Humphrey Quotes

If you want me, just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow." (as Marie 'Slim' Browning in To Have and Have Not)

Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life.

You know a relationship has deteriorated past the point of salvage when one person detests another's gestures.

It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened.

I am in the process of nailing Mr. Humphrey Griffin to the wall so thoroughly that future generations will mistake him for a tapestry,...

I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

The test we must set for ourselves is not to march alone but to march in such a way that others will wish to join us.

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

The trouble with the world is that it's always one drink behind.

The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.

Love is a slippery slope and it's so easy to fall.

Clarification is not to clarify things. It is to put one’s self in the clear (Sir Humphrey Appleby)

Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.

All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away.

Open the fridge and put My heart on a plate. I'm just as you left me, and I taste even better leftover.

Sometimes the greatest gift you can give someone is to accept whatever it is they’ve got to offer you

From here on in, Harry, I may be as woefully wrong as Humphrey Belcher who believed the time was ripe for a cheese cauldron.

Don't even think of arguing with me. I'm an old woman and if you fight me about it, it could give me a heart attack.

Taste of metal on my tongue. Poison the color of envy- I'm delirious, you're delicious, I'm deluded and delusional. I'm lost without you. I need you.

I really am fine,” Humphrey said in the corridor. “I just got old by accident.

Things are never so bad they can't be made worse.

This is what I know about love. That it is tested every day, and what is not renewed is lost. One chooses either to care more or to care less. Once the choice is to care less, then there is no stopping the momentum of goodbye.

She closed Dan's door and walked down the hall to her room. He makes a good boyfriend, she repeated to herself. What the hell was that suppose to mean? She didn't just want a good boyfriend. She wanted that thing Gustav Klimt had captured so perfectly in The Kiss. That radiant, electric, hold-me-tight-so-I don't-fall-from-up-here-in-the-sky feeling of being in love. Well, don't we all, sweetie?

People Should not be protected from the world.. -It cripples them.

Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts. It's what you do with what you have left.

The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind.

I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis.

When people say they are happy for you it may mean they are sad for themselves.

"The whole world is three drinks behind. If everyone in the world would take three drinks, we would have no trouble. If Stalin, Truman and everybody else in the world had three drinks right now, we’d all loosen up and we wouldn’t need the United Nations.

You are the beautiful and elusive pinpoint of radiance that lit up the darkness and called me home.

I dont mind a reasonable amount of trouble

A hotdog at the ballgame beats roast beef at the Ritz

...his girl was on the tentacles of expectation about it. (From Mr. Humphreys and his Inheritance)

You people voted for Hubert Humphrey and killed Jesus!

The senate is a place filled with goodwill and good intentions, and if the road to hell is paved with them, then it's a pretty good detour. Hubert Humphrey, as quoted by Biden, p. 134

In life it isn't what you've lost, it's what you've got left that counts

I watched as Humphrey Bogart’s character used beans as a metaphor for the relative unimportance in the wider world of his relationship with Ingrid Bergman’s character, and chose logic and decency ahead of his selfish emotional desires. The quandary and resulting decision made for an engrossing film. But this was not what people cried about. They were in love and could not be together. I repeated this statement to myself, trying to force an emotional reaction. I couldn’t. I didn’t care. I had enough problems of my own.

The only good reason to have money is this: so that you can tell any SOB in the world to go to hell.

I am in the process of nailing Mr. Humphrey Griffin to the wall so thoroughly that future generations will mistake him for a tapestry,” said Crane.

You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

The heart is a river. The act of writing is the moving water that holds the banks apart, keeps the muscle of words flexing so that the reader can be carried along by this movement. To be given space and the chance to leave one's earthly world. Is there any greater freedom than this?

Life is too brief and too rich to tiptoe through half-heartedly, rather than galloping at it with whooping excitement and ambition.

Like most good looking women, she was never sure of her beauty, and had to keep checking on it, to make sure it was still there.

the problems of three little people in a big world don't add up to much

What I've always found interesting in gardens is looking at what people choose to plant there. What they put in. What they leave out. One small choice and then another, and soon there is a mood, an atmosphere, a series of limitations, a world.

Paperwork is the religion of the Civil Service. I can just imagine Sir Humphrey Appleby on his deathbed, surround by wills and insurance claim forms, looking up and saying, 'I cannot go yet, God, I haven't done the paperwork.

But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver. No, said Tolkien, they are not. ...just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil. You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand.

