Bixby Quotes

So... be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea, you're off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So...get on your way!

And will you succeed? Yes! You will, indeed! (98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.) KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS! So... be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea, you're off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So...get on your way!

Apparently textbooks were an endangered species here in Bixby, Oklahoma.

We should trust people to be exactly what they have proven themselves to be, no more and no less.

You know why God’s so hard to find, Trevor? No, Mr. Shaw, I say, why is God so hard to find? God’s so hard to find because he ain’t lost!

I remember in treatment, Mr. Shaw told me that the alcohol and drugs never were my problem. He said the alcohol and drugs were my solution and that was my problem. And he was right.

I forgive him and like water draining from the sand after a wave, the power he held over me disappears. A slow smile rises on my face.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go... Oh, the places you'll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winning-est winner of all. Fame! You'll be as famous as famous can be, with the whole wide world watching you win on TV. Except when they don't Because, sometimes they won't. I'm afraid that some times you'll play lonely games too. Games you can't win 'cause you'll play against you. All Alone! Whether you like it or not, Alone will be something you'll be quite a lot. And when you're alone, there's a very good chance you'll meet things that scare you right out of your pants. There are some, down the road between hither and yon, that can scare you so much you won't want to go on... You'll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You'll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step. Step with care and great tact and remember that Life's a Great Balancing Act. Just never foget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left. And will you succeed? Yes! You will, indeed! (98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.) KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS! So... be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea, You're off the Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So...get on your way!

At that opportune moment, Bixby reappeared, tea towel and grenade in hand. "I beg your pardon, sir. There is a house following us.

Mr. Lincoln, the merciful and just, who cries large tears over Mrs. Bixby's five boys, hasn't any tears to shed about the thousands of Yankees dying at Andersonville," said Rhett, his mouth twisting. "He doesn't care if they all die. The order is out. No exchanges.

That's the difference between artists and the rest of us, I think. Artists know where to put the shadows.

We all have moments when we think nobody sees us. When we feel like we have to act out or be somebody else to get noticed. But somebody notices, Topher. Somebody sees. Somebody out there probably thinks you're the greatest thing in the whole world. Don't ever think you're not good enough.

..I was raised on the Torah, my wife on the Qu'Ran, my eldest son is an Atheist, my youngest is a scientologist, my daughter is studying Hinduism, I imagine there is room there for a holy war in my living room, but we practice live and let live.

Live every day as if it were your last. That’s a Bixbyism for sure, though even she would tell you that it’s impossible. It’s just way too much to ask most of the time. I’ve experienced one last day in my life, and it was enough to hold me for a while. The truth is—the whole truth is—that it’s not the last day that matters most. It’s the ones in between, the ones you get the chance to look back on. They’re the carnation days. They may not stand out the most at first, but they stay with you the longest.

Oh ... why not?' he smiled. "This valley is a pleasant spot for meditation. I like New England... it is here that I have experienced some of my greatest successes - and several notable defeats. Defeat, you know, is not such a bad thing, if there's not too much of it... it makes for humility, and humility makes for caution, therefore for safety.' ("Trace")

At her feet, a fold of the bed linens wriggled. A wet black nose appeared, followed by a whiskered snout. "Bixby!" She reached for the dog and pulled him into her arms for cuddles and kisses. The pup was beside himself, turning in circles and licking her everywhere he could reach. "Oh, darling. Look at you. How did you end up here?" Gabriel crossed the room to stand at the bedside. "I knew you needed an animal in your bed. And I didn't think it should be me tonight." "There's room for another.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

So... be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea, you're off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So... get on your way!

You'll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You'll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step. Step with care and great tact and remember that Life's a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left. And will you succeed? Yes! You will, indeed! (98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.) KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS! So... be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea, You're off the Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So… get on your way!

