People From Indiana

"If you live very long time or are immortal, perhaps you learn everything about everything in order to pass the time."

"Sometimes you are arrogant, thinking you are better than others. More often you are humble. Too humble. I might even say, sickeningly humble. That is another form of arrogance. True humility is knowing your true place in the cosmic scale."

"Monasticism, retreat from the world, reclusivism, that’s a lot of crap."

"Sometimes I regret we are forbidden any violence whatsoever. Right now, I would like to kick you in the ass."

"By now you must have accepted the fact that your religion, in fact, none of the Earthly religions, truly knew what the afterlife would be. All made guesses, and then established these as articles of faith. Though, in a sense, some were near the mark, if you accept their revelations as symbolic."

"Now, this is what the visitor said the Ethicals had learned from the Ancients. The Creator, God, the One Spirit, call it what you will, forms all. It is the universe; the universe is it. But its body is formed of two essences. One is matter, the other, for lack of a better word, is nonmatter."

"Let's give this entity which you call soul another name. Soul has too many incorrect meanings for humans, too many verbal reverberations, too many contrary definitions."

"Clemens was afraid that he’d lose his temper and cuss out King John as no one else in the universe had ever been cussed out before."

"And how in God’s name did Santiago find out about the laser? Even Queen Victoria’s sex life wasn’t a better secret."

"By the Providence that did not exist, events had worked out perfectly."

"You should have waited to find out the true situation, madame. But then…scarcely anyone ever does."

"“Okay,” she said, “I’ll listen to the wise. Are you wise?” “Wise enough,” he said, “and mighty experienced, which is the same thing if you’re not too stupid.”"

"Burton sighed. She was, on the whole, sane. But she was also a religious fanatic who managed to ignore the facts of life and also the contradictory elements in her faith."

"“Perhaps God—if there is one—doesn’t care,” Burton said. “There is no evidence whatsoever that He does.”"

"If the Creator has a plan for us, why doesn’t He tell us what it is? Are we so stupid that we can’t understand it? He should tell it to us directly! The books that the prophets, the revelators, and the revisionists wrote, claiming to have authority from God Himself, to have taken His dictations, these so-called revelations are false! They make no sense! Besides, they contradict each other! Does God make contradictory statements?"

"How strange and unforeseeable! The world had been saved, not by great rulers and statesmen, not by mystics and saints and prophets and messiahs, not by any of the holy scriptures, but by an introverted eccentric writer of mathematical texts and children's books and by the child who'd inspired him. The little girl become a woman, dream-ridden Alice, had inspired the nonsense not really nonsense, and this in circuitous and spiraling fashion had inspired her to do what all others had failed to do, to save eighteen billion souls and the world."

"The truth is that you can be immortal, relatively so, anyway. You won't last beyond the death of the universe and probably not nearly as long as the universe does. But you have the potentiality for living a million years, two, perhaps three or more. As long as you can find a Terrestrial-type planet with a hot core and have resurrection machinery available. Unfortunately, not all can be permitted to possess immortality. Too many would make immortality miserable or hellish for the rest, and they would try to control others through their control of the resurrection machinery. Even so, everybody, without exception, is given a hundred years after his Earthly death to prove that he or she can live peacefully and in harmony with himself and the others, within the tolerable limits of human imperfections. Those who can do this will be immortal after the two projects are completed."

"Excellent science fiction writer; in fact, a far more skillful writer than I am."

"One of the most original, one of the most talented, and certainly one of the most fearless writers around."

"Farmer's greatest achievement, accomplished with brilliant understatement, is to make us gradually realize that our own situation here on Earth is just as mysterious as anything on Riverworld, or that the answer to the enigmas of Riverworld might also be the explanation of the paradoxes of our own peculiar existence here and now. Once again, in a brilliant climax, Farmer demonstrates my pet theory that sf is the only serious literature around these days, because it is the only literature that grapples with the ultimate questions of who or what we are and how we got here."

"...So I wasn't death to this guy, I was just a one-way ticket home. Now I don't know if you've ever stuck a .38 in somebody's navel, but if they look at you and say "Praise the Lord," I guarantee you one thing, it'll separate your head from your shoulders!"

"Don't ever get between a pregnant woman and the bathroom door; it don't matter if the sister's saved, she'll hurt you in Jesus' name! She'll be saying I pray for you in a minute."

"Pregnant women got someone else in there hangin' from their ribcage goin' "We got to go now.""

"Christians don't gossip, they "share"; and when they really get mean, they "share in love". If a Christian comes up to you and says, "I'm going to share this with you in love", watch out."

"Now, after the concert, y'all are going to want to pig out. But you don't want to say you're going to go pig out. So one of you is come up to the other and say, "How about a little fellowship?""

"Christians have their own language."

"....People think that when you get saved, you're crazy. Did you ever wonder why? What would you think if you were standing beside the road and you saw the local Baptist church go by in pieces? Would you think they had all their marbles, huh? Would you think they had both oars in the water, huh? Huh? Wouldn't you think that maybe their porchlight was out?"

"Maybe you don't like some of the things I've said tonight, that's ok. Maybe you don't like me. I could care less. Especially you Christians, you don't gotta like me, you gotta love me. See, I'm a member of your family. And you can pick your friends, but you're stuck with your relatives!"

"Someone says, "Don't you think that Jesus is a crutch?" Well, maybe he is, but when you're crippled, that's not too bad. Some one else say, "Don't you think you're rather closed-minded?" I say, "Yeah, but I can afford to be, I'm right.""