And though he liked drawing trees he liked most of all to be with trees. He would climb them, lean against them, even talk to them. It saddened him to discover the not everyone shared his feelings towards them.

[...] "boy meets the girl, they fall in love but - oh - they can't possibly be together because of some terrible but really very easy-to-resolve misunderstanding" plots that always ended happily ever after with a passionate kiss and/or a wedding [...]

Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.

The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love.

It's physics. Pure physics, I'm falling fast and faster still. So fall with me. Fall down with me. And stay.

Who said anything about justice? There's no such thing. But injustice is as much a part of life as the weather.

At thirteen desperately watching TV, curling my long legs under me, desperately reading books, callow adolescent that I was, trying (desperately!) to find someone in books, in movies, in life, in history, to tell me it was O.K. to be ambitious, O.K. to be loud, O.K. to be Humphrey Bogart (smart and rudeness), O.K. to be James Bond (arrogance), O.K. to be Superman (power), O.K. to be Douglas Fairbanks (swashbuckling), to tell me self-love was all right, to tell me I could love God and Art and Myself better than anything on earth and still have orgasms.

But the moods could be contagious. He didn't need one right now.

Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate.

I’m told that Sherlock Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson” (at least in the Arthur Conan Doyle books) Jimmy Cagney never said, “You dirty rat”; and Humphrey Bogart never said, “Play it again, Sam.” But they might as well have, because these apocrypha have firmly insinuated themselves into popular culture.

The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life – the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.

Quotes ain’t all that useful. Fact is, there’s more concise ways to express what you’re feelin’, like screams and moans.

Time doesn’t really soften anything. Memories heave up, you know. Still sharp.” “Forgetting takes practice,” says Enid. “You have to work at it.

Squeak-squeak squeak, squeak-squeak squeak. Squeak . . .

The thing about the black market is, it’s racist. White children make useful slaves, too.

You can learn a lot about yourself by getting to know another species. Even humans.

You are one sexy bitch

To put it simply: There was no bunk about Bogie. He was a man.

When a writer writes, it's as if she holds the sides of her chest apart, exposes her beating heart. And even though everything wants to heal, to close over and protect the heart, the writer must keep it bare, exposed.

This is the stuff dreams are made of, right?" I could've pointed out the misquotation; everybody goes for Humphrey Bogarst's famous like from The Maltese Falcon, when the words actually are "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" and they belong to Master Shakespeare, but you know what? With all due to respect to the women's movement, the fact is that, on rare occasions, silence really is a girl's best garment. So I just smiled instead.

Memory is a barricade against forgetting; light is a bulwark against darkness; life is a flex against the stillness of the grave. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here, clear a space in all the debris, through all the anxieties and worries, where I can just exist, easily and simply, entire, for as long as I have left.

People do sometimes change, of course. Habits, allegiances, dreams are all alterable, but only under extraordinary pressure - like great love, fear, grief. More often, people don't change. A girl who never missed a day of work does not suddenly decide to stay home in bed, for no good reason.

Good. Drink your tea," he ordered. "It will make you feel better." Nothing will make me feel better, she thought, but she drank it down. It was hot and sweet. Mr. Humphreys must have put his entire month's sugar ration into it. She drained the cup, feeling ashamed of herself. She wasn't the only one who'd had a bad night.

My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time . . .

She had been wrong in thinking Christ had been called up against his will to fight in a war. He didn't look - in spite of the crown of thorns - like someone making a sacrifice. Or even like someone determined to "do his bit". He looked instead like Marjorie had looked telling Polly she'd joined the Nursing Service, like Mr Humphreys had looked filling buckets with water and sand to save Saint Paul's, like Miss Laburnum had looked that day she came to Townsend Brothers with the coats. He looked like Captain Faulknor must have looked, lashing the ships together. Like Ernest Shackleton, setting out in that tiny boat across icy seas. Like Colin helping Mr Dunworthy across the wreckage. He looked ... contented. As if he was where he wanted to be, doing what he wanted to do. Like Eileen had looked, telling Polly she'd decided to stay. Like Mike must have looked in Kent, composing engagement announcements and letters to the editor. Like I must have looked there in the rubble with Sir Godfrey, my hand pressed against his heart. Exalted. Happy. To do something for someone or something you loved - England or Shakespeare or a dog or the Hodbins or history - wasn't a sacrifice at all. Even if it cost you your freedom, your life, your youth.

In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.

