Chiasson Quotes & Sayings

My sister married a German. He complained he couldn't get a good
bagel back home. I said: 'Well, whose fault is that?' — Emo Philips

If you can orbit the planet, why can't you see
what makes the human heart happy?
Is it art or is it sex?
Or is it, as I suspect, just keeping going
from next thing to next thing
to next thing to next thing
to next to next to next to next
pulsating stupidly to outlast time? — Dan Chiasson

Be terrified. Nothing in life is certain. It does not owe you anything, and if it decides to take something from you it will. You must accept this truth. Accept the dreadful possibility that your blind optimism is merely a fancied lie. — H.S. Crow

If you are made for flight, intended for it,
you had better find a pursuer, fast.
Otherwise, all that fleeing is going nowhere. — Dan Chiasson

Men cannot survive without cheating, it is in their nature. — M.F. Moonzajer

I don't know if it's genetic or just because I was surrounded by it, but I was always fascinated with building and construction and development. — Donald Trump Jr.

Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs, tossing grass up to heaven - as a distraction, not a prayer. That's not humility you see on our long final journeys: it's procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down. - DAN CHIASSON, The Elephant — Jodi Picoult

The most significant events, Bishop seems to argue, are destined to remain outside the scope of description. It is perhaps their very status as excessive or fugitive that makes them, in the end, significant. A poet who believes such things will not arrive uncomplicatedly at self-description. — Dan Chiasson

for heaven is within us, and people who have heaven within them come into heaven. The heaven within us is our acknowledgment of the Divine and our being led by the Divine. — Emanuel Swedenborg

The first lesson is that you can't lose a war if you have command of the air, and you can't win a war if you haven't. — Jimmy Doolittle

I, for one, would think both about how far we have come as a country and how much further we need to go to erase racism and discrimination from our society. — Charles B. Rangel

Love is the most important ingredient to any meaningful relationship. It is fundamental to true significance. Your quality of life is directly tied to the amount of love flowing in you and through you to others. Though it's often overlooked, love is infinitely more valuable than riches, fame, and honor. They will pass away, but love remains. You can be fulfilled without these, but not without love. — Alex Kendrick

For all the enlightened nations that profess a loyalty to liberty, democracy, economy and all the rest, there has long been a readiness to look for a chosen one; as Carlyle pointed out, even the French, those great anti-venerators, those relentless beheaders of Great Men, worshipped Voltaire. — Chris Anderson

I knew we could improve our lives even in jail. We could come out as different men, and we could even come out with two degrees. Educating ourselves was a way to give ourselves the most powerful weapon for freedom. — Nelson Mandela

Nations do not plunge at once into ruin - governments do not change suddenly - the causes which bring about the final blow, are scarcely perceptible in the beginning; but they increase in numbers, and in power; they press harder and harder upon the energies and virtue of a people; and the last steps only are alarmingly hurried and irregular. A republic without industry, economy, and integrity, is Samson shorn of his locks. A luxurious and idle republic! Look at the phrase! - The words were never made to be married together; every body sees it would be death to one of them. — Lydia Maria Francis Child

There are varieties of life unknown to you.
Their whole identity is: you can't find out. — Dan Chiasson

Ah me!" said he, "what might have been is not what is! — Charles Dickens

I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist. — Elizabeth Kostova

But Hunter did sneeze, and what I'd thought was his concern for me had actually been a presneeze expression. — Jennifer Echols