Lousy Quotes & Sayings

As Al Franken has demonstrated, liberals give lousy talk radio. — L. Neil Smith

The impulse to freeze the system, to try to tape all the cracks and staple all the cleavages, to ensure that nobody has to explain to their kid why Christmas this year is going to be a lousy Christmas, that is one of our greatest dangers. — Will Wilkinson

Anger seeped in, like an old friend who was a lousy house guest, but you forget every time he leaves how much you wish him gone, and welcome him heartily when he reappears. Anger was so much easier than hurt, or heartache, or regret, so anger it was. Welcome my old friend. — Julia Kent

The thing that got Daley mad," one of the delegates said later, "was that Ribicoff had been ass-kissing him just a day or two before. He came over and pushed for McGovern to our delegation and made a big speech about what a great guy Daley was. Then he got up there and played the hero for the TV cameras."
Daley was on his feet, his arms waiving, his mouth working. The words were lost in the uproar, but it was later asserted by Mayday, an almost-underground Washington paper, that a lip-reader had determined that he said: "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home. — Mike Royko

Despair kinda smells like burnt hair. Sounds great, but smells lousy. Now fear ... fear you can taste! Let's see, fear kinda tastes like ... like peaches, peaches covered with fresh bone marrow — Matt Wagner

I made more lousy pictures than any actor in history. — Humphrey Bogart

Never trust a woman who doesn't like to eat. She is probably lousy in bed. — Federico Fellini

The stories leaders and others tell, few of which are true, are a lousy foundation on which to base any sort of science, and we know how to accomplish behavioral change and the importance of priming, informational saliency, and social networks. Producing inspiration and other good feelings doesn't last very long. — Jeffrey Pfeffer

Harvard and Yale concentrated with venture capitalists that got the best calls and brainpower. Very few firms made most of the money, and they made it in just a few periods. Everyone else returned between mediocre and lousy. When returns happened, envy rippled through institutional money management. The amount invested in venture capital went up 10 times post-1999. That later money was lost very quickly. It will happen again. I don't know anyone who successfully resists this stuff. It becomes a new orthodoxy. — Charlie Munger

I have a theory about American men
I think they think women are boys who don't know how to throw a ball very well. American women are forced into the role of being men without penises, of being men who haven't quite been able to make it. If women don't want to be pussycats, then they get forced into the role of being almost as good as men. Which is lousy. — Anne Beatts

As Sloan approached the door, Paul Lyons lifted his eyes to watch her leave. He found himself wondering why after all these years they couldn't manage to get along for a lousy twenty minutes. Perhaps it was the result of their inability to compromise - to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Or maybe they'd both simply lost the ability to trust another human being and believe anything good could come of this world. — Kaylin McFarren

The best morale exist when you never hear the word mentioned. When you hear a lot of talk about it, it's usually lousy. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

I was like the family clown. The middle child entertaining. I was a lousy student, but interestingly, the nuns always let me write plays or do drawings, endless special projects. — Eileen Myles

I'm a lousy journalist. — Judith Rossner

Is it going to hurt?"
"You bet."
Sergeant Major had a lousy bedside manner. — Ilona Andrews

I sometimes feel that more lousy dishes are presented under the banner of pate than any other. — Kingsley Amis

How is the birdhouse coming along, Charlie Brown?"
"Well, I'm a lousy carpenter, I can't nail straight, I can't saw straight and I always split the wood ... I'm nervous, I lack confidence, I'm stupid, I have poor taste and absolutely no sense of design ... So, all things considered, it's coming along okay! — Charles M. Schulz

I had a lousy marriage and I drank too much. — Pat Travers

We have two choices every day: We can feel good about ourselves, or we can feel lousy about ourselves. Why would anyone choose the latter? — Kenneth H. Blanchard

The faster you act, the more stable your company becomes and the higher your chances of success. Perfectionists make lousy entrepreneurs. — Sean Wise

I just don't think of age and time in respect of years. I have too much experience of people in their seventies who are vigorous and useful and people who are thirty-five who are in lousy physical shape and can't think straight. I don't think age has that much to do with it. — Harrison Ford

I'm - sorry about being a lousy date," Alec muttered.
"What are you talking about?" Magnus asked. "You're a fantastic date. You've only been here ten minutes, and I already got half of your clothes off. — Cassandra Clare