You're a good man, sister

You have to decide whats most important to you. Keeping your pride and getting nothing or taking a risk and maybe, maybe having everything.

With tractors, you just don’t get the feel of tilling that land. So when planting season comes around, I use a hoe. To grow one useful whore, that’s the motto of my pimp farm.

They were wrapped in each other's arms, lips and tongues dancing, and their hands exploring each other with wild abandon. With a wave of his hand and a seductively wicked wink, he divested them both of their clothing,

Sometimes all you need is to climb a simple hill, to spend time staring at an empty horizon, to jump into a cold river or sleep under the stars, or perhaps share a whisky at a small country inn in order to remind yourself what matters most to you in life.

You can't drown yourself that simply. All good suicides involve speed and irreversibility, because the body will always move to protect itself against the sicko mind trying to do it in.

We cannot use a double standard for measuring our own and other people's policies. Our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantees of those practiced in our own country.

The point, dear Davis, is that sometimes what you want is nothing more than to put your name beside someone else's, someone whom you love. Stretch your name out alongside theirs as though it was you, lying next to them.

It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.

There is a sense of muted desperation in Democratic ranks at the prospect of getting stuck—and beaten once again—with some tried and half-true hack like Humphrey, Jackson, or Muskie… and George McGovern, the only candidate in either party worth voting for, is hung in a frustrated limbo created mainly by the gross cynicism of the Washington Press Corps. “He’d be a fine President,” they say, “but of course he can’t possibly win.” Why not? Well

You cannot go around and keep score. If you keep score on the good things and the bad things, you'll find out that you're a very miserable person. God gave man the ability to forget, which is one of the greatest attributes you have. Because if you remember everything that's happened to you, you generally remember that which is the most unfortunate.

We can do it out here?” Sophie asked, looking uncertainly at the village around them. “Clive can,” Jason said. “He’s more flexible than most, so he can do it just about anywhere you have a flat space.” “It might seem unusual for the two of you to just up and do it in the middle of a village square,” Humphrey said, “but it’s something the villagers will be eager to see.” “It won’t take long,” Jason said. “Clive can just slip it into you out here and we can head off.” “He’s right; it won’t take long,” Clive assured her. “Even in less comfortable conditions, I’m very quick to finish.” “Alright,” Sophie said. “It’s not like it’s my first time.” “You heard the lady, Clive,” Jason said. “Whip it out.

I'm beginning to feel as though everything has happened before, that our story has already been told. Just as we were powerless to stop the fox stealing the chicken, so there seems to be an inevitability to all that takes place at Mosel. This is a ghost story. And we have somehow become the ghosts of these young men who worked this estate before the Great War. The living are the dead.

I don't think anymore that my life is about what has happened to me. It's about what I choose to believe. It's not what I can see, but what I think is out there. And in the end, this end, here is what I believe. The heart is a wild and fugitive creature. The heart is a dog who comes home.

best Hitchcock films not made by Hitchcock. Here we go: Le Boucher, the early Claude Chabrol that Hitch, according to lore, wished he’d directed. Dark Passage, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall—a San Francisco valentine, all velveteen with fog, and antecedent to any movie in which a character goes under the knife to disguise himself. Niagara, starring Marilyn Monroe; Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn; Sudden Fear!, starring Joan Crawford’s eyebrows. Wait Until Dark: Hepburn again, a blind woman stranded in her basement apartment. I’d go berserk in a basement apartment.

Double Indemnity, Gaslight, Saboteur, The Big Clock . . . We lived in monochrome those nights. For me, it was a chance to revisit old friends; for Ed, it was an opportunity to make new ones. And we’d make lists. The Thin Man franchise, ranked from best (the original) to worst (Song of the Thin Man). Top movies from the bumper crop of 1944. Joseph Cotten’s finest moments. I can do lists on my own, of course. For instance: best Hitchcock films not made by Hitchcock. Here we go: Le Boucher, the early Claude Chabrol that Hitch, according to lore, wished he’d directed. Dark Passage, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall—a San Francisco valentine, all velveteen with fog, and antecedent to any movie in which a character goes under the knife to disguise himself. Niagara, starring Marilyn Monroe; Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn; Sudden Fear!, starring Joan Crawford’s eyebrows. Wait Until Dark: Hepburn again, a blind woman stranded in her basement apartment. I’d go berserk in a basement apartment.

