Garrison Keillor Lake Wobegon Quotes

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

If you lived today as if it were your last, you'd buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn't you?

Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.

He was admired for never being at a loss for words and never wasting any either.

The rich can afford to be progressive. Poor people have reason to be afraid of the future.

You're such a big liar you gotta get your neighbor to call your dog.

If you can't read a simple goddam sign and follow one simple goddam instruction then get your fat butt the hell out of here.

My God, rich people have the time to praise You if they want to, but the poor people are so busy, accept their work as praise because, my God, they don’t have time for everything.

Free enterprise runs on self interest. This is socialism and it runs on loyalty . . . if people were going to live by comparison shopping, the town would go bust . . . If you live there you have to take it as a whole. That's loyalty.

What would people think?' Jesus said that people think all sorts of things. The human mind is like a cloud of gnats. Constant motion. That's why you have to look at the heart. 'Oh,' said Grandpa.

... you are never so smart again in a language learned in middle age nor so romantic, brave or kind.

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known

I can see how I could write a bold account of myself as a passionate man who rose from humble beginnings to cut a wide swath in the world, whose crimes along the way might be written off to extravagance and love and art, and could even almost believe some of it myself on certain days after the sun went down if I’d had a snort or two and was in Los Angeles and it was February and I was twenty-four, but I find a truer account in the Herald-Star, where it says: “Mr. Gary Keillor visited at the home of Al and Florence Crandall on Monday and after lunch returned to St. Paul, where he is currently employed in the radio show business… Lunch was fried chicken with gravy and creamed peas”.

If you can't trust your can open, then what?

If you can't trust your can opener, then what? Is your wastebasket going to get you?

Napoleon said, “The main use of religion is to keep the common people from murdering the rich.

Good old Norwegian cooking: you don't read much about that, or about good old Norwegian hospitality.

He takes a kitchen chair and sits in the yard and all the ducks come around. He holds up the cheese curls in one hand and caramel popcorn in the other and his audience looks up and he tells them a joke. He says: So one day a duck come into this bar and ordered a whiskey and a bump and the bartender was pretty surprised, he says, "You know we don't get many of you ducks in here." The duck says, "At these prices I'm not surprised.* And he tosses out the popcorn and they laugh. 'Wak wak wak wak wak. I was shot in the leg in the war.' Have a scar? 'No thanks, I don't smoke.

smake saa god vaer saa god du er saa snille mange takk mange mange takk.

He (coach) looks for size, speed being rare among Norwegians and Germans, and for malleability or what he calls attitude.

It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was warm and bright and the trees were in full color, magnificent, explosive, like permanent fireworks — reds and yellows, oranges, some so brilliant that Crayola never put them in crayons for fear the children would color outside the lines. ["Eloise"]

A major cause of injury to children is parents rushing to the scene. The panic reflex. Some children love to scream for the thrill of making immense people move fast. I remember that, on a quiet day, my sister and I in the backyard wondered, “Where’s Mom?” Upstairs, we thought. So I screamed, “MOM.” She made it down in two seconds. A good pair of wheels for an old lady.

And I wrote a story for private circulation, "Miss Lewis & the Giant Turd," about a painful bowel movement that began in class, as she was drilling us on prepositions. Suddenly she emitted a low scraping sound like a box of rocks being dragged across concrete--like a glacier moving!--and she let out an AIIIIEEEEEEE and bent over double and hobbled to the girls' room, where she fell to the floor and cried pitifully for the janitor, who rushed in with a plunger and tried to extract the fecal mass from her, but it was too immense, and then the fire department arrived and laid her over the sink and attached a suction pump, two men on either side of her skinny butt, working a lever, and they managed to suction the poop out of her, and when they were done, she weighed forty-five pounds. And she couldn't teach anymore, she just sat on her front step waving to passing cars. This title passed from pupil to pupil, two grimy sheets of paper folded to pocket size.... The story found its way to Laura, Miss Lewis's pet, who handed it over to her, and she read it, thin-lipped, and tore it into tiny pieces and dropped them into the wastebacket. "This is so childish it doesn't bear talking about," she said. "It is beneath contempt.

As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o'clock and time to get  up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o'clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulators that Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to achieve perfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was - as anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa,when his house burned down when Grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the rest of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor ( which faced north as his former bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and then moved in his mind to the house he'd grown up in, and in the end didn't know one day from another until he died." Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," but there's more than one kind of of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great-grandpa. He died of misdirection.

Du skal ikke tror at du er noget. “Don’t think you’re somebody.

As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o'clock and time to get  up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o'clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulatorsthat Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to ahieveperfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was - as  anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa,when his house burned down when Grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the test of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor ( which faced north as his former bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and 5hen moved in his mind to the house he'd grown up in, and in the end didn't know one day from another until he died." Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," but there's more than one kind of of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great- grandpa. He died of misdirection. " /

In recent years, scientists have begun to notice larger patterns in our biases. One of those is often described as our “psychological immune system.” If you believe your own life hopeless, then what’s the point of pushing on? To guard against this, we’ve developed a psychological immune system: a set of biases that keep us ridiculously cocksure. In hundreds of studies, researchers have consistently found that we overestimate our own attractiveness, intelligence, work ethic, chances for success (be it winning the lottery or getting a promotion), chances of avoiding a negative outcome (bankruptcy, getting cancer), impact on external events, impact on other people, and even the superiority of our own peer group (known as the Lake Wobegon Effect after author Garrison Keillor’s fictional happyland “where all the children are above average”). But there’s a flip side: while we seriously overestimate ourselves, we significantly underestimate the world at large. Human beings are designed to be local optimists and global pessimists and this is an even bigger problem for abundance.

Our propensity to overvalue what we own is a basic human bias, and it reflects a more general tendency to fall in love with, and be overly optimistic about, anything that has to do with ourselves. Think about it - don't you feel that you are a better-than-average driver, are more likely to be able to afford retirement, and are less likely to suffer from high cholesterol, get a divorce, or get a parking ticket if you overstay your meter by a few minutes? This positivity bias, as psychologists call it, has another name: "The Lake Wobegone Effect", named after the fictional town in Garrison Keillor's popular radio series 'A Prairie Home Companion', In Lake Wobegone, according to Keillor, "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." I don't think we can become more accurate and objective in the way we think about our children and houses, but maybe we can realize that we have such biases and listen more carefully to the advice and feedback we get from the others.