#am

These days there are a lot of people who just want to be famous. I think that comes from a naive place, because those people generally don't know what it's like. ↗

— Catherine Keener

#comes #days #famous #generally #i

The scramble to get into college is going to be so terrible in the next few years that students are going to put up with almost anything, even an education. ↗

— Barnaby C. Keeney

#anything #college #education #even #few

My whole damn family was nice. I don't think I've imagined it. It's true. Maybe it has to do with being brought up as Christian Scientists. Half of my relatives were Readers or Practitioners in the church. ↗

— Henry Fonda

#being #brought #christian #church #damn

I am a living illustration of Bosnian mixing and converting. My grandparents lived in eastern Herzegovina. Very poor. The Turks came and brought Islam. There were three brothers in the family. One was Orthodox Christian. The other two took Islam to survive. ↗

— Emir Kusturica

#bosnian #brothers #brought #came #christian

I've wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, though it seemed an unlikely outcome since I showed no real talent. But I persevered and eventually found my own row to hoe. Ignorance of other writers' work keeps me from discouragement and I am less well-read than the average bus driver. ↗

— Garrison Keillor

#average #boy #bus #bus driver #discouragement

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#ancient-greeks #atheism #boredom #brotherhood #cana

Man is by nature competitive, combative, ambitious, jealous, envious, and vengeful. ↗

— Arthur Keith

#combative #competitive #envious #jealous #man

I am a rank individualist. ↗

— Arthur Keith

#i #i am #individualist #rank

Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged. ↗

— Helen Keller

#appears #compare #comparing #fellow #fellow men

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. ↗

— Helen Keller

#awkwardness #barrier #book #discourses #disenfranchised