Calvin Trillin Quotes

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.

Health food makes me sick.

The price of purity is purists.

When someone reaches middle age, people he knows begin to get put in charge of things, and knowing what he knows about the people who are being put in charge of things scares the hell out of him.

Why in the world are you a Republican?

I never did very well in math-I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.

But my subconscious mind--the part I've heard writers call the lizard brain--could and did: it told me to reach for Anne Lamott or Edith Wharton or Calvin Trillin instead. And if I've learned one thing in my decades on earth, it's this: Don't argue with your lizard brain; it knows you better than you know yourself.

By the way, did you fellows know that a hummingbird weighs as much as a quarter? Do you think a hummingbird also weighs the same as two dimes and a nickel? But then she asked a question of her own: How do they weigh a hummingbird?

...the existential paradox we all experience; we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die.

She believed in the principle of enoughness." from "About Alice

Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?

your children are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary

understand what Ernest Becker meant when he said something like ‘To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything,

As far as I'm concerned, 'whom' is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.

All White House hopefuls we forewarn: You'll have to prove that you were born. Before Trump hits the state of granite, He must identify the planet Where he first took on human form - A place where blowhards are the norm.

If Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the Union, how come 'Lincolnesque' just means tall?

As far as I’m concerned, whom is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.’ CALVIN TRILLIN

School plays were invented partly to give parents and easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities.

I am firmly committed to the proposition that whoever is in power is exceedingly silly.... And that goes for the opposition as well.

For Alice, of course, the measure of how you held up in the face of a life-threatening illness was not how much you changed but how much you stayed the same, in control of your own identity.

Paull has his own style, which is folksy, not canned. Religion? He's got one. His prophet's Ayn Rand. By Rand's eerie theories he's fervently gripped, So he won't do flip-flops. He long ago flipped.

Someone who managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.

Do my ears deceive me, or can I actually hear the sounds of worms turning? You say a turning worm makes no sound? But how about a chorus of turning worms?

The question about those aromatic advertisements that perfume companies are having stitched into magazines these days is this: under the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, is smelling up the place a constitutionally protected form of expression?

Would I be commenting on Amy Fisher? Was that the sort of subject that someone who hoped to become poet laureate should discuss? Would those British laureates who had traditionally written about royal birthdays and royal jubilees have dealt with such goings on?

I suppose it's possible that the Sundance Kid didn't like to make much of his birthdays — they may have struck him as just another reminder that his draw was getting slower by the year—but what if he truly liked a major celebration? What if he looked forward every year to marking the day of his birth with what they used to call in the West 'a real wingding, with pink balloons and a few survivors'?

Was the Buffalo chicken wing invented when Teressa Bellissimo thought of splitting it in half and deep frying it and serving it with celery and blue-cheese dressing? Was it invented when John Young started using mambo sauce and thought of elevating wings into a specialty?

Reporters also tend to love trials. It may be that we are transfixed by a process in which the person being asked a question actually has to answer it. He cannot say he would rather not comment. He cannot tell an anecdote on a different subject. He has to answer the question—under oath that he is telling the truth.

SEEING THE WORLD “In the fifties, when my mother began lobbying for a trip to Europe, my father, who had been brought to Missouri from the Ukraine when he was two, said, ‘I been.’ 

Our oldest grandchild has precisely Alice's coloring, which may be one reason I sometimes have trouble taking my eyes off her.

She wanted to protect us from worry, from sadness, from loneliness--things her parents had not been able to protect her from. (About Alice)

among married couples the person who actually makes out the mortgage check is likely to be more cautious about spending money than the person who doesn't. There is something sobering about sending away that much money every month in the knowledge that, rain or shine, you'll have to come up with the same amount of money the next month and the month after that.

No sophisticated study of public opinion is needed to establish the fact that in the United States, North or South, a white life is considered to be of more value than a Negro life.

In the early sixties, the notion that racism was not acceptable even in certain regions or certain clubs or certain circumstances—the notion that it could not be treated with moderation—was a notion largely confined to black people.

Going out? Are you going out? He's not going out? What do you mean he's not going out? Are you out here because you're still mad that they moved the Dodgers to L.A.? Are you going out or not? You're not going out? I guess you're not going out — huh? You mean go out parking in the evenings? Are you going out to park? Mr. Tepper, he asked at one point, did you ever — if you were in the middle of an interesting story in the paper or perhaps an interesting conversation with somebody who dropped in to talk to you while you were parking — notice that the meter had run out and therefore go out and put more money in the meter? If we're both keeping an eye out, what does it hurt?

Because a superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman, I realize that, like a good secondhand bookstore or a bad South American dictatorship, it is not easily passed down intact.

La comida sana me enferma

The American people are sick to death of people taking advantage of laws and then playing victim. This man is not a victim. He’s a provocateur. Simple as that.

[Donald Hall asked Henry Moore] 'what is the secret of life?' [Moore answered] 'The secret is to devote your whole life to one ambition. Concentrate everything you know, everything you can summon, to accomplish this one desire. But remember: Choose something you can't do.

Why read the memoir? Sven Birkerts offers a succinct reason. 'The point—the glory—of memoir is that it anchors its authority in the actual life; it is a modeling of the process of creative self-inquiry as it is applied to the stuff of lived experience. This really happened is the baseline contention of the memoir.

The naked statement—a black man has been killed by a white policeman—is such a fearsome divider of the races that the people who preside over a city immediately try to cover it with details.

According to Harold Fleming, for instance, who was then director of the Southern Regional Council, a small Atlanta hotbed of what he now calls “premature integrationists,” a moderate was “a white man without sidearms.

IT WAS CUSTOMARY in the South for outside observers to interpret events in terms of ideology (usually racial ideology) and for local observers to interpret the same events in terms of money (usually graft).

JACKSON HAS NEVER stood apart from the rest of Mississippi the way Atlanta has stood apart from Georgia, say, or New Orleans from Louisiana.

Do you think the people you preach to have a feeling of love?” the young man asked. “Well, I’m not talking about weak love,” King explained. “I’m talking about love with justice. Weak love can be sentimental and empty. I’m talking about the love that is strong, so that you love your fellow men enough to lead them to justice.

Once, in Lisbon, I tried my best to work the phone book in a way that would assuage a longing [Alice and I] had for certain Chinese dishes . . . .

In the rather informal survey I have taken over the years on intensity of interest in food by profession, lawyers rank only a few trades below concert pianists....

Long Island is the single most segregated suburban area in the United States.

My problem with math was that I was never able to convince my teachers that many of my answers were meant ironically.