Don Knotts Quotes

Photos I’m not in and memories we don’t share, haunt my lonely eyes.

Love isn't a steadfast dog at all; love is more like a pygmy mouse lemur. Yes, that's exactly what love is: a tiny, jittery primate with eyes that are permanently peeled open in fear. For those of you who cannot quite picture a pygmy mouse lemur, imagine a miniature Don Knotts or Steve Buscemi wearing a fur coat.

When I'm an old man, I don't want to count the years, we forgot to share.

My husband doesn’t like to fly. He does fly now because he doesn’t want our daughter to grow up thinking he is a Don Knotts character. But when we were first married, he didn’t fly.

Don't ever tell me I'm broken if you will not be the glue, and please don't point out the fractures if that's all you're allowed to do.

Nip it, Nip it in the bud.

Please don't break this heart, it's endured so very much, it survived the fall.

Though you tell yourself it’s preposterous, you can’t quite shake the feeling that you are being watched. You order yourself to be serene (it’s just a woods for goodness sake), but really you are jumpier than Don Knotts with pistol drawn.

Being intelligent does not mean you don't have an asshole living inside your head.

I would hesitate to use the word 'success' in the way many people do. I don't know that I would apply it to what I've done as though I have now reached the ultimate goal. To me success is a continuing thing. It is growth and development. It is achieving one thing and using that as a stepping stone to achieve something else. Success comes as you have confidence in yourself. Self-confidence is built by succeeding, even if the success is small. It is the believing that makes it possible.

So woods are spooky. Quite apart from the thought that they may harbor wild beasts and armed, genetically challenged fellows named Zeke and Festus, there is something innately sinister about them, some ineffable thing that makes you sense an atmosphere of pregnant doom with every step and leaves you profoundly aware that you are out of your element and ought to keep your ears pricked. Though you tell yourself it’s preposterous, you can’t quite shake the feeling that you are being watched. You order yourself to be serene (it’s just a woods for goodness sake), but really you are jumpier than Don Knotts with pistol drawn.

No man succeeds without faith. Whether you call it religious faith or label it something else. I don't feel anything worthwhile is accomplished without it. When you believe there is a Supreme Being guiding the destiny of this universe and that within each of us there is a little part of that Being, then you will have faith in yourself, in your country, in that Supreme Being, and in humanity itself.

Writing surrogate letters wasn’t quite so easily justified; there was something slightly but definitely dishonest about it. To get one placed, you had to sound like the real thing, but not so much that you discredited your own position or insulted the intelligence of the supporter whose name you were hoping to attach to it. You had to start the letter off with some sassy stock phrase or rhetorical question: “Representative So-and-so just doesn’t get it” or “Which constitution is Senator So-and-so reading?” Then you’d make your case without sounding like you knew too much about the topic. That’s where surrogate letters sometimes went wrong. They would refer to specific revenue numbers or to the names of subcommittees or explain the difference between house and senate versions of bills. Average people didn’t know these things, and if a surrogate letter used them, it sounded like what it was, and editors wouldn’t run them. I spent a day writing these wretched things. It wasn’t worth it unless you produced ten or fifteen; newspapers likely wouldn’t print a letter taking a certain view if they got only one, but if they got a handful they’d feel bound to run one or two. It was a mind-numbing exercise: each one had to sound clumsy but not stupid; each had to approach the question from a different angle; and none could use the same vocabulary. We sent them out to the ostensible authors, and over the next two weeks or so I would see my little creations pop up in a variety of newspapers. Sometimes a few words had been changed by the surrogates, but by and large they slapped their names on the letters and forwarded them to their hometown newspapers. I felt the whole exercise was pointless, but perhaps the letters did contribute in a small way to the sense that Knotts’s allegations had been grossly unfair and that the governor had acted properly. Had he? I thought so at the time, but enough time has passed that I can admit I don’t know. One of the melancholy facts of political life is that your convictions tend to align with your paycheck.

We order pizza—no one wants to leave the house, and Knott’s Harbor isn’t big on delivery—and eat it with Veuve Clicquot. We don’t talk about tomorrow, when we’ll say goodbye. To one another, to this house, to an era of life we wish could have lasted forever.

I was thinking about the water here in Knott’s Harbor,” I say. “About the waves, and how weird it is that they don’t really exist. Like the water is just the water, but the tide moves through them and the wind moves over them and they change shape, but they’re always just water.

Knott-Sloman was looking displeased. He had not liked Starling’s breaking into his anecdote, nor the perfunctory nod with which the little don acknowledged their introduction. Nigel was conscious of an immediate antipathy between the two— the antipathy, perhaps, between the conversationalist, who lives by give-and-take, and the man who must have monologue or nothing.

Don't come to me with a flimsy boat and expect my seas to calm.

The previous day, on an Internet political talk show called Pub Politics, in which a Democrat and a Republican drink beer and talk politics, state senator Jake Knotts, a Bauer supporter, had said: “We’ve got a raghead in Washington. We don’t need a raghead in the statehouse.” Here we go again, I thought. You couldn’t make this stuff up. It was getting beyond ridiculous.