Famous Parcells Quotes

Only those who matter in this world are accused of something. Accusations are part and parcel of fame.

The Empress surrounds you at all times. She feeds the soul with her brilliance and beauty of the night sky. Mountain landscapes, rolling hills, and ocean waves rise like the curve of her hips. Her breath is the warm air of summer, her cool palms are the willow tree's shade. She is the peace of mind of a walking meditation. The Empress fills you with the entirety of the world's beauty if you let her in. She shows you in no uncertain terms, that you are never, ever alone. You are part and parcel of the glistening, pulsating world of energetic and beautific connection. You are her and she is you. She is everything and everything is you.

November We walk to the ward from the badly parked car with your grandma taking four short steps to our two. We have brought her here to die and we know it. You check her towel. soap and family trinkets, pare her nails, parcel her in the rough blankets and she sinks down into her incontinence. It is time John. In their pasty bloodless smiles, in their slack breasts, their stunned brains and their baldness and in us John: we are almost these monsters. You're shattered. You give me the keys and I drive through the twilight zone, past the famous station to your house, to numb ourselves with alcohol. Inside, we feel the terror of the dusk begin. Outside we watch the evening, failing again, and we let it happen. We can say nothing. Sometimes the sun spangles and we feel alive. One thing we have to get, John, out of this life.

children from pain and loss and tragedy and illness. You cannot be sure that you will always be married, let alone happily married. You cannot be sure you will always be employed, or healthy, or relatively sane. All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference. Humility does not mean self-abnegation, lassitude, detachment; it’s more like a calm recognition that you must trust in that which does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly, ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture; you must trust that you being a very good you matters somehow. That trying to be an honest and tender parent will echo for centuries through your tribe. That doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken. That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will somehow matter in the social fabric, save a thread or two from unraveling. And you must do all of this with the sure and certain knowledge that you will never get proper credit for it, at all, one bit, and in fact the vast majority of the things you do right will go utterly unremarked; except, perhaps, in ways we will never know or understand, by the Arab Jew who once shouted about his cloak, and may have been somehow also the One who invented and infuses this universe and probably a million others—not to put a hard number on it or anything. Humility, the final frontier, as my late brother Kevin used to say. When we are young we build a self, a persona, a story in which to reside, or several selves in succession, or several at once, sometimes; when we are older we take on other roles and personas, other masks and duties; and you and I both know men and women who become trapped in the selves they worked so hard to build, so desperately imprisoned that sometimes they smash their lives simply to escape who they no longer wish to be; but finally, I think, if we are lucky, if we read the book of pain and loss with humility, we realize that we are all broken and small and brief, that none among us is actually rich or famous or more beautiful than another; and then, perhaps, we begin to understand something deep and true finally about humility. This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that there is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love. That could be. I wouldn’t know; I am a muddle and a conundrum, shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder, trying to just see and say what is, trying to leave shreds and shards of ego along the road like wisps of litter and chaff.

The entry to these events is hideously embarrassing. You’re picked up and driven to the venue, where you join a queue of cars some distance away. Someone comes to the window, checks who’s in the car and speaks into a radio. At the appropriate time, your car is allowed to move forward to the drop-off point, and you get out to a barrage of cameras. You then walk the red carpet, where photographers shout at you to look this way and that. It feels very much like being a lesser prize on a game-show conveyor belt. If someone more famous turns up, you’re abandoned, or if you turn up and the person ahead is less famous than you, they abandon them. It all feels coldly brutal, and I genuinely don’t like it, but it’s all part and parcel of going to those events.