If you put on a lousy production with white actors, it's lousy. There is a problem, or can be, at this stage of our social evolution, with mixing the casts. It may not be a question of race so much as class. You would rarely find a black man in a high executive position where he was swinging his weight around. — Howard Schultz

I went drinking with Gray Powell and all I got was a lousy iPhone prototype. — Steve Wozniak

Probably a lack of concentration. I always hit them during practice. I just need to concentrate. Even though I should a lousy percentage, I beat a lot of teams from the line. You have to have mechanics. But see, what people don't know about my wrists is my wrists don't go all the way back. My wrists are crooked and don't go all the way back. I've been practicing and working on them. You can't do everything good. — Shaquille O'Neal

The pain is stronger than ever. I've seen bit of lost Paradises and I know I'll be hopelessly tryng tu return even if it hurts. The deeper I swing into the regions of nothingness the further I'm thrown back into myself, each time more and more frightening depths below me, until my very being becomes dizzy. There are brief glimpses of clear sky, like falling out of a tree, so I have some idea where I'm going, but there is still too much clarity and straight order of things, I am getting always the same number somehow. So I vomit out broken bits of words and sintaxes of the countries I've passed through, broken limbs, slaughtered houses, geographies. My heart is poisoned, my brain left in shreds of horror and sadness. I've never let you down, world, but you did lousy things to me.
(from "As I was moving ahead occasionally I saw brief glimpses of beauty", 2000) — Jonas Mekas

I thought about how I had come to know him a little bit over the last few months and how he was now getting out, escaping from prison, just like he always said he would. I realized I wanted to escape as well. I wanted to leave this town and this lousy job, go home, collect my family, and drive away to Washington State, Colorado, the Florida Keys, or up to northern New England and find a new job where I wasn't exposed to the worst parts of the worst people every day. — Robert Reilly Jr.

Reading a book, for me at least, is like traveling in someone else's world. If it's a good book, then you feel comfortable and yet anxious to see what's going to happen to you there, what'll be around the next corner. But if it's a lousy book, then it's like going through Secaucus, New Jersey
it smells and you wish you weren't there, but since you've started the trip, you roll up the windows and breathe through your mouth until you're done. — Jonathan Carroll

I think a lot of people can relate to that school is pretty lousy for a lot of people, and it just shows that you don't have to be perfect and you can still be a hero. — Matthew Lewis

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

There are lots of things I am not good at. I'm not that good a singer. And I'm a good dad but a lousy husband because I work far too much and am not at home as much as I would like. — Magnus Scheving

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer. — Colleen McCullough

I was a pretty lousy bass player. But the band I was in couldn't find a bass player in our small town and it was more important to have a bass than keyboards, so that's what I did. — Anne Boleyn

Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sakes. Now, I mean, I'm talking about singing in the shower, I'm talking about dancing to the radio, I'm talking about writing a poem to a friend
a lousy poem. — Kurt Vonnegut

What you're doing--it's the right thing. Going after what you love despite everything you've done, and I won't sugarcoat it, you've done some pretty lousy things, but you did it all because you love this single human being so much you couldn't help yourself. There is an honesty to that. — Tarryn Fisher

Economics is in many respects the queen of the soft sciences. It's expected to be better than the rest. It's my view that economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft science. And it's also my view that it's still lousy ... — Charlie Munger

It's just what you're stuck with, the lousy furniture you can't change. The educated me knows hell's nothing, a fiction I happened to inherit. The other me knows I'm going there. There must be a dozen mes these days, taking turns looking the other way."
"It's the postmodern solution," I said. "Controlled multiple personality disorder. Pick a fiction and allocate it an aspect of yourself. — Glen Duncan

I found it again at last! Page 156 - 157 of *My Soul to Keep* by Melanie Wells.

Dr. Dylan Foster is thinking to herself while searching through literature on snake lore, "Then there was all the mystical stuff. Once again, the dearth of comparative religion in my theology training nearly skunked me. Four years of sod-busing in seminary had taught me exactly nothing more than what I already knew--in grander proportions, of course, and to near-microscopic levels of minutia. In the end, I got out of there with a solid hermeneutical method, an encyclopedic understanding of dispensational theology, and the ability to conjugate verbs and deconstruct participles in Greek and Hebrew--all notable skills--but without even passable knowledge of anything outside one extremely narrow strip of theological territory."

