Fancy Things Quotes & Sayings

Soft, sweet things with a lot of fancy dressing - that's what a little boy loves to eat and a grown man prefers to marry. — Helen Rowland

It was the best advice Francie ever got. Truth and fancy were so mixed up in her mind
as they are in the mind of every lonely child
that she didn't know which was which. But Teacher made these two things clear to her. From that time on, she wrote little stories about things she saw and felt and did. In time, she got so that she was able to speak the truth with but a slight and instinctive coloring of the facts. — Betty Smith

Sketching in general - anywhere, not just in Gitmo, but in life, in the world - is a profoundly disruptive act. Because you're creating something when you're kind of expected to consume or sit passively. I've always sketched things as a way to get into them, whether it was a fancy nightclub or, you know, to have kids think I was cool, whatever. — Molly Crabapple

I like building and making things. I, perhaps, would like to try my hand at directing one day. Sometimes I fancy myself as an architect - but I think I might need to go back to school for that. — Matthew James Thomas

What was he thinking falling in love with her again, opening himself to another world of hurt when she left - knowing she would leave? She was a lawyer, working in the big city, used to fancy things, a fancy life. She didn't fit in his world anymore. — Leah Braemel

It was only an 'opeless fancy,
It passed lika an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!'
They sye that time 'eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an' the tears across the years
They twist my 'eart-strings yet! — George Orwell

Keeping all things in their places. Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball that was never to leave off. From the Palace of the Tuileries, through Monseigneur and the whole Court, through the Chambers, the Tribunals of Justice, and all society (except the scarecrows), — Charles Dickens

Always write as if you are talking to someone. It works. Don't put on any fancy phrases or accents or things you wouldn't say in real life. — Maeve Binchy

Pity me'
the unspoken words upon a nation's lips
'because I am indeed pitiable. I have been deprived of freedom
yes, of course, all that. And of proper food and of fancy things, consumer durables and material wealth of every kind, all that. But mostly I have been robbed of my birthright, my mother, my father, my home. And how can I ever recover from that?' Then there is a murmur, as a last, despairing cry, the latest prayer
'Market forces, market forces.' Say it over and over, as once the Hail Mary was said, to ward off all ills and rescue the soul, but we know in our hearts it won't work. There is no magic here contained. Wasted lives, lost souls, unfixable. Pity me, pity me, pity me. — Fay Weldon

Ello, love. Fancy a cuppa?"
"You're not British, Isis," Naomi says.
"I can be things," I insist. — Sara Wolf

I love idleness. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them, to come and go as my fancy bids me, to change my plan every moment, to follow a fly in all its circlings, to try and uproot a rock to see what is underneath, eagerly to begin a ten-years' task to give it up after ten minutes: in short, to fritter away the whole day inconsequentially and incoherently, and to follow nothing but the whim of the moment. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In the temple, I sit on the cool floor next to Grandfather, beneath the stern benevolence of the goddess's glance. Grandfather is clad in only a traditional silk dhoti
no fancy modern clothes for him. That's one of the things I admire about him, how he is always unapologetically, uncompromisingly himself. His spine is erect and impatient; white hairs blaze across his chest. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Call me Autolycus. Well, no, don't. Although I am, like that unfunny clown, a picker-up of unconsidered trifles. Which is a fancy way of saying I steal things — John Banville

Great cooking is about being inspired by the simple things around you - fresh markets, various spices. It doesn't necessarily have to look fancy. — G. Garvin

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts ... it is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us. — Henrik Ibsen

[Julie] had lived a great deal among lies, before plumping for a small life of her own, a sincere and restricted life from which all pretense, even in matters sensual, was banished. How many crazy decisions and allegiances to successive aspects fo the truth! Had she not, one day when her costume for a fancy dress had demanded short hair, cut off the great chestnut mane that fell below her waist when she let it down? 'I could have hired a wig,' she thought. 'I might also, at a pinch, have passed the rest of my life with Becker or Espivant. If it comes to that, I could also have gone on stirring puddings in a saucepan at Carneilhan. The things "one might have done" are, in fact, the things one could not do ... — Colette

