Kerr Quotes

I make mistakes; I'll be the second to admit it.

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?

When something needs to be said, you look for a man to say it. But when something needs actually to be done, you look for a woman.

Do you know how helpless you feel if you have a full cup of coffee in your hand and you start to sneeze?

A rose can never be a sunflower, and a sunflower can never be a rose.All flowers are beautiful in their own way, and that’s like women too. I want to encourage women to embrace their own uniqueness.

Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speak by something outside himself-like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks.

We all have bad days, but one thing is true; no cloud is so dark that the sun can't shine through.

Her essay about the wedding ring was short. Kerr wrote: "Things are just things - they have no power to hurt or to heal. Only people can do that. And we can all choose whether to be hurt or healed by the people who love us." That was all. And that was everything.

We are limited only by our thoughts

Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get home, but it doesn't always go with everything in the house.

On the whole it’s not wise to remind the devil that he’s the devil, especially when we were getting on so well.

To grant all a man's wishes is to take away his dreams and ambitions. Life is only worth living if you have something to strive for. To aim at.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation.

Focus your intention on your dreams, you can wave magic when you set your heart and mind to it

When you get a cat to catch the mice in your kitchen, you can't expect it to ignore the rats in the cellar.

Knowing yourself and coming to trust your feelings and your intuition will open up your life to greater possibilities and keep you moving toward your goals. One thing I have learned is that I should trust my 'gut' instincts. Ultimately, only we know what is best for us.

Sometimes, challenges and struggles are exactly what we need in our lives...May you welcome every effort, every struggle, and every challenge...May you open your wings and fly!

Obstacles are challenges for winners and excuses for losers

The only reason that they say, 'Women and children first' is to test the strength of the lifeboats.

I am my own person caoable of making my own decisions and choosing powerfully how i live. I appreciate and respect what others have to say but ultimately I choose how I live my life.

May the saddest day of your future be no worse than the happiest day of your past.

A rose can never be a sunflower, and sunflower can never be a rose.All flowers are beautiful in their own way, and that's like women too.I want to encuorage women to embrace their own uniqueness.

A wish is a dish that's a lot like a fish: Once it's been eaten it's harder to throw back. - Mr. Rakshasas

A rose can never be a sunflower, and a sunflower can never be a rose. All flowers are beautiful in their own way, and that's like women too.

The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.

Strangers take a long time to become acquainted, particularly when they are from the same family.

A man's bookseller should keep his confidence, like his physician. What can become of a world where every man knows what another man reads? Why, sir, books would become like quacks' potions, with every mountebank in the newspapers claiming one volume's superiority over another.

I am proud to be a woman. I am sensual, nurturing and compassionate woman. I am a woman of my word and I love who I am.

Dearer to me than the evening star A Packard car A Hershey bar Or a bride in her rich adorning Dearer than any of these by far Is to lie in bed in the morning

And tell them all about the books you've read. Better still, buy some more books and read them. That's an order. You can never read too many books.

I didn’t know you were interested in politics,’ I said. ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘But isn’t that how Hitler got elected in the first place: too many people who didn’t give a shit who was running the country?

it is always the women who rebuild the civilizations that the men have done their best to destroy

the real menace in dealing with a 5-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a 5-year-old.

Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them

He is suffering from delusions of adequacy.

By the hairy ass of lord hell." Many characters in the Deverry Cycle Novels

Looking round the room I found there were so many false eyelashes flapping at me that I was beginning to feel a draught.

Sometimes a stupid man is only a couple of good guesses away from looking clever.

We’ll come back,” said Papa. “I know,” said Anna... “But it won’t be the same - we won’t belong. Do you think we’ll ever really belong anywhere?” “I suppose not,” said Papa. “Not the way people belong who have lived in one place all their lives. But we’ll belong a little in lots of places, and I think that may be just as good.

Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.

I'm a big collector of things." "Am I a thing?" "No, you're my heart.

Change your life experiences through the thoughts you think. Practice thinking good thoughts and your life will reflect what you are thinking. We have the blessing of choice.

Leaders create leaders by passing on responsibility, creating ownership, accountability and trust.

She was not only a female, but a damned beautiful one.A gentleman would have turned away the moment he realized what was happening." ~Alex Kerr

All men come to resemble their fathers. That isn’t a tragedy, but you need a hell of a sense of humour to handle it.

Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

Winter came early that year. Snow filled the gray December air like fragments of torn-up hope

Now the thing about having a baby - and I can't be the first person to have noticed this - is that thereafter you have it.

society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never see’.

Halloween was the best holiday, in my opinion, because it was all about friends, monsters, and candy, rather than family and responsibility.

