Madonna Best Quotes

We learn our lessons; we get hurt; we want revenge. Then we realize that actually, happiness and forgiving people is the best revenge.

The time between your first major fight with your best friend until you make up is, for a teenage girl, about as long as it took for God to create the universe. . . . It's excellent training for having a boyfriend.

The two of us praying like this to the Black Madonna Sudenly washes over me, and I'm filled with love for my mother. The best gift she has give me is the constancy of her belief. Whatever I become, she loves me. To her, I am enough.

Mrs. Tulliver was what is called a good-tempered person,–never cried, when she was a baby, on any slighter ground than hunger and pins; and from the cradle upward had been healthy, fair, plump, and dull-witted; in short, the flower of her family for beauty and amiability. But milk and mildness are not the best things for keeping, and when they turn only a little sour, they may disagree with young stomachs seriously. I have often wondered whether those early Madonnas of Raphael, with the blond faces and somewhat stupid expression, kept their placidity undisturbed when their strong-limbed, strong-willed boys got a little too old to do without clothing. I think they must have been given to feeble remonstrance, getting more and more peevish as it became more and more ineffectual.

For the Langs, Madonna was totally and completely out of the question. But when Gretchen's dad was at work and her mom was taking one of her nine billion classes (Jazzercise, power walking, book club, wine club, sewing circle, women's prayer circle), Gretchen and Abby would dress up like the Material Girl and sing into the mirror. Gretchen's mom had a jewelry box devoted entirely to crosses, so it was basically like she was inviting them to do it.

I don’t think anyone, my publishers, my agent, or myself, expected the book to do anything like as well as it did. It was in the London Sunday Times best-seller list for 237 weeks, longer than any other book (apparently, the Bible and Shakespeare aren’t counted). It has been translated into something like forty languages and has sold about one copy for every 750 men, women, and children in the world. As Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft (a former post-doc of mine) remarked: I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex.

By the power of lost retainers and Jamaica and bad cornrows and fireflies and Madonna, by all these things I rebuke you.

t is quite important to find the best thing to do. It is much more important to find something to do. If I were a young artist, I would paint soap advertisements, if that were all opportunity offered, until I got ahead enough to indulge in the painting of madonnas and landscapes. If I were a young musician, I would rather play in a street band than not at all. If I were a young writer, I would do hack work, if necessary, until I became able to write the Great American Novel. I would go to work. Nothing in all this world I have found is so good as work.

I have no illusions that I, by myself, pose any threat to the current status quo. They, who have effectively neutered and marginalized the population so greatly, that a coffee-table book of Madonna’s twat constitutes a greater threat in Americans’ minds than does a 150-billion-dollar defense budget during peacetime (more on Madonna’s twat later.)... ...For all the lip service being paid by our candidates for the need to change, it looks like Business As Usual here in America. So, who am I supporting? Which candidate best represents my interests? As for me, I’m voting for Madonna’s twat.

It’s like lifting—when you’re deep in a set, your arms are shaking and you’re a melting candle of pain that’s burned down to zero; you got nothing left to give. And in that darkest moment you cry out, ‘Lord, I can’t!’ and a voice comes out of the darkness and says, ‘But I can.’ That’s the still, small voice that comes in the night. That’s the sound of something bigger than yourself. That’s God talking. And he says, ‘You are not alone,’ and enfolds you in wings of the eagle, and he carries you up. But first you have to burn away everything that doesn’t matter. You have to burn away leg warmers and New Age crystals, and Madonna, and aerobics, and New Kids on the Block, and the boy you’re sweet on in school. You burn away your parents, and your friends, and everything you ever cared about, and you burn away personal safety, conventional morality. And when all that is gone, when everything is swept away in the fire and everything around you is ash, what you have left is just a tiny nugget, a little kernel of something that is good, and pure, and true. And you pick that pebble up, and you throw it at the fortress this demon has built in your friend’s soul, this leviathan of hatred and fear and oppression, and you throw this tiny pebble and it hits that wall and it goes ping . . . and nothing happens. That’s when you’ll have the hardest doubts you ever had in your life. But never doubt the truth. Never underestimate it. Because a second later, if you’ve been through the fire, you’ll hear the cracks start to spread, and all those mighty walls and iron gates will collapse like a house of cards because you have harrowed yourself until all that’s left is truth. That’s what that pebble is, Abby. It’s our core.

