Hamill Quotes & Sayings

His vacant eyes took on a more sinister look, taking notice of us for the first time, a stranger in our midst, a monster. — Patricia Hamill

My family had a membership to the Riverside Yacht Club where my brother, Sandy, learned to sail, and I competed in local swim races. My sister, Marcia, became a competitive springboard diver, and my brother excelled in water polo. — Dorothy Hamill

Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul. — Pete Hamill

I haven't seen any poet in this country behave nearly as rudely as Newt Gingrich or Bill O'Reilly. I'm not asking these people to approve of everyone's manners. I don't feel obliged to defend the manners of every poet who submits a poem to my web site. That's not my job. My job is to provide them with an opportunity to speak from the heart. If there's not much in the heart and if the mouth is running wild, that's not my problem. — Sam Hamill

It would be nice if all the Republicans could put poetry in a little box and put the box under the bed and sit on it, but they can't. — Sam Hamill

Beauty and ugliness have one origin.
Name beauty, and ugliness is.
Recognizing virtue recognizes evil.

Is and is not produce one another.
The difficult is born in the easy,
long is defined by short, the high by the low. — Sam Hamill

You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house. — Pete Hamill

The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street. — Pete Hamill

The great novel of twentieth-century New York might be the Daily News. — Pete Hamill

Reaches past her back and holds one of her hands. Silence — Pete Hamill

I've always loved Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness movies. — Mark Hamill

I think I dreamed about competing at the Olympics, maybe hoping to win a gold medal. Not that I ever thought that I would, but I dreamed about it. — Dorothy Hamill

There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it. — Pete Hamill

Everybody needs an editor. — Pete Hamill

There's no one New York. There's multiple New Yorks. — Pete Hamill

Lucas had narrowed his lead threesome down to two competing groups: in one was Walken, Will Seltzer, and Terri Nunn, a trio Lucas described as "a little more serious, a little more realistic"; in the other, Ford, Hamill, and Fisher, a group Lucas called "a little more fun, more goofy. — Brian Jay Jones

One of the things that I love about voiceover is that it's a situation where - because you're not encumbered by being seen - it's liberating. You're able to make broad choices that you would never make if you were on camera. — Mark Hamill

All that ran through my mind at her suggesstion was running through the park with a ton of turned Disney Princesses and the three little pigs hot on our trail. — Patricia Hamill

The only thing we all agree on, virtually every poet in this country, is that this Administration is really frightening, and we want something done about it. — Sam Hamill

The mind is pretty powerful. In skating, you learn to click into that zone and focus not necessarily on what you're doing but if you're doing it well. — Dorothy Hamill

Poetry transcends the nation-state. Poetry transcends government. It brings the traditional concept of power to its knees. I have always believed poetry to be an eternal conversation in which the ancient poets remain contemporary, a conversation inviting us into other languages and cultures even as poetry transcends language and culture, returning us again and again to primal rhythms and sounds. — Sam Hamill

My legs are ice skaters' legs. No tan in sight. — Dorothy Hamill

I always had short hair, and I hated my short hair. I was always mistaken for a boy, but my mom wouldn't let me change my hair because she was always chasing me around with a hairbrush, and it was always tangled, so she just would cut it off, and she's right: short hair did suit me. — Dorothy Hamill

I wouldn't say that there's ever been an Olympic champion that didn't deserve to win an Olympic Gold Medal. — Dorothy Hamill

It has been demonstrated that freemason - in an operative context - is a contraction of 'freestone mason' ... The earliest printed use so far traced comes in The Pilgrimage of Perfection - usually attributed to William Bonde - printed in 1536 by Wynkyn de Worde. — John Hamill

I debated in high school! If you told things that weren't true or just made things out of whole cloth, you were penalized. It's too bad they don't apply the same standards to presidential candidates as they do to high school students. — Mark Hamill

I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me. — Sam Hamill

For a long time, I was in love with her in that diffuse, ambiguous, and obsessive way that can never be explained to strangers. — Pete Hamill