"When it was all said and done, I'd spent four years and trainload of money to get indoctrinated, not educated. Lousy planning, if you ask me. — Melanie Wells

The real, native South Seas food is lousy. You can't eat it. — Victor Hugo

There are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that's still going to be lousy. The money still won't come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers. — Charlie Munger

What we need, of course, is a language which will allow us to distinguish the normal or routine fuck from the glorious, the rare, or the lousy one - a fack from a fick, a fick from a fock - but we have more names for parts of horses than we have for kinds of kisses, and our earthy words are all ... well ... 'dirty'. It says something dirty about us, no doubt, because in a society which had a mind for the body and other similarly vital things, there would be a word for coming down, or going up, words for nibbles on the bias, earlobe loving, and every variety of tongue track. After all, how many kinds of birds do we distinguish? We have a name for the Second Coming but none for a second coming. In fact our entire vocabulary for states of consciousness is critically impoverished. — William H Gass

So the hours are pretty good then?' he resumed.
The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.
Yeah,' he said, 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy. — Douglas Adams

I'm a lousy writer; a helluva lot of people have got lousy taste. — Grace Metalious

The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large. — Kurt Vonnegut

Tacky T-shirts that said things like "My crazy Grandma traveled to India and all I got was this lousy T-shirt." They — Chris Colfer

I feel lousy about the pain that I've caused my wife and kids. I feel guilty and conscience-stricken, and all of those things you think sentimental, but which my generation calls simple human decency. And I miss my home, because I'm beginning to get scared shitless, because all of a sudden it's closer to the end than the beginning, and death is suddenly a perceptible thing to me, with definable features. — William Holden

Sleepovers and dance parties and those talks we would have until three in the morning that would make us feel lousy the next day because we'd slept like hell but also feel good because the talks were like blood transfusions, moments of realness and hope that were pinpricks of light in the dark fabric of small-town life. — Gayle Forman

At some point the rhetoric runs out, and we have to ask ourselves, 'Are we simply going to standby while somebody's rhetoric is good, but their actions are so lousy?' Are we going to stand up for that? — Matt Gonzalez

to Maxfield to get away from the crap I'd put up with all my life in lousy schools. I wasn't going to let a couple — Robison Wells

I think... no, I am positive... that you are the most unattractive man I have ever met in my entire life. You know, in the short time we've been together, you have demonstrated EVERY loathsome characteristic of the male personality and even discovered a few new ones. You are physically repulsive, intellectually retarded, you're morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selfish, stupid, you have no taste, a lousy sense of humor and you smell. You're not even interesting enough to make me sick. — John Updike

He's not your type."
Peabody's face clouded exactly as it had when Eve had rejected the perfume. "How come - I like looking at his type."
"Sure, but try to have a conversation with him." Eve dipped her hands in her pockets and rocked back on her heels. "Guy's in love with himself and figures every woman who gets a load of him has to go moony eyed - just like you're doing. He'd bore you to death in ten minutes because all he'd talk about is himself - how he looks, what he does, what he likes. You'd just be his latest accessory."
Peabody considered, watching as the gold-tipped Adonis posed at the check-in counter. "Okay, so we won't bother to talk. We'll just have sex."
"He'd be a lousy lay - wouldn't give a damn if you got off or not."
"I'm getting off just looking at him." But she sighed when he took out a small silver-backed mirror and examined his face with obvious delight. "It's times like this I hate it when you're right. — J.D. Robb

Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls, girls that looked like they'd be bitches if you knew them. It was really nice sightseeing, if you know what I mean. In a way, it was sort of depressing, too, because you kept wondering what the hell would happen to all of them. When they got out of school and college, I mean. You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that always talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping-pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never read books. Guys that are very boring - But I have to be careful about that. I mean about calling certain guys bores. I don't understand boring guys. I really don't. — J.D. Salinger

I had achieved so much success in my career and then had this spectacular fall from grace that left me unemployed and living in a town, Los Angeles, that is built on envy. Once you fall, people don't really root for you to come back again. I'd go to restaurants where I always had the best table and half the time they wouldn't even let me pay. And then when I stopped making movies, the same places wouldn't even give me a lousy table, never mind the best one! — Mickey Rourke

