Pasted Quotes & Sayings

Congratulations," I said. "It's so wonderful to write a book." "I walked all the way here," she said. "I started at midnight. I would have gotten here sooner if I weren't so old." "Where do you live?" I said. "The Kit Carson Hotel," she said. "And I've written a book." Then she handed it proudly to me as if it were the most precious thing in the world. And it was. It was a loose-leaf notebook of the type that you find everywhere in America. There is no place that does not have them. There was a heavy label pasted on the cover and written in broad green crayon across the label was the title: GROWING FLOWERS BY CANDLELIGHT IN HOTEL ROOMS BY MRS. CHARLES FINE ADAMS — Richard Brautigan

I got one entire song from fortune cookies (Land of Sunshine). On another one, I took words from different Frank Sinatra songs and pasted them together. Another one, I was just driving around and there was a piece of paper on the ground, so I stole it. — Mike Patton

I could feel the shakes starting to come back, so I washed my face, rinsed my mouth out with handfuls of tap water, pasted on my best I-didn't-just-kill-a-zombie expression, and left with my coffee. — Jonathan Maberry

The cities were sucking all the life of the country into themselves and destroying it. Men were no longer individuals but units in a vast machine, all cut to one pattern, with the same tastes and ideas, the same mass-produced education that did not educate but only pasted a veneer of catchwords over ignorance. Why do you want to bring that back? — Leigh Brackett

I guess we all can't help peeking at our own imperfections, just like we can't help scratching a scab that keeps itching. When those imperfections are pasted across your face like that, exaggerated and magnified, it's hard to find all those good thoughts you have about yourself. If you believe those distorted reflections too deeply, you'll never get out of the maze. — Neal Shusterman

For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man ... Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher. — Walker Percy

Sitting in the study hall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from seventy-seven to seventy-six. But the Christmas vacation was very far away: but one time it would come because the earth moved round always.
-Stephen Dedalus- — James Joyce

The reflected version of myself, wet, shaking, rumpled, pinched and slightly stooped, would be alarming were it not for the self-satisfied expression pasted across my face. I would ask the obvious question, "What are you smiling about?" but I already know the answer: "It just gets better from here". — Michael J. Fox

Most headlines are set too big to be legible in the magazines or newspaper. Never approve a layout until you have seen it pasted into the magazine or newspaper for which it was destined. If you pin up the layouts on a bulletin board and appraise them from fifteen feet, you will produce posters. — David Ogilvy

Studs Lonigan, on the verge of fifteen, and wearing his first suit of long trousers, stood in the bathroom with a Sweet Caporal pasted on his mug. — James T. Farrell

We rode in silence, I think all of us wondering what was behind the flowery wallpaper our perceptions had always pasted on the unknown. All the things the mind won't allow us to see, to protect our sanity, or our soul, or maybe just to keep the shit out of our pants. — David Wong

As we reached the turning of the hall, Randall spoke behind us. "Jamie," he said. The voice was hoarse with shock, and held a note halfway between disbelief and pleading. Jamie stopped then, and turned to look at him. Randall's face was a ghastly white, with a small red patch livid on each cheekbone. He had taken off his wig, clenched in his hands, and sweat pasted the fine dark hair to his temples. "No." The voice that spoke above me was soft, almost expressionless. Looking up, I could see that the face still matched it, but a quick, hot pulse beat in his neck, and the small, triangular scar above his collar flushed red with heat. "I am called Lord Broch Tuarach for formality's sake," the soft Scottish voice above me said. "And beyond the requirements of formality, you will never speak to me again - until you beg for your life at the point of my sword. Then, you may use my name, for it will be the last word you ever speak. — Diana Gabaldon

Everyone was getting married or falling in love. I was happy for them. Happy, happy, happy. I pasted a smile on my face and went to Piggly Wiggly. — Charlaine Harris

