Berdines Quotes & Sayings

Stories are thick with meanings. You can fall in love with a story for what you think it says, but you can't know for certain where it will lead your listeners. If you're telling a tale to teach children to be generous, they may fix instead on the part where your hero hides in an olive jar, then spend the whole next day fighting about who gets to try it first.
People take what they need from the stories they hear. The tale is often wiser than the teller. — Susan Fletcher

[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry. — Roberto Bolano

Mel Gibson would not be a good James Bond. — Sophie Marceau

...it was better to believe in God and to be wrong than to believe that there was no God and to be right. — Foreli Kramarik

The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants. — Charles Baudelaire

I was stationed at a marine recruit depot in San Diego from 1965 to 1967. — R. Lee Ermey

A Clock stopped
Not the Mantel's
Geneva's farthest skill
Can't put the puppet bowing
That just now dangled still — Emily Dickinson

Is there a magical time when children become parents to their parents? — Ralph Webster

When someone wrongs us, we rarely (if ever) want to do the same thing back. Why? Because we want to do something more harmful. Likewise, when someone insults us, our instinct is to search for words that will be more insulting.
Revenge always escalates. — Rob Bell

The sperm whales' network of female-based family unit resembled, to a remarkable extent, the community the whalemen had left back home on Nantucket. In both societies the males were itinerants. In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey. — Nathaniel Philbrick

Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else. — Arthur Conan Doyle

To relinquish the futile effort to control change is one of the strengthening forces of true detachment & thus true love. — Sharon Salzberg

Marshall was a pioneering player. As a threat in so many different aspects of football, he revolutionized the way in which the running back position was played. He was the player that I wanted to emulate. — Tiki Barber

There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to 'Americanize' him. — Charles Horton Cooley