Foster Brooks Quotes

I don't need a big house,... Just a cozy one. A fireplace in the living room, those two little square windows on either side.

... everyone leaves parts of their past behind as they grow up... You don't have to carry yours around like a backpack weighing you down with bricks. All anyone cares about is who you are right now.

roles in True Romance and Crimson Tide—is a young, pre-Sopranos James Gandolfini. Glory, Marshall Herskowitz, 1989. Broadcast News, James L. Brooks, 1986.

Jean-Rose poured a cup of the tomato and lemon concoction Ruth made for hangovers, gulping it back.

Curious, living in someone else’s house—it was like parachuting into another person’s life, landing smack in the middle of a home with its own culture and mores.

She heard her mother, the day she left for Wellesley: Some people play the slots. Others put their money into a house. Well, I don’t have any money at all, so I’m investing in you.

A dress is just a dress if you don't know how to inhabit it.

A man may be benign or he may be sinister, but don't expect him to be interesting.

I think every person you meet has something they can teach you, whether it's good or bad.

All peoples think they are forever," he growled softly. "They do not believe they will ever not be. The Sinnissippi were that way. They did not think they would be eradicated. But that is what happened. Your people, Nest, believe this of themselves. They will survive forever, they think. Nothing can destroy them, can wipe them so completely from the earth and from history that all that will remain is their name and not even that will be known with certainty. They have such faith in their invulnerability. Yet already their destruction begins. It comes upon them gradually, in little ways. Bit by bit their belief in themselves erodes. A growing cynicism pervades their lives. Small acts of kindness and charity are abandoned as pointless and somehow indicative of weakness. Little failures of behavior lead to bigger ones. It is not enough to ignore the discourtesies of others; discourtesies must be repaid in kind. Men are intolerant and judgmental . They are without grace. If one man proclaims that God has spoken to him, another quickly proclaims that his God is false. If the homeless cannot find shelter, then surely they are to blame for their condition. If the poor do not have jobs, then surely it is because they will not work. If sickness strikes down those whose lifestyle differs from our own, then surely they have brought it on themselves. Look at your people, Nest Freemark. They abandon their old. They shun their sick. They cast off their children. They decry any who are different. They commit acts of unfaithfulness, betrayal, and depravity every day. They foster lies that undermine beliefs. Each small darkness breeds another. Each small incident of anger, bitterness, pettiness, and greed breeds others. A sense of futility consumes them. They feel helpless to effect even the smallest change. Their madness is of their own making, and yet they are powerless against it because they refuse to acknowledge its source. They are at war with themselves, but they do not begin to understand the nature of the battle being fought." -pages 96-97

She wasn’t telling Heddy to be someone else. She was telling her to edit. To omit. To figure out the parts of herself she was proud of and let go of the parts that she wasn’t. It was like revising a story; she was always cutting details to shape the plot.

Women in the movies got men interested in them by taking charge. Instead, Heddy tended to wish men would want to know her, sense her quickening pulse, note her cheerfulness or the way she twisted her earring as she imagined kissing them. But men never looked that hard, she supposed.

The central problems of our day flow from this erosion: social isolation, distrust, polarization, the breakdown of family, the loss of community, tribalism, rising suicide rates, rising mental health problems, a spiritual crisis caused by a loss of common purpose, the loss—in nation after nation—of any sense of common solidarity that binds people across difference, the loss of those common stories and causes that foster community, mutuality, comradeship, and purpose. The core flaw of hyper-individualism is that it leads to a degradation and a pulverization of the human person.

she was struck by the thought that humans were incredibly disappointing. They could crush you with their words and actions over and over again, and, still, you expected more of them. You believed in them, the possibility of their transformation, because if you didn’t, what did you believe in?

What came to mind was a line from a Salinger story, something about how every man has at least one place that at some point turns into a girl. She’d written a paper on what that one line meant, and still, she hadn’t understood until she happened upon this surfer on Martha’s Vineyard. Perhaps, for every woman, there is at least one place that at some point turns into a boy.

Heddy could see that money couldn’t fix a person. It couldn’t save someone, or serve as a Band-Aid to whatever wounds a person carried around. It helped keep the lights on and the radiators humming, but it didn’t make anyone happier. Whatever had hurt Heddy as a child would always be with her, no matter how much education she received or how high her social standing climbed.

We live in an environment in which political animosities, technological dehumanization, and social breakdown undermine connection, strain friendships, erase intimacy, and foster distrust. We’re living in the middle of some sort of vast emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis. It is as if people across society have lost the ability to see and understand one another, thus producing a culture that can be brutalizing and isolating.