I used to have terrible tantrums. I was temperamental when I was younger. Actually, what I needed was a swift kick in the pants. What a brat! — Dorothy Hamill

The library is a place where most of the things I came to value as an adult had their beginnings. — Pete Hamill

In truth, I've never been a big superhero fan. I don't mind some of the movies, and a couple of the cartoons were alright - that Batman series from the early nineties where Mark Hamill voiced the Joker is sweetness. But largely, I've not really had much time for superheroes. — Ben Peek

I was passionate. I found something that I loved. I could be all alone in a big old skating rink and nobody could get near me and I didn't have to talk to anybody because of my shyness. It was great. I was in my fantasy world. — Dorothy Hamill

Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town. — Pete Hamill

Nothing will change until we demolish the "we-they" mentality. We are human, and therefore all human concerns are ours. And those concerns are personal. — Sam Hamill

My parents were Belfast Catholics. — Pete Hamill

It was very much like Norman Rockwell: small town America. We walked to school or rode our bikes, stopped at the penny candy store on the way home from school, skated on the pond. — Dorothy Hamill

In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable. — Pete Hamill

I'm really very glad that I had skating to be my love and my escape. I think that it always gave me something that made me feel good, and it was music, and it was peaceful, and not a lot of the other stresses of life. — Dorothy Hamill

New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church. — Pete Hamill

In group lesson number six I think we learned how to turn backwards and then just kind of wiggle. That wasn't really skating backward, but I guess I was going in the right direction. — Dorothy Hamill

The best newspapermen I know are those most thrilled by the daily pump of city room excitements; they long fondly for a good murder; they pray that assassinations, wars, catastrophes break on their editions. — Pete Hamill

I don't want to think about it, but I have to. Someone has to. I see the signs of spring and I weep ... — Patricia Hamill

People think skating would translate very easily to dancing, but it really doesn't. Dancing is a lot of fun and not as dangerous as being on the ice. — Dorothy Hamill

His brothers accepted his fluid nature as something Darian simply was. He had been so all his life; suspended between male and female, one rising, the other ebbing without pattern or reason. The Queen, daughterless and doting, had gladly let her youngest son
wear gowns, bows, and curls far longer than appropriate, until his father had intervened with violent persuasion. At court, he now moved as a man. In private, he never stopped wearing gowns or ribbons when the softer she inside him waxed like the full moon. He allowed her complete rein. In truth, he no longer knew where he ended and she began. They were the same. — E.M. Hamill

If you're the oldest in a large family, you tend to do everything yourself, particularly if you are the first American. You begin a habit or pattern that makes it easy to reject other help. — Pete Hamill

Reporters now are better educated than the crowd I knew when I broke in. We still had guys shaped by Prohibition and the Depression, so the news business still had badly paid people who loved it for the life, because every day was different. — Pete Hamill

The boy admonished himself for wanting everything to be a story. And now realized that some journeys were not stories. On some journeys, nothing really happened. You just kept taking steps. — Pete Hamill

When I was growing up, there were very few women athletes. I remember watching Olga Corbett, but Peggy Fleming and Janet Lynn were my role models. I never dreamt that I could be at that level. I remember thinking they seemed so elegant and regal and powerful and feminine. — Dorothy Hamill

Each of us as poets, as decent suffering human beings, has to find a way to run our lives that is compassionate toward one another and toward our environment. — Sam Hamill

I wanted to learn how to skate backwards and they wouldn't help me and they went off and left me on my own. — Dorothy Hamill

At the last Celebration I spoke before an auditorium full of people and I could just feel the affection and the positive feelings that they were exuding. It was actually moving. I remember thinking, 'I'm not worthy,' because 'Star Wars' is so much bigger than all of us. — Mark Hamill

When I was a teenager, I did one animated series back when I was on 'General Hospital.' It was 1971 or '72. Then I didn't do animation until 'Batman.' — Mark Hamill