All wisdom is plagiarism; only stupidiy is original.

Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speech by something outside himself - like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks.

Looking at him I felt as if I had just met a powerful gorilla while at the same time being in possession of the world's last banana.

We all have wings, but it is up to each one of us to have the courage to fly.

Terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close.

A man might think he can stare into the abyss without falling in but sometimes the abyss stares back. Sometimes the abyss exerts a strange effect on your sense of balance.

Compared with the person who had decorated and furnished the place, the Archduke Ferdinand had been blessed with the taste of a troupe of Turkish circus dwarves.

I want you, bunny, and I'll have you. This will be the last night you cry alone.

Humility does not mean weakness, but its opposite. Leaders with mana understand the strength of humility. It allows them to connect with their deepest values and the wider world.

Sometimes I think God is just the devil pretending to be nice.

The challenge is to always improve, to always get better, even when you are the best. Especially when you are the best. Henry

I wonder if I'll ever forgive Evandar? I wonder even more if I should bother," Aderyn said. "Of course you should," Nevyn said wearily, "but for your own sake, not his. Hatred binds a man to what he hates, and I think me you need to be free of him.

I made an appointment to see him and then ordered another beer. While I was drinking it I did some doodling on a piece of paper, the algebraic kind that you hope will help you think more clearly. When I finished doing that, I was more confused than ever. Algebra was never my strong subject.

The best way to deal with jealousy is to just recognize it first if it comes up, breath with it and let it go, because you can never compare yourself to somebody else, because you are so different any unique,everybody is so different and unique, so focus on what your positive qualities are, and try and expand and grow on that so then u can be a better version of yourself.

I prefer to regard a dessert as I would imagine the perfect woman: subtle, a little bittersweet, not blowsy and extrovert. Delicately made up, not highly rouged. Holding back, not exposing everything and, of course, with a flavor that lasts.

Hope is the feeling that the feeling you have isn't permanent.

Horror does not need the dark, and sometimes a truly evil deed shuns the shadows.

Nothing perplexes us quite like our best pal's choice in a partner.

The real question here is what happens to you, Gunther. In many ways you’re a useful fellow to have around. Like a bent coat hanger in a toolbox, you’re not something that was ever designed for a specific job, but you do manage to come in useful sometimes.

He was as obsequious as a Japanese ivy plant. Wringing his hands as if he hoped to squeeze the milk of human kindness from his fingernails, ...

There is evil in the best of us, of course; but perhaps just a little bit more in the worst of us.

Believe me, I know a lot about harm's way. It turns sharp left off the road to Shitsville when you're least expecting it.

A second or two later, the reptile had been quite absorbed by a handsome, arrogant-looking Englishman smelling strongly of snobbery and snake.

The fight is won or lost,’ says Muhammad Ali, ‘far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, well before I dance under the lights.

Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence,’ wrote Tom Peters in Thriving on Chaos, ‘only in constant improvement and constant change.

I'd wait forever for you, Tiny. If you don't believe it now, you will when you're still stuck with me fifty years from now.

I can see my future in your eyes, Tiny

One day I hoped some thoughtful historian would point out the close connection between the Mercedes-Benz motor car and Germany’s favorite dictator and that the Lord would find a way to pay these bastards back for their help in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there.

The thing that worries me is that I'm so different from other writers. Connecticut is just another state to me. And nature - well, nature is just nature. When I see a tree whose leafy mouth is pressed against the earth's sweet flowing breast, I think, 'Well, that's a nice-looking oak,' but it doesn't change my way of life. Now I'm not going to stand here and run down trees and flowers. Personally, I have three snake plants of my own, and in a tearoom I'm the first one to notice the geraniums. But the point is, I keep my head.

The English make bonny speeches, but they run to an awful wee man. And the Kerrs . . . there’s something unchancy about a left-handed race.’ ‘I’m right-handed,’ offered Will Scott. ‘Aye.’ ‘And six foot three in my hose.’ ‘Uh-huh. I didna say I wanted to run up a beanpole. Nor have I heard hide nor hair of a speech, bonny or otherwise.’ ‘I’m saving it,’ he said austerely, ‘till I’ve the theme for it.’ ‘Oh!’ said Grizel Beaton (Younger) of Buccleuch, with a squeal of delight. ‘Will Scott! Are we having our first married set-to?

the man who succeeds is the man who is able to reduce problems to their simplest terms and who has the courage of his convictions - despite the objections of intellectuals. The courage to speak, perhaps, even when he believes that what he is suggesting sounds like madness.