I wanted it the way an alcoholic must want booze: badly enough to shove aside the hard knowledge that this was a truly lousy idea. — Tana French

All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last. — Aldous Huxley

Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician. — Dorothy Parker

I reached over, opened it in the middle, and began reading Tolstoy's War and Peace. Nothing had changed. It was still a lousy book. — Charles Bukowski

Stop worrying about the lousy science, and how me the money already. — Rajendra K. Pachauri

You look lousy,' he said.
Jace blinked. 'Seems an odd time to start an insult contest, but if you insist, I could probably think up something good.'
'No I mean it. You don't look good.'
'This is from a guy ho has all the sex appeal of a penguin. Look, I realize you may be jealous that the good Lord didn't deal you the same chiseled hand he dealt me, but that's no reason to-'
'I am not trying to insult you.' Simon snapped. — Cassandra Clare

In many ways, education is a lousy business. Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry, given their skills and advanced degrees. — Andrew Ross Sorkin

Look at Nelson Mandela. Why did people want to follow him? He's a lousy speaker. If he hadn't got all the other things, you wouldn't spend time listening to him. But people actually don't listen to what he's saying, in a way. They are listening to him because he has communicated that he is ready to put his life on the line. — Desmond Tutu

Blame has no purpose, and it is a lousy teacher. — John Yokoyama

There's only one honest way to measure affluence; that's by comparing the capability of producing goods and services with the desire of people to enjoy them. It's a lousy, crooked trick to compare this society with China or some such place and then say we're affluent. It's a piece of intellectual crookery even to compare this economy with itself ten or twenty years ago. We should compare what we have with what we could have. — Louis O. Kelso

I was a lousy hitter in May doing the same things that made me a great hitter in June. — Carl Yastrzemski

No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square. — Louise Bogan

I never think about a movie when I'm writing a book, because I think only two things could happen and both of them are bad. You write a lousy novel and a lousy film. — Don Winslow

I think I know where my life went wrong. For all the world's a stage and I'm a lousy actor! — Greg Curtis

I'm ordered to a week of bed rest and I don't object because I feel so lousy. Not just my heel and my tailbone. My whole body aches with exhaustion. So I let my mother doctor me and feed me breakfast in bed and tuck another quilt around me. Then I just lie there, staring out my window at the winter sky, pondering how on earth this will all turn out. — Suzanne Collins

The disaster at the Bay of Pigs intensified Kennedy's doubts about listening to advisers from the CIA, the Pentagon, or the State Department who had misled him or allowed him to accept lousy advice. — Robert Dallek

Come on, Ted. I'm not exactly the type to be a rich man's bimbo."
"That's true." A world of compassion softened his voice. "Bimbos are generally good-hearted women who are pleasant to be around."
"Spoken from experience, I'm sure. By the way, you may be God Almighty on the golf course, but you're a lousy dancer. Let me lead. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it. — Walter Isaacson

Ethan: "You think I'm a hero?"
Beth: "Yes."
Ethan: "But lousy husband material?" Like that really mattered to him.
Beth: "Don't sweat it. So was Superman. — Lucy Monroe

You've got one life, live it. Follow your dreams, quit your job, drop out of school, tell your boyfriend that he's lousy and walk out the door. This is your time. This is your life. You know what? Dream as big as you want to, its the cheapest thing you'll ever do. — Jared Leto

The problem with holding a grudge is that your hands are then too full to hold onto anything else. It might be the competition or a technology or the lousy things that someone did a decade ago. None of it is going to get better as a result of revisiting the grudge. — Seth Godin

I'd be somewhat of a lousy writer if I didn't know what to say. — S.A. Tawks

During my own gap year, I learned an invaluable lesson - that I was a lousy teacher. Even though the children I 'taught,' in upcountry Uganda, were desperate for qualifications, they largely ignored me. Until, that is, I realised that they wanted to hear about other young persons around the world. — Simon Hoggart

He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything. — Robert Cormier

I was about to get a degree in economics when I accepted that I'd be a lousy businessman, and if I didn't give acting a try I'd regret it for the rest of my life. — Peter Gallagher