I was just ice skating. I had no concept of that. In those days you couldn't see the judges. I was this little person on the ice and they were just people that would stand around the boards. — Dorothy Hamill

Sometimes people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic poem or something, and they say, "Oh, I really like your Zen poems." And I say, "Which ones are not Zen poems?" — Sam Hamill

I live in a sort of insular world. It's mostly my family, my house, staying home and working. — Mark Hamill

The most successful terrorist group in the United States for almost 70 years was the Ku Klux Klan. They hated Catholics, Jews, and blacks. They were prone to violence. — Pete Hamill

One thing is certain: for many of those who came back from WWII, the music of Frank Sinatra was no consolation for their losses. Some had lost friends. Some had lost wives and lovers. All had lost portions of their youth. More important to the Sinatra career the girls started marrying the men who came home. Bobby socks vanished from many closets. The girls who wore them had no need anymore for imaginary lovers; they had husbands. Nothing is more embarrassing to grownups than the passions of adolescence, and for many, Frank Sinatra was the passion. — Pete Hamill

New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other. — Pete Hamill

It's odd being an American now. Most of us are peaceful, but here we are again, in our fifth major war of this century. — Pete Hamill

An independent Brooklyn probably would have built a new stadium for the Dodgers, so today there might be not just baseball but also the only football team on this side of the Hudson. — Pete Hamill

I would say that my great political awakening was really born on Okinawa, reading Albert Camus: the "Neither Victims nor Executioners" essay and The Rebel. I was an eighteen-year-old kid. I hated myself. I hated my life. I thought nobody wanted me. — Sam Hamill

Losers are more like the rest of us. They make mistakes they can't take back. — Pete Hamill

When you say 'comic book' in America, people think of Mickey Mouse, and Archie. It has a connotation of juvenile. — Mark Hamill

He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through, someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled. — Pete Hamill

I'm so much like Luke Skywalker I guess I always will be. — Mark Hamill

The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day. — Pete Hamill

One thing that I notice that is changing, you don't see kids on Sunday. Most of them are home. The kids are having much more virtual childhoods instead of childhoods. They don't play ball or hang out with the wrong people or get in fistfights, all the things that once made childhood. I don't know how it's going to turn out. — Pete Hamill

I have a sneaking suspicion that if there were a way to make movies without actors, George Lucas would do it. — Mark Hamill

In the newspaper business, I was in the last generation before the arrival of the personnel manager. You were hired by editors - and editors who would take a chance on what they perceived to be talent and not hire a resume. — Pete Hamill

Presents? Cake? I could use a new bat, maybe some good work boots or running shoes. — Patricia Hamill

What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect? — Pete Hamill

"Some say the most beautiful thing in the world is a great cavalry riding down over the hill. Others say it's a vast infantry on the march. But I say the most beautiful thing is the beloved." How political can you get? — Sam Hamill

You see the fairy tale - four minutes of glory at the Olympics. I thought my life would be cake after that. — Dorothy Hamill

I have failed 'Star Wars' trivia tests. People come up to me at conventions and use terms that I've never heard of. — Mark Hamill

One of the things I love about translation is it obliterates the self. When I'm trying to figure out what Tu Fu has to say, I have to kind of impersonate Tu Fu. I have to take on, if you will, his voice and his skin in English, and I have to try to get as deeply into the poem as possible. I'm not trying to make an equivalent poem in English, which can't be done because our language can't accommodate the kind of metaphors within metaphors the Chinese written language can, and often does, contain. — Sam Hamill

I've made a commitment to concentrate on my career as an entertainer. — Dorothy Hamill

You've got to have something in your life you don't sell to others. — Pete Hamill

I think Princess Diana probably had the most famous haircut, or Farrah Fawcett or Jennifer Aniston. — Dorothy Hamill

Across the years, in spite of everything I knew, my passion endured. Newspapers and magazines paid me to cover fights when I'd have paid my own way. — Pete Hamill