A quick check on the platoon showed everyone more or less enjoying the flight. "Whatever it is you're eating, Ressk, swallow it before we land," [said Staff Sergeant Kerr]. "No problem, Staff." "More like whoever he's eating," Binti muttered beside him. "You ought to count your fingers," he suggested. "You're too serley stupid to notice one missing." "Maybe you ought to gren sa talamec to." "That's enough, people." When the Confederation first started integrating the di'Taykan and the Krai into what was predominantly a human military system, xenopsychologists among the elder races expected a number of problems. For the most part, those expectations fell short. After having dealt with the Mictok and the H'san, none of the younger races - all bipedal mammals - had any difficulty with each other's appearance. Cultural differences were absorbed into the prevailing military culture and the remaining problems were dealt with in the age-old military tradition of learning to say "up yours" in the other races' languages. The "us against them" mentality of war made for strange bedfellows.

Sometimes I wish I had tried to stay longer, but no matter how long I stayed, nothing would change the fact that I could turn the light back on, stand up, and walk out. I am not a prisoner; I am not trapped. I do have control over my life and my actions.

When I get nervous, I go to the library and hang around. The libraries are filled with people who are nervous. You can blend in with them there. You're bound to see someone more nervous than you are in a library. Sometimes the librarians themselves are more nervous than you are. I'll probably be a librarian for that reason. Then if I'm nervous on the job, it won't show. I'll just stamp books and look things up for people and run back and forth to the staff room sneaking smokes until I get hold of myself. A library is a great place to hid.

It seems right now that all I’ve ever done in my life is making my way here to you.’ I could see that Rosie could not place the line from The Bridges of Madison County that had produced such a powerful emotional reaction on the plane. She looked confused. ‘Don, what are you…what have you done to yourself?’ ‘I’ve made some changes.’ ‘Big changes.’ ‘Whatever behavioural modifications you require from me are a trivial price to pay for having you as my partner.’ Rosie made a downwards movement with her hand, which I could not interpret. Then she looked around the room and I followed her eyes. Everyone was watching. Nick had stopped partway to our table. I realised that in my intensity I had raised my voice. I didn’t care. ‘You are the world’s most perfect woman. All other women are irrelevant. Permanently. No Botox or implants will be required. ‘I need a minute to think,’ she said. I automatically started the timer on my watch. Suddenly Rosie started laughing. I looked at her, understandably puzzled at this outburst in the middle of a critical life decision. ‘The watch,’ she said. ‘I say “I need a minute” and you start timing. Don is not dead. 'Don, you don’t feel love, do you?’ said Rosie. ‘You can’t really love me.’ ‘Gene diagnosed love.’ I knew now that he had been wrong. I had watched thirteen romantic movies and felt nothing. That was not strictly true. I had felt suspense, curiosity and amusement. But I had not for one moment felt engaged in the love between the protagonists. I had cried no tears for Meg Ryan or Meryl Streep or Deborah Kerr or Vivien Leigh or Julia Roberts. I could not lie about so important a matter. ‘According to your definition, no.’ Rosie looked extremely unhappy. The evening had turned into a disaster. 'I thought my behaviour would make you happy, and instead it’s made you sad.’ ‘I’m upset because you can’t love me. Okay?’ This was worse! She wanted me to love her. And I was incapable. Gene and Claudia offered me a lift home, but I did not want to continue the conversation. I started walking, then accelerated to a jog. It made sense to get home before it rained. It also made sense to exercise hard and put the restaurant behind me as quickly as possible. The new shoes were workable, but the coat and tie were uncomfortable even on a cold night. I pulled off the jacket, the item that had made me temporarily acceptable in a world to which I did not belong, and threw it in a rubbish bin. The tie followed. On an impulse I retrieved the Daphne from the jacket and carried it in my hand for the remainder of the journey. There was rain in the air and my face was wet as I reached the safety of my apartment.

Without a degree of risk, there is little chance for the enormous mixture of relief and achievement that follows in its steps. It is the leap that goes on to support even greater attempts at the seemingly impossible challenges that the world often uses to sort the men from the boys, and of course, the women from the girls!

It was an interesting dilemma and pointed up a real point of difference between Nazism and Communism as forms of government: there was no room for the individual in Soviet Russia; conversely not everything was state-managed in Germany. The Nazis never shot anyone for being stupid, inefficient or just plain unlucky. Generally speaking the Nazis looked for a reason to shoot you, the commies were quite happy to shoot you without any reason at all - but when you're going to be shot, what's the difference?

In any event, whether a supernatural tale remains altogether fantastic or eventually modulates to the uncanny or the marvelous, the reader is faced with disconcerting ontological and perceptual problems. Indeed, the disorienting effect of the supernatural encounter in fiction seems to reflect some deeper disorientations in the culture at large.