Dear Mr. Duke, As requested, here is an inventory of the animals in my care: *Bixby, a two-legged terrier. *Marigold, a nanny goat of unimpeachable character, who is definitely not breeding. *Angus, a three-year-old Highland steer. *Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia- laying hens. *Delilah, a parrot. *Hubert, an otter. *Freya, a hedgehog. *Thirteen kittens of varying colors and dispositions. Gabe leafed through the report in disbelief. It went on for pages. She'd given not only the names, breeds, and ages of every misbegotten creature, but she'd appended a chart of temperaments, sleeping schedules, preferred bedding, and a list of dietary requirements that would beggar a moderately successful tradesman. Along with the expected hay, alfalfa, corn, and seed, the animals required several pounds of mince weekly, daily pints of fresh cream, and an ungodly number of sardines. The steer and thee goat, she insisted, must go to the same loving home. Apparently they were tightly bonded, whatever that meant, and refused to eat of parted. The laying hens did not actually lay with any regularity. Their previous owners had grown frustrated with this paltry production, and thus they had come into Her Ladyship's care. And the lucky bastard who accepted a ten-year-old hedgehog? Well, he must not only provide a steady supply of mealworms, but remain ever mindful of certain "traumatic experiences in her youth.

Everybody loves a good sob story, so long as it's not their story. I don't know why. I'm not sure if people honestly care about other people or they just want a way to confirm that they've got it better than someone else.

We all have moments when we think nobody really sees us. When we feel like we have to act out or be somebody else just to get noticed. But somebody notices, Topher. Somebody sees. Somebody out there probably thinks you're the greatest thing in the whole world. Don't ever think you're not good enough.

Hubert's on to happier waters," Penny said. "Bixby and Freya stay. Surely I'm allowed to keep a dog, and Freya doesn't trouble anyone." Gabriel counted on his fingers. "That leaves Delilah, the kittens, Marigold and Angus, then Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia." Penny was touched. He knew them all by name? Be still her heart.

I was devastated when I found out Pluto wasn’t a planet anymore, and all because it’s not gravitationally dominant in its own orbit, which is suddenly what’s important. Not that I think Pluto should be a planet. I just think people should be consistent in how they define things. You can’t suddenly stop being a planet because a bunch of scientists say so.

... stories are everywhere, just waiting to be found...

To support these ladies in the manner to which they are accustomed, the men must work like slaves, which is of course precisely what they are.

Each handicap is like a hurdle in a steeplechase, and when you ride up to it, if you throw your heart over, the horse will go along, too.

Mr. McGee, don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

Then she asked me who the lead singer of Led Zeppelin was. I told her zeppelins could not be made of lead due to the obvious weight issues. She said, “Case closed.” Led Zeppelin is a band. I know that now.

I’m not sure if people honestly care about other people or they just want a way to confirm that they’ve got it better than someone else, someone they can point to and say, “It could be worse. I could be that guy.

Dad would really have loved this toilet. Sitting there, thinking of the great white about to take a bite out of my skinny white bottom, I think of a new word, or at least a new way of thinking about an old one. Squaring. As in “I just squared one.” Pretty much the same as “going number two” or “dropping a deuce” except even more scientific. It’s going potty to the power of two. Plus it’s more appropriate for dinner conversation than “making fudge nuggets” or “birthing a Baby Ruth.

You have to slay the dragon to be the hero. Not easy to do, but at least you know what you're dealing with... But there are no such things as dragons. It's never that clear-cut. Sometimes, the thing you're fighting against is hiding from you. It's tucked away, buried deep where you can't see it. In fact, for a long time, you might not even know it's there. Maybe when it starts, it's just this tiny thing you don't even notice. Maybe you mistake it for something else or you ignore it. But then it starts to grow, and before you know it, it's stalking you. Before you know it, it has you cornered... Of course, sometimes it really is a dragon, or at least it's a monster, determined to destroy you or someone you care about from the inside out. And you know it's there. You just have no idea how to stop it.

The deadliest snake in the world is the inland taipan, by the way. A single drop of its venom is enough to kill a hundred men. And yet, in the history of snakebites, this species of snake has only ever killed one person. I told that to Ms. Bixby at the end of that day, the day she broke the news. She asked me what the moral was. She's always asking me what I think the moral is, because she knows I sometimes don't get that part. But the moral of the inland taipan was easy: Just because it can doesn't mean it will. Things are never as bad as they seem.

We all have moments when we think nobody really sees us. When we feel like we have to act out or be somebody else just to get noticed. But somebody notices, Topher. Somebody sees. Somebody out there probably thinks you're the greatest thing in the whole world. Don't ever think you're not good enough.