On the morning of Thanksgiving, I would wake up to the home smelling of all good things, wafting upstairs to my room. I would set the table with the fancy silverware and china and hope that my parents and grandmother wouldn't have the annual Thanksgiving fight about Richard Nixon. — Debi Mazar

When the Professor is told by the Polynesian that once there was nothing except a great feathered serpent, unless the learned man feels a thrill and a half temptation to wish it were true, he is no judge of such things at all. When he is assured, on the best Red Indian authority, that a primitive hero carried the sun and moon and stars in a box, unless he clasps his hands and almost kicks his legs as a child would at such a charming fancy, he knows nothing about the matter. — G.K. Chesterton

Upstairs, in the cupboard, he had a box of things he had saved as a boy and a young man. He hadn't looked into it in twenty years or more. Nothing fancy or valuable, but things that had meant something to him at one time. He found it, and found the key, and carried it downstairs without opening it. — Jane Smiley

I am well aware that many will say that no one can possibly speak with spirits and angels so long as he lives in the body; and many will say that it is all fancy, others that I relate such things in order to gain credence, and others will make other objections. — Emanuel Swedenborg

He loved physical books with the same avidity other people loved horses or wine or prog rock. He'd never really warmed to ebooks because they seemed to reduce a book to a computer file, and computer files were disposable things, things you never really owned. He had no emails from ten years ago but still owned every book he bought that year. Besides, what was more perfect an object than a book? The different rags of paper, smooth or rough under your fingers. The edge of the page pressed into your thumbprint as you turned a new chapter. The way your bookmark - fancy, modest, scrap paper, candy wrapper - moved through the width of it, marking your progress, a little further each time you folded it shut. — Patrick Ness

Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things. — Oscar Wilde

The mistake the world is making with the simple peoples is to try and hurry them into political concepts they don't understand and aren't prepared to cope with. I know. I am a peasant myself ... I say, Spit on the big, fancy schemes. I want all the little things first. Then perhaps we can get on to the bigger things. — Ramon Magsaysay

Instead of buying a guitar for $2,000 or $2,500 - I'm not sure how much these are going for - but it's maybe $300 or something like that. It's more for beginners and stuff like that. Obviously it's not hitting the pros. And you can't get the Piezo pickup and the color-changing paint and the inlays and all the fancy things that my signature guitars offer, but you can get the general feel of the guitar - and the body style. It's cool. — John Petrucci

That's my window. This minute
So gently did I alight
From sleep--was still floating in it.
Where has my life its limit
And where begins the night?

I could fancy all things around me
Were nothing but I as yet;
Like a crystal's depth, profoundly
Mute, translucent, unlit.

I have space to spare inside me
For the stars, too: so full of room
Feels my heart; so lightly
Would it let go of him, whom

For all I know I have started
To love, it may be to hold.
Strange, as if never charted,
Stares my fortune untold.

Why is it I am bedded
Beneath this infinitude,
Fragrant like a meadow,
Hither and thither moved,

Calling out, yet fearing
Someone might hear the cry,
Destined to disappearing
Within another I. — Rainer Maria Rilke

For now, I'm supposing that all movements are equal, which they're not, except in this respect: that none of them gives a damn about artists beyond their immediate utility. Good movements will use a writer just as ruthlessly as bad ones; since they all fancy they have better things to do than worry about one man's artistic survival. — Wilfrid Sheed

Well, hey, how come you never gave me a sword?" I asked, trying to lighten things up. "I get stuck with a lousy stick with sparkles, and the boys get the fancy swords?" I held up the gooey nubbin, all that was left of my bedazzled wooden stake. "Not. Fair."
"I can get you one, too, kid." Talbot smirked. "I just always thought you preferred the feel of wood in your hand. — Bree Despain

The truth is, the Science of Nature has been already too long made only a work of the Brain and the Fancy: It is now high time that it should return to the plainness and soundness of Observations on material and obvious things. — Robert Hooke

It's not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things
fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too ... we beat Them (and spare ourselves a lot of tedium and terror) by declining to worship. — Helen Oyeyemi

