People From Los Angeles

"Someone took a selfie with me today on the street, and to see them plug in their passcode right in front of you — it’s not something I would ever do, and it’s borderline creepy, but my show just makes me so much more aware of how to conduct oneself in public. It’s little things we take for granted, like holding your passport out while you wait in line at an airport, and someone can screenshot that in a heartbeat. The amount of information that we arbitrarily extend to the world is very mind-boggling to me. It’s like we’re saying, “Go ahead,” Clint Eastwood-style, “make my day.”"

"I know Elliot does not come across as charismatic, but to me he is."

"Everything has become so easy. It's great that it's at your fingertips, but I miss those good old days. And we're connected, but it can be very alienating. There is this distance between all of us because we're speaking to each other through cameras and monitors and icons and Emojis."

"Please tell me you're seeing this, too."

"Because Launchpad appeared in 'DuckTales' and we used Roboduck as the Superman character, the hero who gets all the glory as opposed to Darkwing, fans try to connect the two realities, They are two different universes in my book. We work in the alternate Duckiverse."

"My parents kept things real. I had no idea they were famous. In fact, it didn’t hit me until one day when I was riding in the car with my father in Ann Arbor, Michigan—I was maybe 8 and could barely see above the dashboard—and we stopped at a crosswalk. Suddenly we were surrounded by people who recognized my dad and were really thrilled to see him. I remember looking at this man I thought I knew so well and thinking, “Who are you?”"

"Gibbs is thankful to be alive. He really thought life was over, and for him to admit that is huge, because he’s not that kind of guy. After all this time, the writers still find new places to take him. NCIS was never a show about the crime cases, because sometimes we solve ’em, sometimes we don’t. This is a show about characters. The audience takes real ownership of the people we play."

"Change is healthy. Any actor can depart this show and it will survive. In my mind, there is nothing unclear about how I got here. You go to different shows and hear the chirping about who’s No. 1 on the call sheet or who has the biggest trailer. For me, it’s about doing a job as well as you can. If your job is to get somebody coffee—and I did that in my early days—then make it the best cup of coffee possible. Do the work. And do it with pride."

"I was never interested in playing him with a big red S on his chest. I’m much more attracted to the underbelly stuff. Gibbs is a loner, with emotional scars a mile deep that run in a million different directions. At work, he’s a leader. But who is he if you take away his job? I play him, and even I don’t know the answer to that."

"I got those, Data’s chair and console, the side walls, and some panels from Vegas. And though I didn’t know I'd have the entire bridge someday, I knew they were an invaluable history of Trek, I couldn't allow it to bring me down. I spent almost a year trying to convince people to help me. If worst came to worst it could go to a rich guy’s house but then no one would see it. Once this happened, that's how this bridge got forgotten about—people changed hands, people got fired, I didn't know if he had standing assembled walls or what, My whole thing was: this is good, it's great to have a dream, but it’s great to have your feet on the floor too. They said: ‘You have to do something. This can't remain in this condition."

"$175,000 will get the bridge completely restored and will give us a place to put it, That will get us at least a few of the computers going. And up until now, everybody’s been doing everything for free—I don't want people going broke on this. Fandom is fandom, but people have to eat and live."

"He thought about spiders, twisting thread into beautiful symmetry, taming chaos with ordered nets that greeted the dawn, hung with globes of dew that caught and held cores of sunlight, and tiny images of the world."

"“I should have killed or confused you when I had the chance. You are destruction. You are corrosion. You are death to order. Family, cast him out before he infects the rest of us as he has these.” “You may speak in your own defense, Tom,” said Aunt Agatha. “She’s right, though; I embody those things.” He held out his hands, open. “I bring you change.”"

"After a moment she let go of him and rubbed her eyes. “Sorry,” she said to both of them. “Don’t be, child,” said Trixie. “Sometimes crying is the best medicine you can give yourself.” “I never cry,” Maggie said, hearing the tears in her voice, and the anger. “Crying’s for people who are helpless.” “Who told you that?” asked Trixie. “Learned it from looking around.” “Well, it’s not true. You can’t always judge by appearances. Crying’s a power tool to cleanse the soul, if you use it right. I think you used it right. Do you feel helpless?” “No,” said Maggie."

"Any established power system grows decadent over time, if there is nothing with the strength or motivation to challenge it, and if it refuses to challenge itself."

"Never rush into anything—unless into is the direction you want to go."

"Freedom! That belabored word! It is a big, empty word, and yet, when some experience reminds us what freedom is, how clear and particular its meaning becomes, how unspeakably sweet, and full!"

"Weigh then your wealth, and judge if it’s more dear To you than life. If not, your course is clear."

"“Come on,” I said. “We have to try. The effort is utterly pointless, but inaction seems an even greater agony.”"

"It’s always been an exceedingly curious thing to me, just how incurious most people are about all save their own little island of time and place in the world."

"We’re none of us more than wisps of desire and imagining! What man is not, at the center of his mind, a ghostly wish-to-be haunting the jerry-built habitation of his imperfect acts? Haunting the maze of what-has-been?"

"Deeper and deeper. Ever greater power. Ever greater evil."

"This is not genuine scholarship! Real research is a coming-to-grips with phenomena. This, as a transcription of the ocean’s infinitely various text, is a fraud, an egregious counterfeit, which patly reduces the Primary Sea’s endlessness to a cozy finitude, such as it pleased this puny entity to regard it, for he must have had but a feeble stomach for enterprise of a dark or difficult kind."