The house fostered an easier and more candid exchange of ideas and opinions, encouraged by the simple fact that everyone had left their offices behind and by a wealth of novel opportunities for conversation—climbs up Beacon and Coombe Hills, walks in the rose garden, rounds of croquet, and hands of bezique, further leavened by free-flowing champagne, whiskey, and brandy. The talk typically ranged well past midnight. At Chequers, visitors knew they could speak more freely than in London, and with absolute confidentiality. After one weekend, Churchill’s new commander in chief of Home Forces, Alan Brooke, wrote to thank him for periodically inviting him to Chequers, and “giving me an opportunity of discussing the problems of the defense of this country with you, and of putting some of my difficulties before you. These informal talks are of the very greatest help to me, & I do hope you realize how grateful I am to you for your kindness.” Churchill, too, felt more at ease at Chequers, and understood that here he could behave as he wished, secure in the knowledge that whatever happened within would be kept secret (possibly a misplaced trust, given the memoirs and diaries that emerged after the war, like desert flowers after a first rain). This was, he said, a “cercle sacré.” A sacred circle. General Brooke recalled one night when Churchill, at two-fifteen A.M., suggested that everyone present retire to the great hall for sandwiches, which Brooke, exhausted, hoped was a signal that soon the night would end and he could get to bed. “But, no!” he wrote. What followed was one of those moments often to occur at Chequers that would remain lodged in visitors’ minds forever after. “He had the gramophone turned on,” wrote Brooke, “and, in the many-colored dressing-gown, with a sandwich in one hand and water-cress in the other, he trotted round and round the hall, giving occasional little skips to the tune of the gramophone.” At intervals as he rounded the room he would stop “to release some priceless quotation or thought.” During one such pause, Churchill likened a man’s life to a walk down a passage lined with closed windows. “As you reach each window, an unknown hand opens it and the light it lets in only increases by contrast the darkness of the end of the passage.” He danced on. —

A lot of people think a good conversationalist is someone who can tell funny stories. That’s a raconteur, but it’s not a conversationalist. A lot of people think a good conversationalist is someone who can offer piercing insights on a range of topics. That’s a lecturer, but not a conversationalist. A good conversationalist is a master of fostering a two-way exchange. A good conversationalist is capable of leading people on a mutual expedition toward understanding.

This was no coincidence. The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. The structure is delicate. If one element fails, the edifice crumbles. In a novel you might get away with a loose line or two, a saggy paragraph, even a limp chapter. But in the joke and in the short story, the beginning and end are precisely anchored tent poles, and what lies between must pull so taut it twangs. I'm not sure if there is any pattern to these selections. I did not spend a lot of time with those that seemed afraid to tell stories, that handled plot as if it were a hair in the soup, unwelcome and embarrassing. I also tended not to revisit stories that seemed bleak without having earned it, where the emotional notes were false, or where the writing was tricked out or primped up with fashionable devices stressing form over content. I do know that the easiest and the first choices were the stories to which I had a physical response. I read Jennifer Egan's "Out of Body" clenched from head to toe by tension as her suicidal, drug-addled protagonist moves through the Manhattan night toward an unforgivable betrayal. I shed tears over two stories of childhood shadowed by unbearable memory: "The Hare's Mask," by Mark Slouka, with its piercing ending, and Claire Keegan's Irishinflected tale of neglect and rescue, "Foster." Elizabeth McCracken's "Property" also moved me, with its sudden perception shift along the wavering sightlines of loss and grief. Nathan Englander's "Free Fruit for Young Widows" opened with a gasp-inducing act of unexpected violence and evolved into an ethical Rubik's cube. A couple of stories made me laugh: Tom Bissell's "A Bridge Under Water," even as it foreshadows the dissolution of a marriage and probes what religion does for us, and to us; and Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall," a deftly comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life, and a lifetime. Some stories didn't call forth such a strong immediate response but had instead a lingering resonance. Of these, many dealt with love and its costs, leaving behind indelible images. In Megan Mayhew Bergman's "Housewifely Arts," a bereaved daughter drives miles to visit her dead mother's parrot because she yearns to hear the bird mimic her mother's voice. In Allegra Goodman's "La Vita Nuova," a jilted fiancée lets her art class paint all over her wedding dress. In Ehud Havazelet's spare and tender story, "Gurov in Manhattan," an ailing man and his aging dog must confront life's necessary losses. A complicated, only partly welcome romance blossoms between a Korean woman and her demented