To paint things as they are requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy. — Samuel Johnson

So ... It's just that I have a problem with voltage. I don't know how to explain it ... I often get the feeling I've got a button missing, you know, some knob for adjusting the volume. I always go too far to one extreme or the other. I can never find the right balance and whatever I take a fancy to - well, it always ends badly." She was surprised at herself. Why was she confiding in him like this? Slightly tipsy, maybe? "When I drink, I drink too much, when I smoke, I fuck myself up, when I love, I go out of my mind and when I work, it's into the ground. Dead. I don't know how to do things normally, quietly, I - — Anna Gavalda

I'm working hard to have a good life.
You don't need fancy things to feel good.
You can hug a puppy.
You can buy a can of paint and surround yourself with color.
You can plant a flower and watch it grow.
You can decide to trust people, the right people.
You can decide to start over and let other people start over, too. — Joan Bauer

Sometimes I half fall asleep when I am sitting alone and fancy things that have never happened. — Charlotte Bronte

She felt something deeper and richer with Dave, something driven by years and commitment, but maybe that was just fancy talk. That sort of electricity - had she ever felt it with her husband? Was it fair to even compare or think such things? Were such thoughts alone a betrayal? You — Harlan Coben

It would be unsound fancy and self-contradictory to expect that things which have never yet been done can be done except by means which have never yet been tried. — Francis Bacon

Deryn had been there every step of the way.
"We are connected, aren't we?"
"Aye," she said, still chewing. "And for us to meet at all, I had to pretend to be a boy. Fancy that."
"Barking destiny," Bovril said, then burped.
Alek put his hands up in surrender. There were worse things than being connected to Deryn Sharp. In fact, the simple fact that she was smiling sent a wave of relief through him - she was his ally again, his friend. Providence seemed to be saying that she always would be.
All at once a fist around his heart loosened its grip.
"It was awful, being at war with you."
Deryn laughed. "I missed you, too, daft prince. — Scott Westerfeld

Some folks, he said, seem to want to seek out the things that destroy them. Called an achimist, a fancy word, but a true one. — Matt Bondurant

You don't need fancy things to feel good. You can hug a puppy. You can buy a can of paint and surround yourself with color. You can plant a flower and watch it grow. You can decide to trust people - the right people. You can decide to start over and let other people start over too -Sugar Mae Cole — Joan Bauer

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke. — Ned Vizzini

What a strange idea: "comfort food." Isn't every food comforting in its own way! Why are certain foods disqualified? Can't fancy food be soothing in the same way as granny food?" Must it always be about loaded memories, like Proust's madeleine? Or can it be merely quirky, like M. F. K. Fisher's tangerine ritual: she dried them on a radiator, then cooled them on her Paris windowsill.
Comfort food - food that reassures - is dilferent things to different people. — David Tanis

Some playwrights are obvious influences on younger writers. Arthur Miller (realistic, politically engaged dramas) and Christopher Durang (satirical dark comedies) are examples. But August stands apart, ... He has his special way of seeing things. I remember he and I were at one of those fancy benefits the Rep has. The gay men's chorus was singing, and I was very proud to have brought them into a Rep event. And August says, 'You know, I don't see any black people up there.' That was his focus the lives of black people. — Daniel J. Sullivan

One of the things I like to pack, that I take with me all the time, is my Virgensita de Guadalupe. It doesn't take much room in your suitcase. If you have one that isn't so fancy, you can use it on the plane when you're scared. — Sandra Cisneros

Things can never touch the soul, but stand inert outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within. — Marcus Aurelius

It is indeed immensely picturesque. I can fancy sitting all a summer's day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world's duration and the feeble span of individual experience. There is something in Stonehenge almost reassuring; and if you are disposed to feel that life is rather a superficial matter, and that we soon get to the bottom of things, the immemorial gray pillars may serve to remind you of the enormous background of time. — Henry James

Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices. — William James

Hence it comes to pass, that a man, who is very sober, and of right understanding in all other things, may in one particular be as frantic, as any in Bedlam; if either by any sudden very strong impression, or long fixing his fancy upon one sort of thoughts, incoherent ideas have been cemented together so powerfully, as to remain united. But there are degrees of madness, as of folly; the disorderly jumbling ideas together, is in some more, and some less. In short, herein seems to lie the difference between idiots and madmen, That madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from them: but idiots make very few or no propositions, and reason scarce at all. — John Locke

We should not attach to some fancy ideas or to some beautiful things. We should not seek for something good. The truth is always near at hand, within your reach. — Shunryu Suzuki

I was thinking of Anna. I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her. Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day? I have come to realise how little I knew her, I mean how shallowly I knew her, how ineptly. I do not blame myself for this. Perhaps I should. Was I too lazy, too inattentive, too self-absorbed? Yes, all of those things, and yet I cannot think it is a matter of blame, this forgetting, this not-having-known. I fancy, rather, that I expected too much, in the way of knowing. I know so little of myself, how should I think to know another? — John Banville

Now I'm having to live with sales of around 50,000 per album - but I'm pretty content with my place in the general scheme of things, even if it's meant I don't drive a fancy car and can't afford grand vacations. — David Knopfler

Dreams are but interludes that fancy makes ...
Sometimes forgotten things, long cast behind
Rush forward in the brain, and come to mind. — John Dryden

One of the greatest myths in the world - & the phrase 'greatest myths' is just a fancy way of saying 'big fat lies'
is that troublesome things get less & less troublesome if you do them more & more. People say this myth when they are teaching children to ride bicycles, for instance, as though falling off a bicycle & skinning your knee is less troublesome the fourteenth time you do it than it is the first time. The truth is that troublesome things tend to remain troublesome no matter how many times you do them, & that you should avoid doing them unless they are absolutely urgent. — Lemony Snicket

Bad people aren't happy ... Wickedness often wears fancy clothes, dines on rich food, has money, controls armies, rules nations ... but it never seems to know joy. Peace, laughter, trust, ease: these things flee from wickedness like sparrows from the shadow of a hawk. — Sonya Hartnett

For my birthday my husband learned to cook and is cooking one day a week for me. But he only likes to do fancy dishes. So we end up with weird, obscure things in the refrigerator. — Cheryl Hines

I think many of the boundaries that convention has placed upon us are arbitrary, so we can fiddle with them if we fancy. Gravity's hard to dispute, and breathing, but a lot of things we instinctively obey are a lot of old tosh. — Russell Brand

Oh, Karamazov, I am profoundly unhappy. I sometimes fancy all sorts of things, that every one is laughing at me, the whole world, and then I feel ready to overturn the whole order of things. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I've never been the type of guy that's ever needed a lot of things or any fancy things, but my lifelong goal has always been to have a piece of land and a house. — Tyler Farr

Crystal-clear thinking is one of the things we look for - not a fancy slide pitch, but crystal-clear thinking. — Douglas Leone

I have to be stretched in some way. There's not enough things that come my way that I fancy. — Terence Stamp

What simpletons we are! Whatever our natural age, how childish we are in spiritual things! What great simpletons we are when we first believe in Christ! We think that our being pardoned involves a great many things which we afterwards find have nothing whatever to do with our pardon. For instance, we think we shall never sin again. We fancy that the battle is all fought; that we have got into a fair field, with no more war to wage; that in fact we have got the victory, and have only just to stand up and wave the palm branch; that all is over, that God has only got to call us up to himself and we shall enter into heaven without having to fight any enemies upon earth. Now, all these are obvious mistakes. Though the text has a great meaning, it does not mean anything of this kind. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The place is good. How good, one must have circumnavigated the globe to discover. Why not stay? Take root? But roots are chains. I have a terror of losing my freedom. Free, without ties, unpossessed by any possessions, free to do as one will, to go at a moment's notice wherever the fancy may suggest
it is good. But so is this place. Might it not be better? To gain freedom one sacrifices something [ ... ] and all that these things and people signify. One sacrifices something
for a greater gain in knowledge, in understanding, in intensified living? I sometimes wonder. — Aldous Huxley