Psychic change, as Todorov has recognized, subverted the genre in another way, by revoking the cultural taboos, the social censorship, that had prohibited the overt treatment of psychosexual themes, which then found covert expression in the supernatural tale. 'There is no need today to resort to the devil [or to posthumous reverie] in order to speak of excessive sexual desire, and none to resort to vampires in order to designate the attraction exerted by corpses: psychoanalysis, and the literature which is directly or indirectly inspired by it, deal with these matters in undisguised terms. The themes of fantastic literature have become, literally, the very themes of the psychological investigations of the last fifty years.

It is described by some as a moment when the world stops moving...it did just that for me. I knew before she said one word or made a single movement, that our lives would begin to dissolve into each other... we would never part again. This was not love at first sight, but rather second. I had fallen in love at eleven; now I was twenty and now all things were possible.

It wasna a man,’ said Andrew Kerr broadly. ‘T’was my aunty. I tellt ye. I’m no risking cauld steel in ma wame for a pittance, unless all that’s mine is well lookit after—’ ‘An old lady,’ said Lord Grey with forbearance, ‘in curling papers and a palatial absence of teeth?’ ‘My aunt Lizzie!’ said Andrew Kerr. ‘She has just,’ said Lord Grey austerely, ‘seriously injured one of my men.’ ‘How?’ The old savage looked interested. ‘From an upper window. The castle was burning, and he was climbing a ladder to offer the lady her freedom. She cracked his head with a chamberpot,’ said Lord Grey distastefully, ‘and retired crying that she would have no need of a jurden in Heaven, as the good Lord had no doubt thought of more convenient methods after the seventh day, when He had had a good rest.

Oftentimes, in the evening after they have finished spreading the fertiliser, the writer and his wife sit on the fence - with a wonderful sense of "togetherness" - and listen to the magic symphony of the crickets. I can understand that. Around our house, we're pretty busy, and of course we're not the least bit integrated, but nevertheless my husband and I often sit together in the deepening twilight and listen to the sweet, gentle slosh-click, slosh-click of the dishwasher. He smiles and I smile. Oh, it's a golden moment.

If he was a member of the human race at all, Neumann was its least attractive specimen. His eyebrows, twitching and curling like two poisoned caterpillars, were joined together by an irregular scribble of poorly matched hair. Behind thick glasses that were almost opaque with greasy thumbprints, his grey eyes were shifty and nervous, searching the floor as if he expected that at any moment he would be lying flat on it. Cigarette smoke poured out from between teeth that were so badly stained with tobacco they looked like two wooden fences.

Tea has nothing to do with being hungry," said Nimrod. "For Englishmen, it is like a canonical hour. And almost as much of an important ritual as the tea ceremony in Japan. Except for one thing. With tea, in Japan, recognition is given that every human encounter is a singular occasion which can, and will, never recur again exactly. Thus every aspect of tea must be savored for what it gives the participants. But in England, the significance occurs in the fact that teas is always the same, and will always recur again and again, exactly . For how is the endurance of a great civilization to be measured?

Why has pachinko swept Japan? It can hardly be the excitement of gambling, since the risks and rewards are so small. During the hours spent in front of a pachinko machine, there is an almost total lack of stimulation other than the occasional rush of ball bearings. There is no thought, no movement; you have no control over the flow of balls, apart from holding a little lever which shoots them up to the top of the machine; you sit there enveloped in a cloud of heavy cigarette smoke, semi-dazed by the racket of millions of ball bearings falling through machines around you. Pachinko verges on sensory deprivation. It is the ultimate mental numbing, the final victory of the educational system." - Lost Japan, Eng. vers., 1996

Supernatural fiction contains its own generic borderland: a neutral territory, which Tzvetan Todorov calls 'the fantastic,' between 'the marvelous' and 'the uncanny.' According to Todorov, 'The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.' Once the event is satisfactorily explained (and sometimes it is never explained), we have left the fantastic for an adjacent genre - either 'the uncanny,' where the apparently supernatural is revealed as illusory, or 'the marvelous,' where the laws of ordinary reality must be revised to incorporate the supernatural. As long as uncertainty reigns, however, we are in the ambiguous realm of the fantastic.

