Quote of the Week

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Quote of the Week

A really terrific guy comes along and says, "I wish you’d stay home and be my wife," and that’s the most logical thing in the world for a Latin. And I loved being a Latin wife -- you get treated very well. There’s a lot of attention in return for that sacrifice.
--Esther Williams

Quote of the Week

Writing is not something you go to school to learn, it's something you drop out of school to do.
--Ray Garton

Quote of the Week

How should an aging, black jock like myself know anything about pop culture? Man, I am a living part of pop culture and have been for nearly 50 years. Beyond that, I think pop culture expresses our needs, fears, hopes and whole zeitgeist better than some of the more esoteric and obscure forms of art.
--Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, "Coming Out of the Locker Room Ghetto", The Huffington Post, February 4, 2013

Quote of the Week

George Jones' voice was a rowdy Saturday night uproar at a back-street beer joint, the heartbroken wail of the one who wakes up to find the other side of the bed empty, the far-off lonesome whistle of the midnight train, the look in the eyes of a young bride as that ring is placed on her finger, the memories of a half-asleep old man dreaming about the good old days. Lost love, lost innocence, good and bad memories, and experiences that are just too much for a human being to deal with. He sang for us all, the non-stop partiers, the guys who are alone and the girl done wrong, the puppy lovers, the extrovert, the introvert and the guy at the end of the bar who never seems to go home... George had a song for everybody.
--Charlie Daniels, from his eulogy about the late George Jones (natch)

Quote of the Week

When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.
--Flannery O'Connor

Quote of the Week

Motherfuckers will read a book that’s 1/3rd elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they (white people) think we’re taking over.
--Junot Díaz

Quote of the Week

I can't remember a time I didn't know who I was; and I have heard much testimony from my friends and other more detached persons to the effect that I thought too highly of what I thought I was.

It seemed to me unlikely that out of six or seven million Mexicans in the United States I was the only one who felt this way.
--Ernesto Galarza, preface to Barrio Boy

Quote of the Week

Strong people do not go around apologizing for their roots.
--Manuel C. Gonzales, Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in The United States

Quote of the Week

I've got to be honest. I met President Obama and he was a nice fellow, but I'm not going to vote for him, and I'm not going to vote for Romney. So, that leaves me without many options. I don't see much that I like in either of them. It's a tough world and I don't think either of them is capable of representing this country right now.
--Merle Haggard, The Dallas Observer, June 28, 2012

Quote of the Week

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quote of the Week

My cousin, who divides her profession and her marriage between Houston and Dallas, told me her yuppie friend’s little girl spied an equally yuppie black woman strolling her own daughter down the sidewalk and the delighted little white girl said, “Look mommy, a baby maid!”
--Debbie Nathan, “Lives of the Maids,” The Texas Observer, March 11, 1988, vol. 80, no. 5

My comment:

Needless to say, neither Ms. Nathan nor I endorse the mentality illustrated in this quote though I find it all too believable. Worse yet, I suspect that the only thing that has changed since that quote was first written is that today the little white girl would point to a Mexican woman's daughter before saying the same thing. I pray I'm wrong but still...

Quote of the Week

Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.
--Stephen King, On Writing

Quote of the Week

The message is very clear: when Mexican Americans and blacks are allowed or permitted in Hollywood and other media, they are present mainly to do the bidding of the ruling whites. When Mexican and African American characters are not around, it is because the whites can do without them, which occurs during most of the movie. Some readers may take offense at my bald interpretation of Hollywood’s celluloid reality, but, unfortunately, that is the reality that every person who sees this film, young or old, is invited to absorb.
--Marco Portales, Latino Sun, Rising: Our Spanish-Speaking U.S. World, about the 1956 movie Giant

Quote of the Week

The United States is often called a Puritan nation. Well, here is one way in which it emphatically is not: Puritan lives were overwhelmingly, fanatically literary. Their single-minded obsession with one book, the Bible, made words the center of their lives -- not land, not money, not power, not fun. I swear on Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston’s communitarian English majors.
--Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

Quote of the Week

And when I look back on those hundreds and hundreds of hours that I spent watching movies -- many of which were not that memorable, and many of which did not tell a whole lot that I didn’t know -- when I realized that they were hours that are gone now and I’m not getting them back... it makes me mad. It makes me mad, honestly, that I’m not gonna get those hours back. You know those are hours I could have been spending with my family, with my loved ones.
--Matt Zoller Seitz, The House Next Door, April 2008

Quote of the Week

Because I don't take my clothes off, and I'm nobody's girlfriend. The writers are new to the whole tough girl thing, and they don't know what to do with [me]. We've got the dude who's strong, so what do we do with the chick who's strong? We kill her. Eventually they'll get used to it, and maybe Salt will change a thing or two.
--Michelle Rodriguez, in response to a question about why she's always getting killed off in her screen roles

Quote of the Week

Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.
--Stephen King, On Writing

Quote of the Week

There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.
--Torvald Helmer in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

Quote of the Week

I am obviously not arguing that discrimination against the Irish or the Italians or the Poles is or was anything like that which our black brothers have had to endure, but I am suggesting that bigotry is by no means a lower-class phenomenon and that compassion among the elites is by no means universal. And yet, an attitude of compassion towards one group mixed with bigotry towards another group is, in the final analysis, intolerable -- intolerable on moral grounds because it is hypocritical and intolerable on political grounds because it is self-defeating. The intellectual who “loves” the blacks and the “poor” but has contempt for the Irish or the Italians or the “middle class” is in the final analysis every bit as much a bigot as the blue-collar worker who “hates niggers,” for both are asking, “Why Can’t They Be Like Us?” And to this titular question in this book there can be but one satisfactory answer: “Because they don’t want to be and in the United States of America, they don’t have to be.”
--Andrew M. Greeley, Why Can’t They Be Like Us?: America’s White Ethnic Groups