis, at thy castle gate, Longing to see the charmed door of dreams Turn on its noiseless hinges, delicate sleep!

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Dream, Twilight, Sleep

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1911). “The writings of Thomas Bailey Aldrich”

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• Everywhere we look, the world urges us to turn on the radio or TV, to make a phone call, to see a movie. Many of us fear, worry, that if left alone with our thoughts and feelings, we may discover that we do not make very good company for ourselves.

  James O. Freedman

  Fear, Phones, Worry

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• We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go. Science is all metaphor. In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show. If you don't like what you are doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove. If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.

  Timothy Leary

  Philosophy, Moving, Games

  Lecture, June 1966, in Politics of Ecstasy (1968) ch. 21

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• Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed to sleep. It's always in the middle of the night, or you're half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them...

  John Lennon

  Letting Go, Running, Song

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• When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years. It's an area of intense interest. I can't say more than that.

  Tim Cook

  Years, Rooms, Tvs

  "Cast Your Bets: Bookies Predict the Chances of What Apple Will Announce" by Alexandra Chang, www.wired.com. September 9, 2013.

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• The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy - then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight - assuming it was straight in the first place.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Men, Office, Democracy

  Hunter S. Thompson (2012). “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72”, p.111, Simon and Schuster

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• A secret, if it's kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance.

  Yasunari Kawabata

  Sweet, Comforting, Secret

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• ... We borrowed it all from Coltrane. I started encouraging everybody in the band to listen to John Coltrane - 'Check it out, see what these guys do.' They take one chord, the tonic chord, and just play all over it. 'We can do that too!' I wanted to make our music something really amazing - I wanted it to be jaw-dropping and turn on a dime and do all of those things that I knew music could do, and nobody told us we couldn't do it. I shouldn't say 'I,' though - Jerry Garcia was behind it the whole way.

  Phil Lesh

  Music, Play, Guy

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• I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Responsibility, Light, Objectivity

  P. J. O'Rourke (2015). “Thrown Under the Omnibus: A Reader”, p.213, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Because the casual music listeners are the ones who turn on the radio and they don't really care what's playing, they just know that they kinda like it or it's easy to drive to or it's easy to sing along to or whatever.

  Michael Stipe

  Care, Radio, Easy

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• I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.

  Ridley Scott

  Believe, Character, Thinking

  "Exclusive Print Interview with Sir Ridley Scott for Gladiator". Female First Interview, www.femalefirst.co.uk. September 13, 2005.

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• I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren't high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up - I'm not sure that's something that resonates with ordinary people.

  Stephen Harper

  Home, Thinking, People

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• I don't listen to music when I write, but I do turn on appropriate music when I read portions of my manuscripts back to myself - kind of like adding a soundtrack to help shape mood.

  Erik Larson

  Writing, Shapes, Helping

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• You can't just turn on when something happens, you have to be turned on all the time. Then things happen.

  Jay Maisel

  Photography, Photographer, Turns

  Jay Maisel (2014). “Light, Gesture, and Color”, p.240, New Riders

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• If my competitor were drowning I'd stick a hose in his mouth and turn on the water.

  Ray Kroc

  Water, Sticks, Mouths

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• Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.

  Edward Hirsch

  Morning, Distance, Sleep

  Edward Hirsch (1999). “How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When you turn on your radio, you don't always want to hear about someone shootin' some person. Even if that's the lifestyle they live, people don't always want to hear it.

  Missy Elliot

  People, Want, Radio

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• The government taxes you when you bring home a paycheck.
  It taxes you when you make a phone call.
  It taxes you when you turn on a light.
  It taxes you when you sell a stock.
  It taxes you when you fill your car with gas.
  It taxes you when you ride a plane.
  It taxes you when you get married.
  Then it taxes you when you die.
  This is taxual insanity and it must end.

  J. C. Watts

  Home, Phones, Light

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• Shakespeare's plays often turn on the idea of fate, as much drama does. What makes them so tragic is the gap between what his characters might like to accomplish and what fate provides them.

  Nate Silver

  Drama, Character, Fate

  Nate Silver (2012). “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't”, p.14, Penguin

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• If fans are going to turn on me because of this, they weren't my fans anyway. I couldn't betray a whole 25 years of record making and not do this. I had to.

  John Mellencamp

  Betrayal, Years, Fans

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• Understand the obstructions you are putting in the way of love, freedom, and happiness and they will drop. Turn on the light of awareness and the darkness will disappear. Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something you have; love is something that has you.

  Anthony de Mello

  Love, Spiritual, Light

  Anthony De Mello (2011). “Awareness: Conversations with the Masters”, p.176, Image

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• I couldn't open up a magazine, you couldn't read a newspaper, you couldn't turn on the TV without hearing about the obesity epidemic in America.

  Morgan Spurlock

  Epidemics, Obesity Epidemic, America

  Interview with Jeff Otto, www.ign.com. May 4, 2004.

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• Don't think you are going to go on forever because you are not and begin to plan something that will compensate as you reduce your capacities to leap or turn on this or that or the other, begin thinking of something else.

  Katherine Dunham

  Thinking, Forever, African American

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