Trivia Old Quotes & Sayings

Joe Sewell is the toughest strikeout in baseball history. In 14 seasons he struck out only 114 times - he never struck out three times in a game, and he struck out twice in a game on only two occasions. So how is it possible that a 30-year-old pitcher who won eight games and recorded 54 strikeouts - in his career - fanned Sewell twice in one game? I don't know, but he did, in 1923. — Tucker Elliot

On any given day, something claims our attention. Anything at all, inconsequential things. A rosebud, a misplaced hat, that sweater we liked as a child, an old Gene Pitney record. A parade of trivia with no place to go. Things that bump around in our consciousness for two or three days then go back to wherever they came from ... to darkness. We've got all these wells dug in our hearts. While above the wells, birds flit back and forth. — Haruki Murakami

I can hear the change in Kaz's breathing when he looks at you."
"You... you can?"
"It catches every time, like he's never seen you before. — Leigh Bardugo

The Indians franchise is more than a century old. It's been called the Blues, the Bronchos, and the Naps. It's also been called a lot worse during hard times when the team wasn't winning. — Tucker Elliot

I remember my first commercial. This is really great 'Degrassi' trivia: The character Toby on 'Degrassi,' played by Jake Goldsbie, he and I were in both of our first commercial ever when we were four. It was for Tiger Toys, this old Game Boy-type thing. Both of our lines were, 'Mommy, I can do it!' — Charlotte Arnold

When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you. — Rebecca West

On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing: a rosebud, a lost cap, a favorite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to call their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them."
-from "Pinball, 1973 — Haruki Murakami

The term SAT is a set of initials, or autonym, standing for Scholastic Attitude Treaty Organization. — Dave Barry

His frown was less dark and more confused."What's new for you? Dancing?"
And so much more, but all I said was, "Yes."
"And you let some strange college boy grind all over you for your first time? That's stupid, Ali."
NOT GOING TO BE EMBARRASSED, NOT GOING TO BE EMBARRASSED."First, he wasn't grinding on me, and second, you're no better than him."
A solid minute of silence, then "You are terrible for my ego, you know that?"
I could say the same to him. — Gena Showalter

The Danes had a great love of sea stories and the old sagas. Snorri provided the former from personal experience and Kara the latter from her vast store of such trivia. I half-thought some of the duke's men would volunteer to join the Undoreth and travel with the Vikings such was the level of worship on display ... — Mark Lawrence

Alex was a historian by education, a translator of centuries-old scripts by training, and a savant when it came to inane trivia, which she tended to offer up without encouragement and much to the annoyance of everyone around her. Three months ago, Bran, LT, Mason, and the other three guys from their SEAL Team - now the owners of the Deep Six Salvage Company - had hired her to translate the historical documents housed in the Spanish Archives that pertained to the hurricane of 1624. They'd hoped she could give them a leg up on their hunt for the Santa Cristina. — Julie Ann Walker

I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me. — Marguerite Duras

Trivia, as I've said before, shouldn't really be called "trivia." Facts about history, geography, books, movies, music - this is the stuff that used to be called good old-fashioned "general knowledge," the stuff that everybody was supposed to remember from school, regardless of their career niche. We lost something the more we specialized - it started to drain away this vast pool of information that everybody knew. Knowledge was what connected us, and now it distinguishes us. — Ken Jennings

You know who they wanted to play Rick?" Aaron asked.
I shook my head. Why was I so tense? Didn't Aaron's question prove that we were just a couple of old-movie fans swapping Hollywood trivia gossip?
"Ronald Reagan," said Aaron.
"The worst president ever," I said.
"You weren't born yet," he said.
"What difference does that make?" I said. — Francine Prose

Well,' Rydell said, trying to pick up his end, 'I was watching this one old movie last night-'
Sublett perked up. 'Which one?'
Dunno,' Rydell said. 'This guy's in L.A. and he's just met this girl. Then he picks up a pay phone, 'cause it's ringing. Late at night. It's some guy in a missile silo somewhere who knows they've just launched theirs at the Russians. He's trying to phone his dad, or his brother, or something. Says the world's gonna end in short order. Then the guy who answered the phone hears these soldiers come in and shoot the guy. The guy on the phone, I mean.'
Suhlett closed his eyes, scanning his inner trivia-banks. 'Yeah? How's it end?'
Dunno,' Rydell said. 'I went to sleep. — William Gibson

It was like the baseball gods were showing off just for him, in honor of his first day of big league baseball. And surely the baseball gods were smiling that day, because the next batter was Larry Brown, and he was a scrawny, scrappy 23-year-old kid who'd never hit a big league home run. And yet he stepped to the plate and became just the second player in baseball history to connect and give his team four consecutive home runs. — Tucker Elliot

Set foot in his classroom, and you'll see that he hasn't quite given up on these dreams. True to his compulsive nature and eclectic taste, he punctuates his courses with entertaining routines to keep his students engaged, playing four songs at the start of each class and tossing candy bars to the first students who shout out the correct answers to music trivia. This is how a poster of a rapper ended up on his wall. "If you want to engage your audience, if you really want to grab their attention, you have to know the world they live in, the music they listen to, the movies they watch," he explains. "To most of these kids, accounting is like a root canal. But when they hear me quote Usher or Cee Lo Green, they say to themselves, 'Whoa, did that fat old white-haired guy just say what I thought he said?' And then you've got 'em. — Adam M. Grant

As it enters the twenty-first century, the United States is not fundamentally a weak economy, or a decadent society. But it has developed a highly dysfunctional politics. An antiquated and overly rigid political system to begin with - about 225 years old - has been captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist media, and ideological attack groups. The result is ceaseless, virulent debate about trivia - politics as theater - and very little substance, compromise, and action. A "can-do" country is now saddled with a "do-nothing" political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving. By every measure - the growth of special interests, lobbies, pork-barrel spending - the political process has become far more partisan and ineffective over the last three decades. — Fareed Zakaria

The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow — Robert M. Pirsig

It was an excess of fantasy that killed the old United States, the whole Mickey Mouse and Marilyn thing, the most brilliant technologies devoted to trivia like instant cameras and space spectaculars that should have stayed in the pages of Science Fiction ... some of the last Presidents of the U.S.A. seemed to have been recruited straight from Disneyland. — J.G. Ballard

The process of truly learning is laborious, monotonous, and at times down right bitter and boring. Therefore, obtaining a truly higher education will require of you a determined mind and a will to stick and stay. In short, it will take discipline. But in the end, it will be worth it all. — Daniel Whyte III

Was I insane? Maybe. But then, there are many different kinds of insanity. Aunt Rose had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. Some have more, some have less, but only truly abnormal people have none at all. — Anne Fortier

Life is for participating, not for spectating. — Kathrine Switzer