It even reached a point of such confusion that men and women were imprisoned in the same cells and used the latrine bucket in each other's presence - who cared about those niceties? Give up your gold, vipers! The interrogators did not write up charge sheets because no one needed their papers. And whether or not a sentence would be pasted on was of very little interest. Only one thing was important: Give up your gold, viper! The state needs gold and you don't. The interrogators had neither voice nor strength left to threaten and torture; they had one universal method: feed the prisoners nothing but salty food and give them no water. Whoever coughed up gold got water! One gold piece for a cup of fresh water!
People perish for cold metal. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Fane and Jacque looked up from the table when they heard Sally's singing all through the cafeteria. She was belting out at the top of her lungs Train's "Meet Virginia". A very pissed off looking Jen was dragging her IV pole as quickly as she could without falling, trying to catch up to her quarry. By the time Sally had reached the table, she had tears "streaming down her face from laughing so hard. She leaned over the table, panting, finishing her serenade. "Her confidence is tragic, but her intuition magic, and the shape of her body, unusual, meet Virginia!" Sally ended dramatically, arms in the air like Vanna White indicating where Jen now stood. Much to Jen's chagrin the entire cafeteria broke into applause.
Jen pasted on her most dazzling smile and waved at everyone adoringly, but to Sally she muttered under her breath, "This is war. — Quinn Loftis

The nation was cracking under the weight of bloated modernity and all the patches pasted onto its excessive and malfunctioning hypercomplexity, and people were bewildered by the strange glitches, failures and shortages. Going forward, nothing would really work anymore as it was designed to, yet the hope and expectation that it would all magically recover dominated the chatter in the rare moments when people could step back from their frantic lives and share a meal or a drink. — James Howard Kunstler

I had used all except peach labels. I pasted the peach labels on peach cans, and then came to apricots. Well, aren't apricots peaches? And there are plums that are virtually apricots. I went on, either mischievously, or scientifically, pasting the peach labels on cans of plums, cherries, string beans, and succotash. I can't quite define my motive, because to this day it has not been decided whether I am a humourist or a scientist. I think that it was mischief, but, as we go along, there will come a more respectful recognition that also it was scientific procedure. — Charles Fort

East Hampton happens to have been the first place in the world where I was a star, a real star with a star pasted above my name on the dressing-room door. — Eva Gabor

Think about it. The industry generates billions of dollars of profit and revenue each year. They do so by selling answers. But if they had the answers, then these so-called answers would just be copied and pasted and handed out, and the industry itself would crumble. — Scott Abel

Marshall Shafter ... kept pasted in his desk drawer a piece of paper he looked at from time to time to remind himself of something. It said, A fool can put on his own clothes better than wise man can do it for him. — Jane Jacobs

left my box of cubicle gear in the trunk, stashed like a dead body. I pasted on a smile and walked into the house. My mother was just hanging up the phone and looked exultant. "Guess what?" she said. — Sandra Byrd

In 1915 Sophie Tauber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper (without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting). These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous. — Hans Arp

Myrtle


How funny your name would be
if you could follow it back to where
the first person thought of saying it,
naming himself that, or maybe
some other persons thought of it
and named that person. It would
be like following a river to its source,
which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.
They just automatically appear at a place
where they get wider, and soon a real
river comes along, with fish and debris,
regal as you please, and someone
has already given it a name: St. Benno
(saints are popular for this purpose) or, or
some other name, the name of his
long-lost girlfriend, who comes
at long last to impersonate that river,
on a stage, her voice clanking
like its bed, her clothing of sand
and pasted paper, a piece of real technology,
while all along she is thinking, I can
do what I want to do. But I want to stay here. — John Ashbery

Then one day I read an article that lifted me out of my despondence and gave me the courage to go on living. I shall never cease to be grateful for one inspiring sentence in that article. It said: 'Every day is a new life to a wise man.' I typed that sentence out and pasted it on the windshield of my car, where I saw it every minute I was driving. I found it wasn't so hard to live only one day at a time. I learned to forget the yesterdays and to not think of the tomorrows. Each morning I said to myself, 'Today is a new life. — Dale Carnegie