They DO live more in earnest, more in themselves, and less in surface, change, and frivolous external things. I could fancy a love for life here almost possible; and I was a fixed unbeliever in any love of a year's standing. — Emily Bronte

Christopher Argent kept stealing disbelieving looks at Farah, his blue eyes reflecting the ambient glow like an alley cat's. Dorian understood why the man would dare in his presence.
First, because Christopher Argent was an unfeeling, fearless killer-for-hire.
And second, because most of the incarcerated men at Newgate had considered Dougan's Fairy some mythical creature, a sight too rare and beautiful to be beheld by a common man. Maybe even a fancy born of an imagination keen enough to take possession of the prison. To meet her was to gaze upon a fantasy realized, to remember the desperate yearnings of a lonely prisoner bereft of kindness, mercy, or beauty. To be blinded by the embodiment of all three of those things. For a man like Argent, one born to incarceration, the sight might have him reassessing some long-held cynical philosophies. — Kerrigan Byrne

People ask me if I'd permit fancy things, like dunks. Well, if they did dunk, it was with no fancy flair. No behind-the-back dribbles or passes unless necessary. If it was for show, you were on the bench. — John Wooden

I'm not a fancy person. I love small spaces. I like tiny cars. I don't buy things, aside from music and books. I don't get loads of attention and maybe it's because I'm kind of boring. I don't think I'm boring, but I have different interests. I don't go out much, not because I'm hiding but because I'm not a big drinker. I go out and have a good time, I go to concerts and stuff. — Ellen Page

It's hurtful somehow to admit this thing and anyway that doesn't mean i'm losing my faith in this beautiful world. But these days now is the time where people have become so much more-excuse me-shallow. When all of the fancy things and outer beauty are demanded, and those who are lost enough to chase and manage to get those things, they will happen to get very nice response from social and able to expand their images and get famous and be seen as someone who has value. Meanwhile those who could see deeper and their souls are insecure of this mad world, they will have smaller space in width but they will dig deeper and deeper into their self, making space in height, finding the true meaning of their souls, the true essential unshakable truth that's beyond the fragile material worldly things. — Reza Rusandi

Whenever I get the sort of fancy pants idea that I'm doing anything other than pure expression things start to go wrong. When I get too premeditated, things start to go wrong. I just shut that part of my brain off. — Lev Yilmaz

Languor is underrated. It is not possible to be immobile in modern society except by dint of constant effort. Holding on tightly to the riverbank and fighting the current is not languor. Nobody likes that. But bone-lazy idleness hours and hours spent staring at the sky and remembering books and birthdays and great kisses: this is a pure pleasure that eludes the productive in all their confident superiority. Languor s sunny and hot. It is at home near the sea and is best appreciated in environments of beauty and limited promise. It contains within it the idea of boredom but is also colored by idle fancy and the understanding that some things proceed best with limited attention. — Kevin Patterson

You will notice that the work is simple obedience. It is not complicated things, it is not fancy things or getting great spiritual manifestations. This work is within the abilities of the most humble and the least educated. — Henry B. Eyring

The Author's Way of sending forth his Second Part of the Pilgrim. Some things are of that nature as to make One's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache. — John Bunyan

We need to steer clear of this poverty of ambition, where people want to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in nice apartments but don't want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realize their full potential. — Barack Obama

Why, you don't seem even to know the good of the things you are constantly doing. Now don't mistake me. I don't mean you are good for doing them. It is a good thing to eat your breakfast, but you don't fancy it's very good of you to do it. The thing is good, not you. — George MacDonald

As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams. — W.B.Yeats

I don't like the idea of things being off-limits to kids - like a fancy sitting room where they can't touch anything. I own vintage pottery cups, and I let my girls hold them. It teaches them to treat objects with respect. — Debi Mazar

Where are Shakespeare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton's thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years. I am content to believe that the mind of man survives, somehow or other, his clay. — Bryan Procter

When you have become quite wild, then perhaps one of the wild things will come to take a look at you, and one of them may take a fancy to you, not because you are suffering and cold, but simply because he happens to like your looks. When this happens, the wandering is over, and the Indian becomes a Shaman. — Jaime De Angulo