It had been a relief to get back downstairs. They took their time, looking for anything which might indicate where Ballard was now. It was Scott who found the dungeon. Chains and a system of pulleys opened the floor, and with more than a little trepidation, they descended the ancient stone steps into the darkness. Suzy whined, and for once refused to follow her master. Brooke patted her head and said, “You keep guard up here, girl, okay?” Suzy was more than eager to remain right where she was. Because it was morning, neither had brought a starlight collector, but they’d found some candles and a holder. The stench was putrid, the foul-smelling air making them gag as they plunged bravely downward into the darkness. When they reached the bottom, the malodorous stench was overwhelming. Brooke held the candle holder up, moving it back and forth. The mix of candlelight and gloomy shadows revealed a room of torture apparatuses; a spiked Judas chair; a spiked cabinet which could be shut on its victims, known as an Iron Maiden; a Guillotine; a Brazen Bull where a victim could be roasted to death; a Strappado for painfully dislocating arms; a sawhorse-looking device called a Spanish Donkey, used during the Inquisition to slice a wedge through the body, beginning at the genitals; a Catherine Wheel, used as late as the nineteenth century for criminal punishment in Germany; a Judas Cradle, which worked on the same principle as the Spanish Donkey. On a long table, were various tools of torture, including a Head Crusher; a Knee Splitter; a Spanish Tickler, or Cat’s Paw; a Heretic’s Fork; the Pear of Anguish; the Boot; the Tongue Tearer and the Breast Ripper. Brooke had taken a class on Medieval times once, not realizing how much cruelty the age had fostered. Scott was not as familiar with the period and its various devices, but there was no doubt as he gazed upon their shadowed contours in the candlelight, something unimaginably heartless, and sickeningly inhuman existed in the depths of this outwardly beautiful castle. It was like discovering the inside of the gorgeous, smiling woman you’d just met was filled with worms.

It's one thing that happened, not the only thing.

A factory job. Never. A baby. Not without a husband. She sliced through the water with her forearms, her thighs burning with fatigue. I'm better than that.

Anna tugged at Heddy's denim shorts, holding a charred-over remnant of a Roman candle firework she found on the ground. "Will you carry me?

Bridge. Ha!.." "Have you ever played?" "I don't play anyone's games, especially hers...

Jean-Rose told me today that someday my social cache will be built upon how few wrinkles I have on my face. She gave me a bar of Pears glycerin soap to wash my face with, prescribed ice-water plunges to keep my skin firm, and handed me a jar of Pond's Cold Cream to apply before bed each night.

Don't let her fill your head. She's the destroying type.

Gigi waved, closing one finger at a time into her palm.

...my mother taught me how to separate the shiny apples from the bruised ones.

...three jobs: keep a fine house, organize an enviable social calendar, and be a tiger in the bedroom.

...Ted kissed Jean-Rose like it was on his to-do list, and she wondered if a morning kiss from one's husband was different from an evening kiss, which may be less perfunctory.

And this is where you'll pinch a brown loaf," Teddy said, pointing at the toilet in a small adjoining bathroom...

Couples and singles made a poor mix, and most of their friends had been couples. He hadn’t done much to foster continuing friendships in any case, spending most of his time involved with his work and with his private, inviolate grief. He was not such good company anymore, and only Miles had had the patience and the perseverance to stay with him.

Why wait passively for the next terrorist attack--or a nuclear missile launched by a rogue state, or a cyberattack emanating from China or from a group of disaffected Estonian teens-- when we could be eliminating the root causes of conflict by fostering economic development and good governance, building relationships, creating networks of agents and allies, collecting data, promoting "new narratives," or striking potential future enemies before they can develop the ability to harm us?

Knowing our weakness, dividing leaders on both the left and right seek power and fame by setting American against American, brother against brother, compatriot against compatriot. These leaders assert that we must choose sides, then argue that the other side is wicked—not worthy of any consideration—rather than challenging them to listen to others with kindness and respect. They foster a culture of contempt.

The exercise of liberty requires moral and intellectual virtues that oppose those habits fostered by the reigning economic, social, and cultural elites. The virtue most essential to liberty is self-control, yet the ruling principle behind egalitarianism, Hollywood-style hedonism, and unbridled materialism is the notion that one’s appetites for pleasure and possessions should brook no limits.