I took a cautious step inside, marveling at the sight before me. A vast conservatory awaited, or what 'once' was a conservatory. Sunlight beamed through the enormous glass roof. I realized that its position at the center of the house precluded its visibility from below. In awe, my heart beating wildly, I lingered in an arbor covered with bright pink bougainvillea, with a trunk so thick, it was larger than my waist. Most of it had died off, but a single healthy vine remained, and it burst with magenta blossoms. I could smell citrus warming in the sunlight, and I immediately noticed the source: an old potted lemon tree in the far corner. 'This must have been Lady Anna's.' I walked along the leaf-strewn pathway to a table that had clearly once showcased dozens of orchids. Now it was an orchid graveyard. Only their brown, shriveled stems remained, but I could imagine how they'd looked in their prime. I smiled when I picked up a tag from one of the pots. 'Lady Fiona Bixby. She must have given them her own names.' Perhaps there hadn't been anything sinister going on in the orchard, after all. Lady Anna was clearly a creative spirit, and maybe that played out in her gardens and the names she gave to her flowers and trees.

There are many of these stories going around, these wonderful wishful thinking dreamworld inventions of the unhappy male, but most of them are too fatuous to be worth repeating, and far too fruity to be put down on paper. There is one, however, that seems to be superior to the rest, particularly as it has the merit of being true.

The man had a way of making her feel that she was altogether a rather remarkable woman, a person of subtle and exotic talents, fascinating beyond measure; and what a very different thing that was from the dentist husband at home who never succeeded in making her feel that she was anything but a sort of eternal patient, someone who dwelt in the waiting room, silent among the magazines, seldom if ever nowadays to be called in to suffer the finicky precise ministrations of those clean pink hands.

It’s true I sometimes imagine my life is different. That I’m somebody else. Maybe more than sometimes. But I’m not the only one around who makes stuff up. Adults are always telling you you can be whatever you want when you grow up, but they don’t mean it. They don’t believe it. They just want you to believe it. It’s a fairy tale. Like the tooth fairy. Something they tell you that gets you excited about something not so fantastic. If you think about it, it’s pretty gross—your teeth just falling out of your head, leaving bloody sockets for your tongue to poke through. But the story makes it better and the dollar makes it worth it. Then one afternoon you sneak into their bedroom and open the drawer of their nightstand, looking for the DS that they confiscated as punishment for your jumping on the roof of the car again, and you find the little Tupperware full of a dozen jagged pearls, caked brown with your own dried blood, your name written in black Sharpie across a piece of Scotch tape, and you stare at them for a moment in disbelief, wondering if maybe they aren’t what you think they are. Maybe they are somebody else’s teeth. They can’t be yours, because your teeth are in Neverland. Or Toothtopia. Or outer space. Or wherever kleptomaniac fairies live. So you confront them, your lying, scheming parents. Over breakfast, you ask your mom about the tooth fairy: where she lives, what she does during the day, how she manages to collect so many teeth each night, and how come some kids’ teeth (like Robbie Dinkler’s) are worth five bucks when yours only fetch a dollar apiece. And you see her search for some explanation that is at once both magical and believable, but you know she’s just making it up as she goes. It’s the same with all grown-ups. They tell you what they think you want to hear and let life tell you the truth later. You can be an astronaut or the president of the United States or second baseman for the White Sox, but you can’t really because you hate math, aren’t rich, and can’t even hit the ball. It’s just another fairy tale. So when your next tooth falls out, you figure you’ll just ask them if they’d like to keep it or throw it away, because you’re not buying it anymore. Or maybe not. Maybe you won’t tell them. Maybe you’ll still put your teeth under your pillow. Because sometimes it’s better to believe in the impossible. To believe you are a secret agent or a private detective or a superhero and not just a kid with freckled cheeks and gangly arms who is too clumsy to leap a tipped-over garbage can in a single bound. Until you are lying in the middle of the sidewalk, with a throbbing ankle and bloody chin, wishing you hadn’t even tried.

The first overt clerical attack took place in December 1614. Standing in the pulpit of the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Father Thomas Caccini delivered a sermon that denounced mathematics as inconsistent with the Bible and detrimental to the State.

In Rome, however, many of the strictest clerics seemed unconcerned - and were still reading Galileo’s works with interest. A number believed, in fact, that his writings were destined to be recognized as established truths.

With these experiments, Galileo succeeded in unlocking the secret of uniformly accelerated motion. His theory was that the speed of an object increased the farther it fell, and, in addition, that the rate of increase was the same with each equal addition of distance. This was the phenomenon as Galileo described it: “A body is said to be uniformly accelerated when, starting from rest, it acquires equal increments of velocity during equal time intervals.