Kerr found that a spinning black hole would not collapse into a pointlike star, as Schwarzschild assumed, but would collapse into a spinning ring. Anyone unfortunate enough to hit the ring would perish; but someone falling into the ring would not die, but would actually fall through. But instead of winding up on the other side of the ring, he or she would pass through the Einstein-Rosen Bridge and wind up in another universe. In other words, the spinning black hole is the rim of Alice's Looking Glass. If he or she were to move around the spinning ring a second time, he or she would enter yet another universe. In fact, repeated entry into the spinning ring would put a person in different parallel universes, much like hitting the "up" button on an elevator. In principle, there could be an infinite number of universes, each stacked on top of each other. "Pass through this magic ring and-presto!-you're in a completely different universe where radius and mass are negative!" Kerr wrote. There is an important catch, however. Black holes are examples of "nontransversable wormholes"; that is, passing through the event horizon is a one-way trip. Once you pass through the event horizon and the Kerr ring, you cannot go backward through the ring and out through the event horizon.

Sometimes when a person is not being heard, it is appropriate to blame him or her. Perhaps he or she is speaking obscurely; perhaps he is claiming too much; perhaps she is speaking rather too personally. And one can, perhaps, charge Spielrein on all three counts. But, on balance, her inability to win recognition for her insight into repression was not her fault; it was Freud’s and Jung’s. Preoccupied with their own theories, and with each other, the two men simply did not pause even to take in the ideas of this junior colleague let alone to lend a helping hand in finding a more felicitous expression for her thought. More ominously still, both men privately justified their disregard by implicitly casting her once more into the role of patient, as though that role somehow precluded a person from having a voice or a vision of his or her own. It was and remains a damning comment on how psychoanalysis was evolving that so unfair a rhetorical maneuver, one so at odds with the essential genius of the new therapeutic method, came so easily to hand. In the great race between Freud and Jung to systematize psychoanalytic theory, to codify it once and for all, a simpler truth was lost sight of: Sometimes a person is not heard because she is not listened to.

RED HEAD Tight, inhibited, results-oriented, anxious, aggressive, over-compensating, desperate. BLUE HEAD Loose, expressive, in the moment, calm, clear, accurate, on task. It’s what tennis coach Nick Bollettieri calls the ‘centipede effect’. If a centipede had to think about moving all its legs in the right order, it would freeze, the task too complex and daunting. The same is true of humans. Red is what Suvorov called ‘the Dark’. It is that fixated negative content loop of self-judgement, rigidity, aggression, shut down and panic. Blue is what he called ‘the Light’ – a deep calmness in which you are on task, in the zone, on your game, in control and in flow. It applies to the military; it applies to sport; it applies to business. In the heat of battle, the difference between the inhibitions of the Red and the freedom of Blue is the manner in which we control our attention. It works like this: where we direct our mind is where our thoughts will take us; our thoughts create an emotion; the emotion defines our behaviour; our behaviour defines our performance. So, simply, if we can control our attention, and therefore our thoughts, we can manage our emotions and enhance our performance.

Barbara and I had arrived early, so I got to admire everyone’s entrance. We were seated at tables around a dance floor that had been set up on the lawn behind the house. Barbara and I shared a table with Deborah Kerr and her husband. Deborah, a lovely English redhead, had been brought to Hollywood to play opposite Clark Gable in The Hucksters. Louis B. Mayer needed a cool, refined beauty to replace the enormously popular redhead, Greer Garson, who had married a wealthy oil magnate and retired from the screen in the mid-fifties. Deborah, like her predecessor, had an ultra-ladylike air about her that was misleading. In fact, she was quick, sharp, and very funny. She and Barbara got along like old school chums. Jimmy Stewart was also there with his wife. It was the first time I’d seen him since we’d worked for Hitchcock. It was a treat talking to him, and I felt closer to him than I ever did on the set of Rope. He was so genuinely happy for my success in Strangers on a Train that I was quite moved. Clark Gable arrived late, and it was a star entrance to remember. He stopped for a moment at the top of the steps that led down to the garden. He was alone, tanned, and wearing a white suit. He radiated charisma. He really was the King. The party was elegant. Hot Polynesian hors d’oeuvres were passed around during drinks. Dinner was very French, with consommé madrilène as a first course followed by cold poached salmon and asparagus hollandaise. During dessert, a lemon soufflé, and coffee, the cocktail pianist by the pool, who had been playing through dinner, was discreetly augmented by a rhythm section, and they became a small combo for dancing. The dance floor was set up on the lawn near an open bar, and the whole garden glowed with colored paper lanterns. Later in the evening, I managed a subdued jitterbug with Deborah Kerr, who was much livelier than her cool on-screen image. She had not yet done From Here to Eternity, in which she and Burt Lancaster steamed up the screen with their love scene in the surf. I was, of course, extremely impressed to be there with Hollywood royalty that evening, but as far as parties go, I realized that I had a lot more fun at Gene Kelly’s open houses.