You can have a Great Day, or a Lousy Day; it's totally up to you. — Ed Foreman

Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation. — Basil Bunting

If they'd been dogs, they would have all been in the yard eating grass and trying to yak up whatever was making them feel so lousy. Not a bone gnawed, not a ball chased-all tails went unwagged. Oh, life is a fast cat, a short leash, a flea in that place where you just can't scratch. — Christopher Moore

Sandra ... ." He blinked then opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "This says, I married Sandra Fielding, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."
"Yep. — Penny Reid

I believe only foreigners should run for president ... Face it, the presidency is a lousy job. And who does lousy jobs we don't want anymore better than foreigners? — Bill Maher

How is it we could have a system where schools could remain lousy for 50 years and yet you do exactly the same thing this year that they did 50 years ago when it didn't work then, and no one feels any pressure to change? — Geoffrey Canada

And the customer has a voice; provide a bad product or lousy service at your peril. — Eric Schmidt

Negative habits eat you up. They're the biggest roadblocks that prevent you from realising your fullest potential; and the very first step towards crafting real change is to become aware of all the destructive habits that squander you! An awareness of what needs to be improved, tackled, or abandoned will go a long way in restructuring your life. Make a list of all the lousy habits that you want to eliminate; and then roust them out of your life, before they chomp you up completely. Axe them, uproot them, throw them into the ocean and never look back. — Manprit Kaur

When the weather's nice, my parents go out quite frequently and stick a bunch of flowers on old Allie's grave. I went with them a couple of times, but I cut it out. In the first place, I don't enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery. Surrounded by dead guys and tombstones and all. It wasn't too bad when the sun was out, but twice - twice - we were there when it started to rain. It was awful. It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach. It rained all over the place. All the visitors that were visiting the cemetery started running like hell over to their cars. That's what nearly drove me crazy. All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner - everybody except Allie. I couldn't stand it. I know it's only his body and all that's in the cemetery, and his soul's in Heaven and all that crap, but I couldn't stand it anyway. I just wished he wasn't there. — J.D. Salinger

Cinderella never had it so good. All she got was a lousy coach and breakable shoes. — Sonya Bateman

He had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
Then Trout made a good point, too. 'Well,' he said, 'I used to be a conservationist. I used to weep and wail about people shooting bald eagles with automatic shotguns from helicopters and all that, but I gave it up. There's a river in Cleveland which is so polluted that it catches fire about once a year. That used to make me sick, but I laugh about it now. When some tanker accidentally dumps its load in the ocean, and kills millions of birds and billions of fish, I say, 'More power to Standard Oil,' or whoever it was that dumped it.' Trout raised his arms in celebration. 'Up your ass with Mobil gas,' he said. — Kurt Vonnegut

The odds are lousy that I actually said something attributed to me. — Morgan Freeman

That was the thing I hated, that I'd made such a lousy choice. But I didn't. You set out to convince me you were exactly what I was looking for. I had no reason to mistrust you. You lied, I didn't. — Susan Mallery

I don't care how loyal you think you're going to be Dink. It's not in you. You're a brat and you always will be. So admit what a lousy follower you are and go ahead and LEAD.
-Petra — Orson Scott Card

"My swing is too fast" may be the biggest misconception ever. Think about it. If you take a fast, lousy swing and slow it down, all you've got left is a slow, lousy swing. Most people swing too slow, not too fast. — Hank Haney

As a general rule, when something gets elevated to apple-pie status in the hierarchy of American values, you have to suspect that its actual monetary value is skidding toward zero. Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent. Same thing with work: would we be so reverent about the 'work ethic' if it wasn't for the fact that the average working stiff's hourly pay is shrinking, year by year ... — Barbara Ehrenreich

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose. — Bill Gates

I started out as a lousy actress and have remained one. — Brigitte Bardot

I want to make a memorial for our turkey. Never has a bird been so tortured to provide such a lousy dinner. — Laurie Halse Anderson

If I'm a lousy writer, then an awful lot of people have lousy taste. — Grace Metalious

If you care to define the South as a poor, rural region with lousy race relations, that South survives only in geographical shreds and patches and most Southerners don't live there any more. — John Shelton Reed

I was feeling sort of lousy. Depressed and all. I almost wish I was dead. — J.D. Salinger