Chase became a critically acclaimed portrait painter and the most highly paid Asian artist of his generation. Jenny Shimizu became a model and one of the planet’s best-known lesbians (“a homo-household name,” as The Pink Paper declared) for her affairs with Madonna and Angelina Jolie (a career trajectory that, despite the tattoo on Jenny’s right biceps of a hot babe straddling a Snap-on tool, Ted never saw coming).

He always said the best chance for a hands-on killer to leave a clue was at the last moment of contact, when the deed had been done. Before that, the murderer was likely on high alert, conscious of every move, waiting for the moment to strike. Then, with the victim dead or dying, the killer might let down his guard if he was overconfident or relieved. Who knew what a guy who’d just knifed a kid and twisted the blade felt? Or a woman?

Which is not to say that you’re not ruining their lives, the minor missteps snowballing into lifelong grievances and injuries. My husband and I play this game all the time, wondering what mistakes we’re making now will surface in group therapy when our kids are in college. Then, of course, there are all the things we’re doing that are unwittingly killing them that we won’t even realize are dangerous for another twenty years, just as our parents blithely drove us around unbuckled in smoke-filled cars. My own mother, a nurse married to a chest surgeon, smoked so often while nursing me that my father termed the tableau “Madonna and Cigarette.” Maybe our equivalent will be the phthalates in their bottles or the carcinogenic flame retardants so omnipresent they show up in cord blood. Maybe, by some great irony, it will be the naturally produced aflatoxins lurking in the organic produce we all thought was best.

They don't teach this in school anymore?' Anya asks and clucks in dismay. 'When I was a girl, we made memory palaces to helps us memorize for our examinations. You chose an actual place, a palace works best, but any building with lots of rooms would do, and then you furnished it with whatever you wished to remember.... Bur once you had learned the rooms, in your imagination you could add anything you wish. So, when we needed to memorize the Law of God, for instance, we closed our eyes and put a question and answer in each room." Page 68-69

I began the day I was to dine at casa di Palone in the Vaticano kitchen, helping Antonio prepare the pope's meals. For noonday, we made barley soup, apples, and a little cheese and bread. For the evening meal, we prepared the same soup with bits of roasted capons, and I made a zabaglione egg dish with a little malmsey wine. I suspected the pope would not touch the custardy dessert, but I felt compelled to take a chance. The worst that might happen was that he would order me to go back to his regular menu. And at best, perhaps he would recognize the joy of food God gifted to us. Once we had finished the general preparations, Antonio helped me bake a crostata to take to the Palone house that evening. He set to work making the pastry as I cleaned the visciola cherries- fresh from the market- and coated them with sugar, cinnamon, and Neapolitan mostaccioli crumbs. I nestled the biscotti among several layers of dough that Antonio had pressed into thin sheets to line the pan. Atop the cherries, I laid another sheet of pastry cut into a rose petal pattern. Antonio brushed it with egg whites and rosewater, sugared it, and set the pie into the oven to bake. Francesco joined us just as I placed the finished crostata on the counter to cool. The cherries bubbled red through the cracks of the rose petals and the scalco gave a low whistle. "Madonna!" Antonio and I stared at him, shocked at the use of the word as a curse. Francesco laughed. "That pie is so beautiful I think even our Lord might swear." He clapped me on the shoulder. "It is good to see you cooking something besides barley soup, Gio. It's been too long since this kitchen has seen such a beautiful dessert." The fragrance was magnificent. I hoped the famiglia Palone would find the pie tasted as good as it looked.