Spangled Old Quotes & Sayings

One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you'd opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are "pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours." Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along. — Anne Fadiman

One of my earliest memories ... I knew three full verses of the Star Spangled Banner when I was seven or eight years old. And one of the nuns discovered this phenomenon and I was actually sent around from classroom to classroom to do the whole thing. — Dave Van Ronk

We're back up and commencing burn in thirty seconds unless someone says otherwise. Everybody get ready to weigh something. — James S.A. Corey

I think if you meet the right person in life and you fall in love, that is a miracle. My husband saw me on the subway. That is a miracle! — Eva Marie Saint

When you give feedback, make sure to give some examples. You listen well: I know that because you ask questions, nod your head, maintain eye contact, and so on. — Assegid Habtewold

I have to keep things vague, jumble up all the men, the lovers and the exes, but I tell myself that's OK, because it doesn't matter who they are. It matters how they make me feel. — Paula Hawkins

My life for your life.' That means while we live, we share the joy of living with each other. 'My death for your life.' I would be willing to lay down my life to save yours. 'My life for your death.' I will spend my life avenging your death, if I can't prevent it. 'My death for your death.' A part of me will die when you do. — Tracy Hickman

[...] I'd wake up in the middle of the night to the Star-Spangled Banner and some old film of a flag blowing in the wind, telling you the day was over and it was long past time to go to bed. That was back when days used to end, before CNN and infomercials, before all our days bled right into each other. — Michael Montoure

It's not uncommon for the Old Soul to experience some measure of depression, apathy or existential lethargy when it comes to living everyday life. After all, if physical existence loses its star-spangled gleam, and everyday affairs lose their burning importance, what is the point of living a dull life? — Aletheia Luna

The Red Sox are a curious thing because so much here is media driven. You can't go fire half your scouts here because they are all friends with the local reporters. Your life is going to hell in the papers. — Michael Lewis