Those who moved from northern England to Appalachia favored a more militant Christianity and ascribed to an honor culture. They were more violent and put a greater emphasis on clan and kin. Their child-rearing techniques fostered a fierce pride that celebrated courage and independence. They cultivated a strong warrior ethic. Sure enough, even today people from Appalachia make up a disproportionate share of the U.S. military.

Vaillant defines generativity as “the capacity to foster and guide the next generations.

During the generative life task, people try to find some way to be of service to the world. One either achieves generativity, Erikson argues, or one falls into stagnation. Vaillant defines generativity as “the capacity to foster and guide the next generations

Brook.

The Williams’s home is one hundred times grander than any of our fantasies, and the view from my bedroom window is equally sublime. Sailboats glide along the silvery waves in the morning, the sky a painting of pinks and purples in the evening. Jean-Rose, even the children, take everything about their lives for granted, whereas I appreciate every detail.

When you grew up with a parent short on rent most months, when a budget taped to the fridge accounted for every penny of your mother’s income, you knew what you were capable of because you had to decide early on if you were going to fight against the tide pushing you downstream or simply let yourself sink. You knew that when your mother collapsed from exhaustion on the subway steps after working nineteen hours straight, that she was the definition of the word “tenacious.” Or when she fell into a funk and cried for hours on the couch, the shades drawn and dinner hardly a thought, then you believed your grandmother when she told you, “Times are hard, but this, too, will pass.” You believed it because you had to. It wasn’t whether you were capable in life that mattered, it was whether you got a chance.

She didn’t like the way he’d said, cuties in typing, like the woman was something for him to enjoy, rather than a professional doing her job. Fathers shouldn’t talk that way; as Heddy saw it, once a man had a child, particularly a daughter, he should tamp down any vulgar aspects of his personality.

An “hourly girl”? The thought cut like a razor, and for the first time, it made her resent these women in updos and strappy sandals. If Heddy ever had money, she’d never make anyone feel like less because they worked in service. Her mother taught her to be thankful for any kindness the world showed her, and the two of them often listed three things they were grateful for over breakfast each morning, no matter how hard times were. She wondered what Jean-Rose was more grateful for—having two beautiful children, or having two servants, even “hourly” ones? Sadly, she guessed the answer was the latter.

While Jean-Rose is exceedingly friendly and quite likable, she’s also studied. She’s extra aware of what her words and behaviors reveal about her, and she acts as though shaping the family’s public face is of highest priority. Even if she’s friendly, I must remind myself that we are not friends.

The first few dates were always ripe with possibility. But at what point did cracks emerge in these men who seemed so good on paper?

Jean-Rose is powerful among the women she knows because of her link to Ted, but if Ted is this cruel, and if this has happened before, and she endures this cruelty to hold on to her social standing, then she may be the weakest person I know. It’s incredibly sad, and I judge her for staying, but I also understand. Maybe she’s scared? The cynic in me believes she puts up with it because Ted makes her feel strong on the outside, even if he’s shattering her on the inside.

At dinner parties with their friends, they would finish each other’s sentences, lavish compliments on each other, emit a magnetism few couples could emulate. And yet, in private, they seemed to cause only pain.

Heddy devoured books like others did chocolate. It was her way of escaping into another place whenever hers was too much to bear.

I’ve always thought that different doors are ways into different lives. Like, what would it be like to walk out one door and into another? I like to imagine the characters who would live in a penthouse, a Cape Cod, a sprawling beach house (...) But what goes on inside those houses, the lives of these characters, is all the same—love, betrayal, sadness, and joy.

She left home with one identity, but while away, she dared to step into another one. But it left her feeling lost, since she wasn’t firmly planted in the upper-crust circles at school or the working-class neighborhood back home. She was somehow both, teetering between the two worlds, lost in a way no one else she knew was.

The best part about growing up is that you get to write your own story.

You see, a lot of people go fishing, and they wait for a fish to bite. But we could sit here all day with these poles and nothing may come of it. The same is true for love.

You can’t make assumptions about people. On-screen, I get to control the ending. Real life is so much more disappointing.” Heddy tugged a shrimp off a skewer. “Maybe that’s why I want to be a writer. Then things can only be as bad as I make them.

That she might marry someone her equal, who needed her as much as she needed him, was a different way to think about marriage. Was it even possible that someone else would join her life, that there could ever be a “we” other than her and her mother? She knew there’d be a day when she’d lose her mother, and that she’d be alone then. But imagine having someone else, a backup—a life partner.

Fostering a total-system, user-oriented attitude may well be the most important function of the programming manager.