I AM come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence
whether much that is glorious
whether all that is profound
does not spring from disease of thought
from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however, rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the "light ineffable", and again, like the adventures of the Nubian geographer, "agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi".
We will say then, that I am mad. — Edgar Allan Poe

A jump shot can get you a shoe deal, a big house, a supermodel, fancy cars, a bunch of yes men, a Swiss bank account. But none of these things can get you a jump shot — Allen Iverson

I hate crowds and making speeches. I hate facing cameras and having to answer to a crossfire of questions. Why popular fancy should seize upon me, a scientist, dealing in abstract things and happy if left alone, is a manifestation of mass psychology that is beyond me. — Albert Einstein

What an advantage that knowledge can be stored in books! The knowledge lies there like hermetically sealed provisions waiting for the day when you may need a meal. Surely what the Collector was doing as he pored over his military manuals, was proving the superiority of the European way of doing things, of European culture itself. This was a culture so flexible that whatever he needed was there in a book at his elbow. An ordinary sort of man, he could, with the help of an oil-lamp, turn himself into a great military engineer, a bishop, an explorer or a General overnight, if the fancy took him. — J.G. Farrell

I loved doing all those costume dramas. I didn't think, 'Ooh I've got to avoid being typecast' - you can't ever be dictated to by what other people think. I just do things because I fancy the parts and the directors. — Helena Bonham Carter

I glance through the rear window at the house. It amazes me slightly that it looks the same as it did, though it's been gutted of so many valuable things. You wouldn't know, to walk past that house, what it had lost. It looks as proud, and as firm, and as fancy as ever. As whole. — Kekla Magoon

Stuff doesn't matter - boats, cars, fancy things don't matter. What matters, what will matter to me, is the love of the people around me, and did I take a chance? Did I seize an opportunity to do something for people with the talents that I was lucky enough to be given? Did I make a difference in the lives of people who needed me? — James Comey

Some people think I can only do fancy; I don't know why. I'm a pretty easy person, really. Low maintenance. I get on with things, and I'm comfortable anywhere. — Donna Air

My parents both left school at 14, but my parents are incredibly smart, successful, thoughtful people. So one of the lessons I learned from my parents is that the fancy degree is just a foot in the door, and there are a lot of very smart people out there who don't necessarily have the fancy degrees. And given the opportunity, they can do amazing things. — Harry West

I cried because there are those of them who are just as intelligent as Ricky Wasserman or Arnie Greenwald or Yael Berg and just because of circumstance, they turn out so horribly. They see the young and affluent, they see their cars and their vacations and their fancy clothes, and they set their hearts on obtaining objects of material wealth. The young and rich already have these things, so they are free to devote their energies to developing their minds or having good, clean fun, or anything they want, really. And they are able to set their goals on spiritual fulfillment because they have everything they need otherwise. It's just not fair. — Phoebe Gloeckner

I remember making a videotape in a fancy hair salon in Beverly Hills. The soundtrack in the salon had a whole worldview behind it - I was interested in things like that. — David Salle

Sergeant Major," Arjun said quietly, "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Yur snorted. "Is that a fancy way of saying it's above my pay grade, sir? — Neal Stephenson

Living in the middle of beauty like this, we've no call to have puny ideas about God. Why do you suppose His world is so fancy-fine, so full of wonderment if He doesn't want everything to be good and perfect and right and healthy? But we can spoil His good work. When we mess things up, then we shouldn't blame Him and try to make ourselves feel better by contending that it's what He wanted. — Catherine Marshall

If my mom came here today, she'd probably join this red-hat brigade. My mother got my sense of humor, even when I was a kid. I would just do things that tickled my fancy in the moment, and she would ask me who I was entertaining. I'd say, 'Well, me.' And she would tell me that nobody knew that and they thought I was psychotic. Well, I don't ever want people to think I'm psychotic, but I can't help myself from doing these things. — Howie Mandel