To be the world's best, you have to beat the world's best. — Dorothy Hamill

Galway Kinnell came out with that wonderful big, breathy, hollow voice of his and read, for the first time in public, "The Bear." That poem impressed me so much that I memorized it. I used it for years when I taught in prisons. It's a powerful extended metaphor for what the writing life is really all about. It's a uniquely powerful poem about self-transformation, and that's what we're asking, really, beyond even our objection to the war. We're asking people to look at themselves and think about what might be possible with a little self-transformation. — Sam Hamill

After school, my mom would pick me up and I would just go to visit my dad in the recording studio, and I would see him working with Mark Hamill or hear him doing the 'Transformers' or a 'G.I. Joe' or the 'Rugrats.' — Ashley Bell

In Mexico, I first encountered the attitude that was missing from the optimistic sense of living in the United States: a tragic sense of life. Such a sense doesn't force us into a somber cone of depression and futility; it urges the opposite. The tragic sense opens a human being to the exuberant joys of the present. To laughter, carnal ity, the comical varieties of love, to music and art, to the small human glories of the day. — Pete Hamill

My father did shape me. He didn't drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility. — Pete Hamill

What libraries give you is all three tenses - the past tense - the present tense in which we live and the future that we can only imagine. These places have teachers who are living and dead and we are lucky to have them. If I sit here and read Aristotle, he is speaking to me across a thousand years - more than a thousand years. That sense that I am in the company of the great greatest people who ever lived is a humbling experience but a liberating experience. — Pete Hamill

My ambition was to embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway, a former newspaperman, once said should be present in all good books: 'the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.' — Pete Hamill

I didn't know about competition or the Olympics until Peggy Fleming won in 1968. My mother looked after all of the competition stuff. I just skated. I didn't really love competition, but that was the only way to get better. You'd see more talent. — Dorothy Hamill

I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career. — Pete Hamill

Not too bad, reminds me of some kind of meat dip, best if you close your eyes and pretend it's something else. — Patricia Hamill

The world was a grand confusion. Finally, when I was drunk, and my mind couldn't do what I wanted it to do, I went home. I would lie alone In the dark, feeling that I was a character in a story that had lost its plot."
Sann "Don't ever use the word tragedy again. You tell what happened, and let the reader say it's a tragedy. If you're crying, the reader won't. — Pete Hamill

I'm so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers. — Pete Hamill

My ethics, my sense of morality, my work ethic, my sense of compassion for suffering humanity, all of that comes directly out of the practice of poetry, as does my Buddhist practice. Poetry is a very important element in the history of Buddhism in general and in Zen in particular. It was really Zen that motivated me to change the way I perceive the world. — Sam Hamill

Don't tell me about the world. Not today. It's springtime and they're knocking baseball around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball. — Pete Hamill

Leon Uris is a storyteller, in a direct line from those men who sat around fires in the days before history and made the tribe more human. — Pete Hamill

Everybody has to deal with tough times. A gold medal doesn't make you immune to that. A skater is used to falling down and getting up again. — Dorothy Hamill

One naively thinks that by winning the Olympics, it's going to be this switch, and then your life is going to be perfect, and that's not reality. — Dorothy Hamill

I love the fact that, one time, my face was on the back of a cereal box - probably 3-CPO's - and it was a mask where you cut out the eye holes and put a string through the side. It makes me feel like I'm 11 years old all over again. — Mark Hamill

Human beings want to know too much abut each other, and that's why there are so many lies. — Pete Hamill

Viewers can't work or play while watching television; they can't read; they can't be out on the streets, falling in love with the wrong people, learning how to quarrel and compromise with other human beings. In short, they are asocial. — Pete Hamill

In my experience, growing up in Brooklyn and all that, the real tough guys didn't act tough. They didn't talk tough. They were tough, you know? I think about these politicians who try to pose as tough guys - it makes me laugh. — Pete Hamill