Excited To See Family Quotes & Sayings

He had been longing to get at these Frenchmen and to cut them down, their being so near seemed to him now so awful that he could not believe his eyes. "Who are they? What are they running for? Can it be to me? Can they be running to me? And what for? To kill me? Me, whom every one's so fond of?" He recalled his mother's love, the love of his family and his friends, and the enemy's intention of killing him seemed impossible. "But they may even kill me." For more than ten seconds he stood, not moving from the spot, nor grasping his position. The foremost Frenchman with the hook nose was getting so near that he could see the expression of his face. And the excited, alien countenance of the man, who was running so lightly and breathlessly towards him, with his bayonet lowered, terrified Rostov. He snatched up his pistol, and instead of firing with it, flung it at the Frenchman and ran to the bushes with all his might. — Leo Tolstoy

The writer Lee Smith, who once had a New York copy editor query in the margin of her manuscript "Double-wide what?" tells a perfectly marvelous, spot-on story about Eudora Welty when she came to Hollins College, where Smith was a student. Welty read a short story in which one female character presents another with a marble cake. In the back of the audience Smith noted a group of leather-elbowed, goatee-sporting PhD candidates, all of whom were getting pretty excited. One started waving his hand as soon as she stopped reading and said, "Miz Welty, how did you come up with that powerful symbol of the marble cake, with the feminine and masculine, the yin and the yang, the Freudian and the Jungian all mixed together like that?" Smith reported that Welty looked at him from the lectern without saying anything for a while. Finally she replied mildly, "Well, you see, it's a recipe that's been in my family for some time. — Sally Mann

At the beginning of World War II, a Nazi officer is forced to share a compartment on a crowded train with a Jew and his family. After ignoring them for a while he says contemptuously, "You Jews are supposed to be so clever; where does this so called intelligence come from?"

"It is from our diet," says the Jew, " we eat a lot of raw fish heads." Upon which he opens his basket and saying "Lunch time!" proceeds to hand out fish heads to his wife and children. The Nazi, getting excited says "Wait a minute, I want some!"

"Okay," says the Jew "I will sell you six for twenty-five dollars."

The Nazi accepts and begins to chew. He almost throws up, but the children shout encouragment, "Suck out the brains, suck out the brains!" The Nazi is on his fourth head when he says to the Jew, "Is not twenty-five dollars a lot of money to pay for six fish heads, that are usually thrown out as garbage?"

"See," says the Jew, "It's working already! — Osho