Surely it is an excellent plan, when you are seated before delicacies and choice foods, to impress upon your imagination that this is the dead body of a fish, that the dead body of a bird or a pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is grape juice and that robe of purple a lamb's fleece dipped in a shellfish's blood; and in matters of sex intercourse, that it is the attrition of an entrail and a convulsive expulsion of a mere mucus. Surely these are excellent imaginations, going to the heart of actual facts and penetrating them so as to see the kind of things they really are. You should adopt this practice all through your life, and where things make an impression which is very plausible, uncover their nakedness, see into their cheapness, strip off the profession on which they vaunt themselves. For pride is an arch-seducer of reason, and just when you fancy you are most certainly busy in good works, then you are mostly certainly guilty of imposture. — Marcus Aurelius

Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I'd known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, materiel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, so we're always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we're doing things we technically don't know how to do. — Ben Fountain

Miss West is never idle. Below, in the big after-room, she does her own laundering. Nor will she let the steward touch her father's fine linen. In the main cabin she has installed a sewing-machine. All hand-stitching, and embroidering, and fancy work she does in the deck-chair beside me. She avers that she loves the sea and the atmosphere of sea-life, yet, verily, she has brought her home-things and land-things along with her
even to her pretty china for afternoon tea. — Jack London

Dombey and Son had often dealt in hides, but never in hearts. They left that fancy ware to boys and girls, and boarding-schools and books. Mr. Dombey would have reasoned: That a matrimonial alliance with himself must, in the nature of things, be gratifying and honourable to any woman of common sense. That the hope of giving birth to a new partner in such a house, could not fail to awaken a glorious and stirring ambition in the breast of the least ambitious of her sex. — Charles Dickens

I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare
or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad
who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping. — P.G. Wodehouse

The rats had crept out of their holes to look on, and they remained looking on for hours; soldiers and police often passing between them and the spectacle, and making a barrier behind which they slunk, and through which they peeped. The father had long ago taken up his bundle and hidden himself away with it, when the women who had tended the bundle while it lay on the base of the fountain, sat there watching the running of the water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball - when the one woman who had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness of Fate. The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so much life ran in the city ran into death according to rule, time and tide waited for no man, the rats were sleeping close together in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all things ran their course — Charles Dickens

Boating, my dear Mrs. Bedel, is the dullest of all things; don't you think so? Because a boat looks very pretty from the shore, we fancy that the shore must look very pretty from a boat; and when we try it, we find we have only got down into a pit and can see nothing rightly. For my part, I hate boating and I hate the water ... — J. Sheridan Le Fanu

He played with the idea, and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and Philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of Pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides. — Oscar Wilde

... how it would be nice if, for every sea waiting for us, there would be a river, for us.
And someone -a father, a lover, someone- able to take us by the hand and find that river -imagine it, invent it- and put us on its stream, with the lightness of one only word, goodbye. This, really, would be wonderful. It would be sweet, life, every life. And things wouldn't hurt, but they would get near taken by stream, one could first shave and then touch them and only finally be touched. Be wounded, also. Die because of them. Doesn't matter. But everything would be, finally, human. It would be enough someone's fancy -a father, a lover, someone- could invent a way, here in the middle of the silence, in this land which don't wanna talk. Clement way, and beautiful.
A way from here to the sea. — Alessandro Baricco

Wow." She reached for a black pillow decorated with a big sparkly skull and hugged it. "So romantic."
I made a face, because who the hell wanted to be a romantic? Then I couldn't look past the skull pillow. "Tell me something, sis. Why do we have to make skulls cute? Some things shouldn't be messed with. Guns, for example. Toilets ... toilet paper ... guns ... They should just stay functional. Sparkle-free."
She rolled her eyes. "Please. If I had a bedazzled toilet, I'd love it and so would you. Don't even try to deny it. You'd love a fancy can."
I did deny it, which led to a healthy debate. — Veronica Rossi

Time has a way of evening things out, the simple ways endure, and the fancy pants with his smart new way falls by the roadside. The best way to tell how long a thing will last is ask how long it's been around for. The newest things end soonest. And things that have been around for a good long while will last awhile to come. — Marcel Theroux