Galileo’s boldness in challenging accepted ideas earned him renown while he was at the University of Pisa but not among his fellow professors. The men who taught traditional physics rejected his radical ideas, but the class of intellectuals produced by the Renaissance eagerly grasped Galileo’s new knowledge.

Galileo named the four moons after four members of the Medici family: the brothers Cosimo II, Francesco, Carlo, and Lorenzo. News of Galileo’s discovery soon swept across Europe, arousing storms of furious debate. The French court, envious of the fact that immortality was being given the Medici, urged Galileo to search the heavens assiduously for another new star. If he found one, they asked that he call it the Grand Star of France.

The swing of a pendulum may be long or short, but as long as it swings, it invariably measures the same amount of time.

His belief in God was absolute, and the God he believed in was “eternal and infinite; He is not duration and space, but He endures and is present.” Men like Galileo and Newton recognized instinctively that science has a limited claim on men. It does not limit or control those areas of man’s nature that are concerned with esthetics, morals, ethics, or religion. Galileo, as a man of the late Renaissance, was not only a scientist but an accomplished painter and musician. Newton in his last years remained influential in scientific circles, but he also devoted most of his time to theology.

Archimedes had discovered the truth about several important natural laws, but more significant - at least from Galileo’s standpoint - was Archimedes’s discovery of a way for a scientist to solve problems: first separating what he truly wants to solve from irrelevant externals and then attacking the core of the problem with boldness and imagination. Galileo realized that this approach was suitable for his own studies

his spirit and intellect did not fail, and so he was able to continue his work almost to his last days by dictating his thoughts and theories to two of his loyal disciples. Finally, a slow fever overcame him. In 1642, when he was nearly seventy-eight, he died. The Roman Church still would not relax its judgment, and Galileo was buried in an unmarked grave.

One definition of genius is the infinite capacity for painstaking detail.

Newton understood that science began and ended with experiment and with correct conclusions drawn from experiments. This was why his approach was thought to be revolutionary and why so many men argued bitterly against it.

Galileo and Kepler had succeeded in explaining how these bodies moved, but Newton became eager to know why. The question had gnawed at him for weeks on end. Then one moonlit night in 1666 while he was seated beneath a tree in the orchard of his Woolsthorpe farm, his meditations were jarred by the thud of an apple falling to the ground beside him. It was a commonplace occurrence, but coming when it did, it set off a chain of thoughts that enabled Newton eventually to answer all the remaining questions about the motion of planets and stars.

glance around, scanning the ground, struggling to come up

a a

From Galileo’s discovery of the principle of the pendulum, a totally new concept of the design of timepieces evolved. But what proved even more significant than the discovery itself was his method of arriving at it -a system that today is called the scientific method.

We’re going to tea at Lady Penny’s house,” Daisy said. “We’ve been two weeks in a row now. She’s Miss Mountbatten’s friend, and she has a hedgehog. And an otter named Hubert, and a goat named Marigold, and a two-legged dog named Bixby, and a heap of other animals.” “Literally,” Rosamund interjected. “Literally a heap.” “Today, I’m allowed to pet the hedgehog if I remember my manners. Also, Miss Teague bakes the scrummiest biscuits.

Cooties

Bixby Canyon.

Agnes Rose had been spending time in Fiddleback too. She’d been flirting with and flattering the bagman, one Alexander Bixby, for a matter of weeks. She had convinced him that she was a virginal young woman from a poor family who had been jilted by her fiancé after he got another woman pregnant. Punished for her virtue—her mama had taught her not to sleep with a man before her wedding night—and far from home, she was forced to take in piecework and live at a ladies’ boardinghouse near Crooked Creek, coming to Fiddleback only to sell her quilts and doilies. Bixby was taken with her sad story and her habit of telling him how impressed she was with the importance of his work. He liked to visit Veronica’s for a single drink on his way back from the bank, and this time Agnes Rose had given him to understand that if he wanted to take her upstairs, she might be willing to forget her mama’s lesson for the duration of an afternoon