Someone told me once, ‘It’s time to get you a pair of overalls, boy.’ But I don’t believe in summing up nothin’ – I let my experiences speak for themselves – and even if I did, a synopsis should be singular. That’s why every time I go out to work in the fields, I work naked. It lets my neighbors speak of my experiences for me.

I wanted him to be a poet. I wanted him to adventure out into the world and learn its ways, not losing himself in the jumble of life but seeing it in the poet's eye, and withdrawing after in the library room where he could write his poems of revelation. He would tell what he had seen. He never wrote a word in his life. But he did see.

There are words in my life that I wish I'd never said. I wish I'd never told my wife that I loved her, because then I had to line up all my actions with those words. I had to always act like that was true. And those three words, I love you, should never be used if you don't mean them. My lying has meant I will never get to use them on anyone else. I went against my own truth, my own heart, and there is really no coming back from that.

The poet was, of course, always present to assist the debater. Though the logic of Lewis's Christian apologetics may be fallible, the imagination of the writing with its brilliantly-conceived analogies is itself enough to win a reader to his side. As Austin Farrer expressed it, "We think we are listening to an argument; in fact we are presented with a vision; and it is the vision that carries conviction.

If she were their mother she'd teach them these things are nothing, the clothes and toys and furniture. These things fool people into thinking they must stay where the things are. Leave it all, she'd teach them, even your hopes, and all the dreams of safe, calm places. Go with what is most terrifying, the dizzying empty night and the lonely stars until night slows and you see the whole design. Always choose love over safety if you can tell the difference...

Well, I mean I have forgotten how to go anywhere alone. There are things you have to do. Like throw money into a toll basket on a highway. I'd pull up to it now and panic. Or what if I had to hail a cab? It's hard to believe, but I used to be able to do things when I was twenty that are impossible now [...] It's more than the physical task. It's ...a vision of yourself. If you don't see yourself as being able to do it, then you can't, no matter how easy it is.

The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing... There are times when the simple dignity of movement can fulfill the function of a volume of words. There are movements which impinge upon the nerves with a strength that is incomparable, for movement has power to stir the senses and emotions, unique in itself. This is the dancer's justification for being, and his reason for searching further for deeper aspects of his art.

George Williams, the revered evolutionary biologist, describes the natural world as “grossly immoral.” Having no foresight or compassion, natural selection “can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness.” On top of all the miseries inflicted by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own kind. Infanticide, siblicide, and rape can be observed in many kinds of animals; infidelity is common even in so-called pair-bonded species; cannibalism can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarians; death from fighting is more common in most animal species than it is in the most violent American cities. Commenting on how biologists used to describe the killing of starving deer by mountain lions as an act of mercy, Williams wrote: “The simple facts are that both predation and starvation are painful prospects for deer, and that the lion's lot is no more enviable. Perhaps biology would have been able to mature more rapidly in a culture not dominated by Judeo-Christian theology and the Romantic tradition. It might have been well served by the First Holy Truth from [Buddha's] Sermon at Benares: “Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful...”” As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a “natural” trait is the same as condoning it. As Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.

Or rather, it made him into two people. He was by nature a cheerful almost irrepressible person with a great zest for life. He loved good talk and physical activity. He had a deep sense of humour and a great capacity for making friends. But from now onwards there was to be a second side, more private but predominant in his diaries and letters. This side of him was capable of bouts of profound despair. More precisely, and more closely related to his mother's death, when he was in this mood he had a deep sense of impending loss. Nothing was safe. Nothing would last. No battle would be won for ever.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: The Foreign Office is pro-Europe because it’s really anti-Europe. The civil service was united in its desire to make sure that the Common Market didn’t work. That’s why we went into it. Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least 500 years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, French and Italians against the Germans, and the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it’s worked so well? Jim Hacker: It’s all ancient history, surely. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes, and current policy. We had to break the whole thing up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn’t work. Now that we are inside, we can make a big pig’s breakfast of the whole thing! Set the Germans against the French, French against Italians, Italians against Dutch —The Foreign Office is terribly pleased! It’s just like old times! Jim Hacker: Surely we are committed to the European ideal! Sir Humphrey Appleby: Really, Minister! Jim Hacker: If not, why are we pressing for an increase in membership? Sir Humphrey Appleby: For the same reason. It's just like the United Nations, in fact. The more members it has, the more arguments it can stir up, the more futile and impotent it becomes. Jim Hacker: What appalling cynicism! Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes. We call it diplomacy, Minister.