"And silence ... is loud! And I'd be straining real hard to hear what those two boys were saying. And finally, just when they figured I had my ear right against the window, one of those ol' boys would turn to the other and say "Did you know that Jesus died for your sins?" And the other one would say "Why no, tell me about it!""

"I've never played so bad and still won."

"We've got a quarterback who comes in off the bench and leads us to a victory, and they boo [Rex Grossman] right out of the gate," Poor guy. Lucky for him he's resilient and he came back and led us to two scoring drives. But man, it's tough."

"Besides him and Cedric [Benson], I don’t think there’s been two people criticized more probably in the NFL"

"When the storm came, he stepped up. You’re going to go through storms; you can’t get away from them. It’s how you handle them, and what our team got a chance to see is how our leader handled the storm. He handled it well and steadied the ship."

"Rex is our quarterback... He's not as accurate as he needs to be and he turned the ball over, but we've won with him. There's a difference between perception and reality, and the reality is, we're 10-2 with Rex. When we win the division title, I'm not going to tell you about all the things we're going to do to change what we have going right now. Because there's not a lot"

"I love the organization. They drafted me. A lot of bad things have happened to me since I’ve been here with injuries and things, but the 2006 season was a special one. We almost completed the ultimate goal. I want to finish that. I want to finish what I started and I want to be a Bear for the rest of my life."

"It's frustrating when some of you guys don't put too much thought into it and you're just trying to go off the fans' reaction or you don't know much about what we're doing on offense. Just realizing how ignorant some of you guys are -- and I don't mean that necessarily in a bad way. I mean, like just understanding that you may not be correct and accepting that fact and not paying attention to it much."

"Shit Happens..."

"Our open fields on the mountaintop are fully exposed to the sky, clouds, and wind without mediation… The fields are quiet to the world but amplify the force of one's thoughts and feelings.. .My father put his sculptures in our fields so that he could look at each work in relation to the natural world of the mountains and sky and also to its fellow sculptures. Again and again, he referred to his 'work stream'; each work of art being as a vessel filled from the stream while never wholly separate."

"My father acted at all times and in all aspects of his life from his identity as an artist. He had no other. He cooked with the extravagant generosity and adventurousness of an artist. He parented as an artist -- his children should not wear 'pretty' colors, but rather 'gutsy' colors.. .While he could be generous, spontaneous, playful and hospitable, the sense of 'I am' was all about 'I am an artist.' There was little room to identify himself in terms of other people. And so he felt lonesome."

"I believe that gazing out at his fields, as he so often did, he found a kind of peace in the balance of the sculptures, which were like so many aspects of his identity. Physically manifested and set together to form their own dialogue -- ultimately aesthetic -- the sculptures in the fields brought a kind of musical order to the dissonance of his inner flow of feelings. He always said that for him, art was easier to do than life."

"In the years I knew my father, we used the fields around our house fully and constantly …In summer, we often ate breakfast in our pajamas on the terrace looking out on the possibilities of the day. My father encouraged my sister and me to run among the sculptures, to climb, to put our bodies into the elements of the sculptures, to bang out tuneless rhythms and hear the difference between the sound of flat and volumetric elements. It was a playground for the unconscious."

"According to my mother, Jean Freas [David Smith's second wife], 'Australia' [he made in 1951] was the first to be placed squarely in the center of the field beyond the house. David Smith was well aware that 'Australia', with its fluid gestures of a long arm swinging gracefully, was an extremely important piece, heralding a new era for his work. It represented a culmination of his sinuous use of metal and the technique of drawing in space. Thus planted, Australia drew not just in any space--such as the impartial space of a museum gallery -- but in the specific landscape of Bolton Landing."

"Smith often said he made only girl sculptures. He explained: I don't make boy sculptures. They become kind of personages, and sometimes they cry out to me that I should have been better or bigger, and mostly they tell me that I should have done that twelve years before--or twenty years before."

"That is the marvel -- to question but not to understand. Seeing is the true language of perception. Understanding is for words. As far as I am concerned, after I've made the work, I've said everything I can say."

"I maintain my identity by regular work, there is always labor when inspiration has fled, but inspiration returns quicker when identity and the work stream are maintained."

"[S]culpture as a process of recognition.. .. in the great quiet of stopped machines -- the awe, the pull.. .Part is personal heritage.. .Since I've had identity, the desire to create excels over the desire to visit [the ancient sites and museums in Italy]."

"I don't make boy sculptures. They become kind of personages, and sometimes they cry out to me that I should have been better or bigger, and mostly they tell me that I should have done that twelve years before -- or twenty years before"

"There is no unity or organisation or even aesthetic unity [in Abstract Expressionism / w:New York School (art), but we do have a very strong bond in our defense, but we also are strongest in our own individual identity. Our effort, I think, is all shooting off in independent directions. And the artists themselves will not admit to the existence of the New York School. They won't admit to any classification, and most of those painters known as Abstract Expressionists are the first to say they are not."

"I knew metal working before I knew Calder [famous for his sculptures, made in sheet metal], and Calder is one of our great men and he is earlier by a few years than any of the rest of us [in American Abstract Expressionism ]. Calder had worked in Paris quite a bit in the early days, though he did go to school here in New York at the Art Student's League.. .After my first year in college I had worked on the assembly line in the Studebaker plants up in Indiana.."