"But ah! what a drear hell it was we now had to venture through! What a maelstrom of relentless gorging, one creature upon another! The claws and jaws of the upper world are red enough—who denies it?—but the carnage has intermissions, periods of amiable association, zones of green peace and fructification. In the subworlds, the merciless seethe of appetites never simmers down."

"The great in Evil, and the great in [Goodness|Good]]—both leave an immortal residue."

"Now a true ocean is the sky’s open floor—that’s the feeling men love in it, the reason they venture upon it, apart from gain or exploration."

"The demons are not our ancestors—we are theirs. The greeds and lusts, the wealth of horrors here, are not the archetypes of our own—they are the derivatives, the dreadful perfectings of all the evil that men have spawned and nourished. Call Man a great, roasting beast, spitted and turning above the fire of his own unending cruelty. The things of this world then, and of those yet farther down, are the drippings of the tortured giant, Man."

"Can it be your spirit does not thrive? Can it be you’ve weighed your life of kissing arse and crouching before fat purses, and have found it wanting?"

"And most important, nothing was to be taken for granted in that place. In Death’s world, any covenant, no matter how mighty, can fall null—any spell, however cogent, can be abrogated. The only certain law in that place is Death itself."

"Good soldiers stay alive by being unsentimental and having a quick eye for the main chance."

"And you could see at a glance that Defalk was a simple man who wanted no more than to be brilliantly rich, admired, and unencumbered with work. His face said it so plainly: “I’m an excellent fellow. Isn’t such a life no more than my proper portion?”"

"Dalissem chuckled. It felt like being grinned at by a big mountain cat—delightful for the beauty of the animal, disturbing for the possible sequel."

"We all thought you such a daring romantic then, and so outspoken about all us more conventional souls! Remember what you used to say about the world of business? All toadying and chicanery, lean purses fawning on fat ones for favors? Were those not the days? How far we wander from our youthful views!"

"For the past three years, young Wimfort had enjoyed so ample a competence from his parent, that he’d been able to buy his way deep into the mysteries of the arts of Power. He purchased no real understanding, of course, for that’s bought by the coin of toil and thought."

"Granting that our knowledge be limited, what can it profit us to traffic in lurid fantasies and errant imaginings? When—certainty failing us—we must speculate, let us recognize the difference between careful enumeration of reasonable hypotheses, and the reckless multiplication of bizarre conceptions."

"I have in mind the notion that is so fashionable nowadays, namely that we live in a Dark Age where puny Science quails before many a dim Unknown on every hand. Surely this sort of facile pessimism dampens the energy of inquiry even as it leads to obscurantism—toward a despair of certainty which encourages us to embrace truths, half-truths, and the most extravagant falsehoods with a promiscuous lack of discrimination."

"I shall present as certain only those data corroborated by exhaustive research, or by my own personal investigations, as I am not untraveled for a bookish man. Wherever doubt exists, I shall unambiguously state its degree and nature, along with whatever grounds I may have for preferring one hypothesis over another. If, despite all I have said, the reader disdains such honest ambiguity, and stubbornly prefers the unequivocal assertiveness to be found in factitious travelogues penned by raffish “explorers,” or in the specious “natural histories” compiled by crapulous and unprincipled hacks who have never left their squalid lofts in Scrivener’s Row, then there is nothing further I can do, and I leave him, with apologies, to his deception."

"The assumption that we would ever be called upon to perform this second task now appeared quite clearly to me as the most extravagant folly, based on a wild delusion conceived by a raving idiot."

"By his twentieth year he was a thorough adept in all of what we may term the “carnival arts,” and already a widely traveled young man. From mastery of the mountebank’s larcenous skills to the study of outright felonious appropriation, and all its subsidiary sciences, proved but a short step for Nifft, who always credited his early “dramatic training” with his success as a thief, vowing it had given him a rare grasp of his trade’s fundamentals: lying, imposture and nimble movement."

"It is a bitter thing that each of us must finally be blown out like a candle, and have the unique ardor of his individual flame choked off, and sucked utterly away like smoke in the dark. Do we ever accept this in our hearts, any of us? The waste of knowledge! It never ceases to be...infuriating."

"And I make bold to say that I am not the only one of my countrymen who could profit from taking this admonition to heart."

"Those feats of deep cunning and brave flair—we’re all allotted a few of them, and we get no more, no matter what our longing is. And you know, you’re lucky if you even recognize when you’re having your best moments. Half the time your soul is looking the other way when they come. And you never grow wise enough to know what they were until you have passed the hope of having more."

"At that age you invent extravagant compensations for bruises to your dignity."

"I will be succinct, eschewing vainglorious hyperbole."

"The boy was unquestionably a great natural talent, if not an outright genius, in the art of complaint—tirelessly inventive, and completely shameless in the matter of interpreting his dissatisfactions as someone else’s—anyone else’s—criminal failures to content him."

"“You realize of course, Barnar, that it is simply not possible that we’re actually doing this?” “I’ve come to the same comforting conclusion, old friend. Therefore let’s away—an impossibility can only do us an unreal sort of harm, after all.”"

"While it is foolish to deny the dark around us, it is futile to exaggerate it."

"“He’s here, of course, strictly through his own ambitious carelessness.” “Prime flaws of youth, of course—but also its strengths, this carelessness and ambition.”"

"Is it not unsettling to consider the blind unlikelihoods that shape one’s fate?"

"Present action, though futile, is preferable to passive acceptance of such a fate as awaits us."