Where did you go?"
"Down below."
"Ugh," she said. "I've heard they're little better than animals."
Funny. I thought the same thing about most Topsiders I encountered. Tegan touched my hand in silent sympathy, and I set my jaw.
...
I stepped forward and pasted on a false smile. We were in her home, after all. The least I could do was be polite. "I'm Deuce, animal from the underground. — Ann Aguirre

Bubble-gum angels swooped from top margins, or scraped their wings between teeming paragraphs. Maidens with golden hair dripped sea-blue tears into the books spine. Grape-colored whales spouted blood around a newspaper item (pasted in) listing arrivals to the endangered species list. Six hatchlings cried from shattered shells near an entry made on Easter. Cecilia had filled the pages with a profusion of colors and curlicues, Candyland ladders and striped shamrocks. — Jeffrey Eugenides

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time. — Ezra Pound

Nelson-Rees had since been hired by the National Cancer Institute to help stop the contamination problem. He would become known as a vigilante who published "HeLa Hit Lists" in Science, listing any contaminated lines he found, along with the names of researchers who'd given him the cells. He didn't warn researchers when he found that their cells had been contaminated with HeLa; he just published their names, the equivalent of having a scarlet H pasted on your lab door. — Rebecca Skloot

For as long as I could remember, the person in E23 pasted the same Halloween decoration, a witch with a giant wart on her crone's nose, but whenever kids rang, the tenant wouldn't answer. At first, kids figured they'd just missed the guy: bad timing. But it seemed impossible that all of us missed him every year. — Victor LaValle

Here's another analogy. Human beings bring only a handful of facial features to the blueprint of how we look - two eyes, two eyebrows, a nose, a mouth, a pair of cheekbones, and two ears, all pasted onto a somewhat ovular-to-round face. That particular blueprint doesn't often vary much, either. Interestingly enough, this is about the same number of essential storytelling parts and milestones that each and every story needs to showcase in order to be successful. Now, consider this: With only these eleven variables to work with, ask yourself how often you see two people who look exactly alike. In a crowd of ten thousand faces, you would be able to differentiate each and every one of them, other than a set of twins or two in attendance. Where we humans are concerned, the miracle of originality resides in the Creator, who applies an engineering-driven process - eleven variables - to an artistic outcome. Where art is concerned, there is something to be learned from that. — Larry Brooks

Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it's also one on temporality too. Statistics - even when accurate - are only an image of the past that can then be Photoshopped before being pasted on to the future. — Will Self

The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer. — Stephen Crane

There's a huge seal called 'impossibility' pasted all over this world. And don't ever forget that we're the only ones who can tear it off once and for all. — Yukio Mishima

He might also be frowning, but it's hard to tell considering someone shaved off all of Hugh Jackman's body hair and pasted it on Tuck's face. — Elle Kennedy

Taking into consideration all your loveliness
why can't you burn your bootsoles and your
draft card? How can you sit there saying yes
to war? You'll be a pauper when you die, sore
boy. Dead, while I still live at our addresss.
Oh my brother, why do you keep making plans
when I am at seizures of hearts and hands?
Come dance the dance, the Papa-Mama dance;
bring costumes from the suitcase pasted Ille de France,
the S.S. Gripsholm. Papa's London Harness case
he took abroad and kept i our attic laced
with old leather straps for storage and his
scholar's robes, black licorice - that metamorphosis
with it's crimson blood.
The Papa and Mama Dance — Anne Sexton

But Sir, he works with NT? Why would he tell us where to go? Aren't we the competition?' Satya asked.
Nagesh shook his head gravely. 'Actually the competition starts at the headquarters and is between the people who come on TV, and want to make sure their face is noticed by the rival channel, so that they get picked up for a higher salary. Between us camerapersons, there is no rivalry. We don't do piece to cameras, we don't come on TV. We do all the jostling to get you the best visuals to show on the channel. We just want to get the news to the viewers, no matter which logo is pasted on it. — Shweta Ganesh Kumar

