Clifford Quotes

And also don’t forget, the reason opportunity is often missed is that it usually comes disguised as hard work.

If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.

When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.

Any idiot can face a crisis—it’s day to day living that wears you out.

My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.

This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with a Pisces rising. This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagrammed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish... This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called "Speedoo" but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence may be pregnant. This sentence suffered a split infinitive - and survived. If this sentence has been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And this little sentence went wee wee wee all the way home.

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

On Valentine's Day, the Spirit Club plastered the school with red streamersand pink balloons and red and pink hearts. It looked like Clifford the Big Red Dog ate a flock of flamigoes and then barfed his guts up.

Just because I don't know how to work a toy, doesn't mean I don't want it in my toy box.

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one

Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.

It's all in your head -- you just have no idea how big your head is.

A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

I want you to close your eyes. I want you to fall asleep first." "Why?" She asked suddenly afraid he would slip out of the room as soon as she did. "Because I'll be here in the morning.

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

I can't go back," said Towser. "Nor I," said Fowler. "They would turn me back into a dog," said Towser. "And me," said Fowler, "back into a man.

Man's inability to understand and appreciate the thought and viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome.

The water's not even blue, jackass.

That was the way with Man; it had always been that way. He had carried terror with him. And the thing he was afraid of had always been himself.

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.

The bitch-goddess, as she is called, of Success, roamed, snarling and protective, round the half-humble, half-defiant Michaelis’ heels, and intimidated Clifford completely: for he wanted to prostitute himself to the bitchgoddess, Success also, if only she would have him.

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

He's a..." "Pain in the ass.

Just wanted to make sure the number wasn't a fake," Az said. She couldn't help her bitter laugh. "Well, you can go ahead and erase it. A bit of advice? Either kiss a girl or don't. Never stop halfway through.

It's the way you fall you. Gotta let yourself go.

Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.

It was a dark and stormy night...

When thinking about what to do next with your life, don’t ask yourself what you would succeed at, but what you would most enjoy failing at.

There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down

Jenkins tried to say goodbye, but he could not say goodbye. If he could only weep, he thought, but robots could not weep.

He noticed her giving him the once-over and smiled in a way no gay boy in history had ever smiled at a girl.

You are not a better or wiser person simply because you’ve ceased to care.

Yeah, go ahead and get the forbidden garden comment out of your system. And no matter what witty snake joke you're considering? Trust me, I've heard it.

So, this is what it feels like when Heaven leaves you.

If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.

Im a scientist, once I do something, I want to do something else.

There was nothing now but this empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with one another. Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!

The tyrant’s formula for every genocide since the beginning of time: differentiate, divide, destroy.

It's necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it.

You're seriously suggesting this?" Az interrupted, his face full of disbelief. "That I what, dump her so she kills herself? That's fucked up.

I would think if you were going to quote Whitman you'd go for something not taken from Leaves Of Grass. Especially if you're going to pull the fancy cultured bitch card.

It's packed in there already and we're fifteen minutes early. My theory, proven once again," Kristen said, climbing the stairs. "What theory would that be?" "Everyone adores a tragedy.

He looked back at the mirror. "I know it's completely ridiculous, but I can't keep quiet about it any longer. Your closet looks like it was put together by a blind nun, and your brother acts like a cross between a monkey and a go-kart, and you have the social skills of a rock. But I like you, Amy. Quite—quite a bit." He paused. "So, congratulations.

Man was engaged in a mad scramble for power and knowledge, but nowhere is there any hint of what he meant to do with it once he had attained it. He

Race preservation is a myth … a myth that you all have lived by—a sordid thing that has arisen out of your social structure. The race ends every day. When a man dies the race ends for him—so far as he’s concerned there is no longer any race.

A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years to come there might be no river – but in a million years from now there would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing. And that was the secret of the universe, Enoch told himself – a thing that went on caring.

In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.

These are the stories that the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north. Then each family circle gathers at the hearthstone and the pups sit silently and listen and when the story's done they ask many questions: "What is Man?" they'll ask. Or perhaps: "What is a city?" Or: "What is a war?

You still could go to some industry or some university or the government and if you could persuade them you had something on the ball—why, then, they might put up the cash after cutting themselves in on just about all of the profits. And, naturally, they'd run the show because it was their money and all you had done was the sweating and the bleeding.

At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.

I'm going to hang up now," she said quietly. "Fine." "Good-bye, Ian," she said. He paused again. She thought she heard something like a sniff or a choke, but it was probably the sound of him tearing up his plane ticket. "Good-bye, Amy." She hung up the phone: Dan and Nellie were quiet. "Well, think about it," said Dan. "Did you really want Natalie Kabra as a sister-in-law?

We thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren't, when we never have. We've just been moving along with time. We said, there's another second gone, there's another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.

I'm throwing out this bottle rocket." "No, wait!" Dan said, reaching for it. "It hasn't been set off yet. Don't waste it, Amy. And we don't have company coming—we have Ian Kabra coming. And I know you want to totally impress him and take him to the movies and stare dreamily into his eyes—" "I do not," Amy said, too quickly. "Oh, Ian," Dan said, pressing his lightsaber to his chest and batting his eyes. "Tell me again about your shiny, shiny shoes.

The need of one human being for the approval of his fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship - a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one's thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family. Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack. It had led to terrible things, of course - to mob psychology, to racial persecution, to mass atrocities in the name of patriotism or religion. But likewise it had been the sizing that held the race together, the thing that from the very start had made human society possible. And Joe didn't have it. Joe didn't give a damn. He didn't care what anyone thought of him. He didn't care whether anyone approved or not.

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it — the life of that man is one long sin against mankind. […] Inquiry into the evidence of a doctrine is not to be made once for all, and then taken as finally settled. It is never lawful to stifle a doubt; for either it can be honestly answered by means of the inquiry already made, or else it proves that the inquiry was not complete. “But,” says one, “I am a busy man; I have no time for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the nature of the arguments.” Then he should have no time to believe.