Never-Eat-Spoiled-Watermelons

Their romance was interminable, on again and off for seven years as one thing after another disrupted their lives. The disruptions were standard serial fare—Stephen’s self-pity, jealousy, spite, and the ever-present fickle nature of soap opera males. In 1943, Stephen ran off to California with Maude Kellogg. At another point, he was partly cured of his paralysis in an amazing operation, but lost his legs again in an accident. Enough was enough. In the sixth year, listeners began clamoring for a marriage, and writers Don Becker and Carl Bixby (identified as “Beckby” in Time, with no distinction as to who was speaking) yielded to the crowd. Chichi and Stephen were married, and almost immediately Beckby realized this was a mistake. Alone, Chichi had been the most exciting of daytime heroines. Saddled now with a whiny husband and then a child, she was hamstrung. Beckby did the obvious: “We had the baby die of pneumonia after Stephen had taken him out in the rain, and then we killed him off with a heart attack. For two weeks afterward we kept Chichi off the air in the interests of good taste, and that was that.” Stephen was never mentioned again.

He came around and knelt beside Emma. “Would you consider giving me a hug good-bye, little one?” Emma complied without reservation. McKenna sought his eyes. “You’re leaving so early?” He stood, taking Emma with him. She laid her head on his shoulder and he rubbed her back. “I’ve got a meeting in Bixby this morning. And if I want to get home earlier in the evenings . . .” He paused. “And I do . . . I need to leave earlier in the day.” He set Emma back in her chair and came around to McKenna’s side. He leaned down and kissed her cheek, and lingered. Sensing what he wanted, McKenna turned her head and met his lips. How quickly she was becoming accustomed to this. “Thank you for breakfast,” he whispered. “You’re welcome.” She brushed his cheek with her hand. “Come home soon.” “I wish I never had to leave.

had had

Because sometimes it's better to believe in the impossible. To believe you are a secret agent or a private detective or a superhero and not just a kid with freckled cheeks and gangly arms who is too clumsy to leap a tipped-over garbage can in a single bound. Until you are lying in the middle of the sidewalk, with a throbbing ankle and bloody chin, wishing you hadn't even tried.

It seems like every group of friends has one kid whose house you never go to.

Some days I wonder if they have the slightest clue what’s going on in my life. Steve says maybe it’s because I live in my own little world and they aren’t invited, so it’s easy for them to just assume everything’s okay. There’s probably something to that. But there are days I wish I got half the attention from my folks that Steve gets from his. The good half, of course. I still show them my drawings sometimes, but the responses are all pretty much the same. “That’s great, T. Why don’t you put it on the fridge?” “Cool, man. Leave it on the table and I’ll take it to work.” “I love it. Do me a favor and take the trash out, will you?” It’s not that they don’t look. They always look—for three seconds, every time, as if they were counting in their heads—but I’m never sure they really see what I want them to. I guess it happens to everyone. You get pushed off to the side, or you just learn to blend in, stay out of the way, merge with the crowd. And you start to think that maybe you’re not the center of the universe anymore. Maybe you’re not as awesome or creative or talented or worthy of attention as you originally thought. But in your head, at least, you can still be all those things. You can be the hero at the center of it all. The man with the plan. The one who leads the way.

Adults are always telling you you can be whatever you want when you grow up, but they don’t mean it. They don’t believe it. They just want you to believe it. It’s a fairy tale. Like the tooth fairy. Something they tell you that gets you excited about something not so fantastic.

For the most part, reporters do not outright lie in their stories.

The best that I could come up with is this: There may not always be a plausible scientific explanation for why humans do what they do. Not everything can be plugged into an equation or reduced to the lowest common denominator. Not everything can be summed up by a letter grade on a report card or a check in a box. Not everything has a formula, and sometimes things just happen for no reason at all, good or bad, logical or illogical. Ms. Bixby would probably say there actually is a reason—we just don’t always understand it at the time. Father Massey would probably say the same thing. I suppose there is some strange comfort in it—this idea that the numbers are sometimes wrong, that there are still mysteries in the universe, and that you don’t always have to know why you do the things you do. Sometimes, despite all evidence to the contrary, things can go your way.

YOU HAVE TO SLAY THE DRAGON. You can travel across distant lands. You can answer the riddles and follow the map and muster your forces, but sooner or later, you will find the dragon or the demon or the king flopsucker himself, and you will have to pull your dead smartphone from its case and slay him and steal his Jack Daniel’s, even if it means a split lip and a swollen ankle.

Whatever it was that made him want to go home before, he was over it. Maybe it was the whiskey. I hear that alcohol makes people do strange things, but I always assumed you had to drink it first.

It’s