Liz pasted on a smile, trying to appear normal in light of the fact that he had possibly incriminating knowledge on her from the background check. She hoped her application for a marriage license with Craig wasn't in the report. Or her long shopping record for organization systems from The Container Store. Or her many Internet searches for breeds of nonshedding dogs (she was waiting for the house with a yard before getting one). Or her long-time obsession with new cleaning products. — Kylie Gilmore

Zurich in 1915, ... While the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our soul. We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the madness of these times. — Hans Arp

The first generation of biotech physically cut and pasted from one organism to another. You learned that taxol helped cure cancer, then you found the source organism and extracted the genes to make your drug. Now physical science is becoming information science. — Steve Jurvetson

You're quiet this evening," he said.
I pasted on a pleasant smile. "It's been a long week. I'm just trying to relax." And I was trying to avoid more drama. He was quiet for two or three minutes, during which the two of us stood there together, black-clad vampires moving around us. "I can tell something's bothering - "
We had sex and you bailed, I silently thought, and now your contrition is driving me crazy. "I was just enjoying the music. — Chloe Neill

A lot of people mistake the persona that I create in poetry and fiction with me. A lot of people claim to know me who don't really know me. They know the work, or they know the persona in the work, and they confuse that with me, the writer. They don't realize that the persona is also a creation and a fabrication, a composite of my friends and myself all pasted together. — Sandra Cisneros

Software is usually accompanied by documentation in the form of big fat scary manuals that nobody ever reads. In fact, for the past five years most of the manuals shipped with software products have actually been copies of Stephen King's The Stand with new covers pasted on. — Dave Barry

Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over. — Lionel Shriver

We attempted perfection; we wanted an object to be without flaw, so we cut the papers with a razor, pasted them down meticulously, but it buckled and was ruined ... that is why we decided to tear prewrinkled paper, so that in the finished work of art imperfection would be an integral part, as if at birth death were built in. — Hans Arp

Pauline kept a scrapbook into which she pasted important articles that she had cut out of the newspapers. These were about the courageous deeds that had been done by people even if they only had one leg or couldn't see or had been dropped on their heads when they were babies.
'It's to make me brave,' she'd explained to Annika. — Eva Ibbotson

When I awoke it was daylight. The inside of my tent was coated in a curious flaky rime, which I realized after a moment was all of my nighttime snores, condensed and frozen and pasted to the fabric, as if into a scrapbook of respiratory memories. — Bill Bryson

And treating poetry as a performing art emphasizes its ephemerality. A printed poem can be endlessly reprinted, photocopied, scanned, uploaded, cut and pasted - but a performance, even if somebody's there with a video camera, is one time only: the audience experiences something that won't exist when the performance is over, and which won't ever be reproduced in exactly the same form. I find that appealing. — James Arthur

In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my studio at the south end of the town at five o'clock one May morning, we had no idea of the immense possibilities, or of the thorny but successful career, that awaited the new invention. On a piece of cardboard we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student song books and dog food, labels from schnaps and wine bottles, and photographs from picture papers, cut up at will in such a way as to say, in pictures, what would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words. — George Grosz

When I was a child, my grandmother used to mix a paste for me of flour and water. Then I would go out into the yard and pick grass and make drawings out of pencil and grass pasted to the paper. — Norma Cole

One day they came and knocked the cornices from the watch repair and pasted campaign posters on the windows. Torn across, by now, by boys, they urge you still to vote for half an orange beblazoned man who as a whole one failed two years ago to win at his election. Everywhere, in this manner, the past speaks, and it mostly speaks of failure. — William H Gass

The woman in whose body I had grown, in whose house I'd been raised was, in some vital ways, a stranger to me. I'd gone thirty years without ascribing her any more dimension than the paper dollies I'd played with as a girl with the pasted on smiles and the folding tab dresses. — Kate Morton

Ginger used her trusty pink scissors to cut out the headline Is Your Vagina Angry? from a newly purchased women's magazine, spread glue on the back, and pasted it over the picture of a nun looking thoughtful. She had a sick sense of humor. So sue her. She stepped back and admired the decoupage nightstand she'd been working on all day. Get Thee to a Nunnery, she'd named this particular one. After a few finishing touches, it would be ready for a coat of lacquer. — Tessa Bailey

I have never liked the phone. Ten years ago, during a misguided fit of self-improvement, I pasted smiley-faced stickers on the phone in my bedroom and on the one in the kitchen. Then I typed out two labels and taped them to the handsets. "It's an opportunity, not an attack," they read. — Alice Sebold

When I was in middle school, some of my so-called friends found a catalogue ad I did for Superman pajamas. They made as many copies as they could and pasted them up all over school. — Jensen Ackles

It is myself I have never met whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind — Sarah Kane

Mama's eyes were like pale blue cutouts, pasted to her face. — Markus Zusak

Here on the head of an empty barrel stood on end were an ink-bottle, some old stumps of pens, and some dirty playbills; and against the wall were pasted several large printed alphabets in several plain hands. "What are you doing here?" asked my guardian. "Trying to learn myself to read and write," said Krook. — Charles Dickens

I closed my eyes, grief spilling up through me. You'd think that after all these years of hurting, of saying goodbye to her over and over in my head, that this moment would be easier. Yet it wasn't. Because for a few brief weeks, I'd thought I'd be able to have my little sister back. That I could heal up some of the gaping wounds in my soul I'd pasted over with brash words and a hard exterior. — Shannon Mayer

Need 'nether whiskey. Whiskey chaser. Gotta get two men drunk.'
Mr. Cohan placed both hands on the bar. 'Mr. Walsh,' he said severely, 'in Gavagan's we will serve a man a drink to wet his whistle, or even because his old woman has pasted him with a dornick, but a drink to get drunk with I do not sell. Now I'm telling you you've had enough for tonight, and in the morning you'll be thanking me ... ' ("My Brother's Keeper") — Fletcher Pratt

Dying is all about letting go and letting be, as is the awareness of God. People who have traveled far along the contemplative path are often aware that the sense of separation from God is itself pasted up out of a mass of thoughts and feelings. When the mind comes into its own stillness and enters the silent land, the sense of separation goes. Union is seen to be the fundamental reality and separateness a highly filtered mental perception. — Martin Laird

There are moments in my life that stick to my memory. I suppose it's the same for everyone - snippets of life pasted in a scrapbook for you to look over every once in a while. You look back sometimes and relive an event, a smell or a sight. You catalog these things in your head and never really look at the whole. I think you miss something grand when you don't step back and examine everything together. — Benjamin X. Wretlind

Thierry." He kept using that placating tone. "I don't plan on going anywhere." "Good." I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans, then pasted on the syrupy-sweet smile I usually reserved for con jobs on Mom. "Then you won't mind me not going anywhere with you." "Stubborn." Eyes flickering to white, he lowered his head, parted his lips. "You're going to try to kiss me with that mouth? After what you just said?" I jabbed the unlock icon on the key fob dangling from his fingers then shoved him back. "Dream on, Shaw. — Hailey Edwards

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. — Mary McCarthy

Tehran looked the way most of its remaining citizens must have felt: sad, forlorn, and defenseless, yet not without a certain dignity. The adhesive tape pasted on the window-panes to prevent the implosion of shattered glass told the story of its suffering, a suffering made more poignant because of its newly recovered beauty, the fresh green of trees, washed by spring showers, the blossoms and the rising snowcapped mountains now so near, as if pasted across the sky. — Azar Nafisi

I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that I would change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would; that it was not necessary for me to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead. — James Weldon Johnson

Even in broad daylight, he was so sallow, he looked like a black-and-white picture pasted into a Kodachrome world. At night, he was barely even visible. — C.D. Reiss

I wish I'd paid better attention. I didn't yet think of time as finite. I didn't fully appreciate the stories she told me until I became adult, and by then I had to make do with snippets pasted together, a film projected on the back of my mind. — Jessica Maria Tuccelli