Organ Grinder Quotes

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.

When I was young, because I was young once like you, I heard many organ grinders play, and I can assure you no two tunes ever sounded the same, even on the same instrument. That's how it is, isn't it? The less love you put into things the more they resemble one another. The same goes for stories, everyone knows them by heart, but when someone tells them with love, I don't know, they seem new.

The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In a word, what is unique is not America but what is called Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not trying to Anglicise thousand of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders. France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or German prisoners of war. America is the only place in the world where this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on. And the process, as I have pointed out, is not internationalization. It would be truer to say it is the nationalization of the internationalized. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles.

In the country, spring is a time of small happenings happening quietly, hyacinth shoots thrusting in a garden, willows burning with a sudden frosty fire of green, lengthening afternoons of long flowing dusk, and midnight rain opening lilac; but in the city there is the fanfare of organ-grinders, and odors, undiluted by winter wind, clog the air; windows long closed go up, and conversation, drifting beyond a room, collides with the jangle of a peddler's bell.

I’m sorry, I thought you were together.’ ‘Why, do I look like an organ grinder?’ said Cobb.

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ — and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing — oh, that eternal hand!— a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.

You should read Spanish,' he said. 'It is a noble tongue. It has not the mellifluousness of Italian--Italian is the language of tenors and organ-grinders--but it has grandeur: it does not ripple like a brook in a garden, but it surges tumultuous like a mighty river in a flood.

Edmond Locard ordered all the local organ grinders and their simian employees brought to his laboratory. A number of the monkeys, perhaps concerned about an infringement of their civil rights, resisted fingerprinting and had to be restrained. The organ grinders were more cooperative. When the burglarizing beast had been identified, his companion’s rooms were searched and there the missing items were found.

Katie warned her never to follow the big organ. Katie said that those organ grinders who dressed up so were Sicilians. And all the world knew that the Sicilians belonged to the Black Hand and that the Black Hand Society always kidnapped little children and held them for ransom.

The phone was laid on a desk thousands of miles away. Once more, with that clear familiarity, the footsteps, the pause, and, at last, the raising of the window. "Listen," whispered the old man to himself. And he heard a thousand people in another sunlight, and the faint, tinkling music of an organ grinder playing "La Marimba"— oh, a lovely, dancing tune. With eyes tight, the old man put up his hand as if to click pictures of an old cathedral, and his body was heavier with flesh, younger, and he felt the hot pavement underfoot. He wanted to say, "You're still there, aren't you? All of: you people in that city in the time of the early siesta, the shops closing, the little boys crying loteria nacional para hoy! to sell lottery tickets. You are all there, the people in the city. I can't believe I was ever among you. When you are away I: from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a ' quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living . . .

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to who as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth every grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romance laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing - oh, that eternal hand! - a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.

Buy whole organic flaxseeds at a natural foods store. Keep them in the refrigerator, and grind a half-cup or so at a time, using a blender or coffee grinder. Ground flax has a nutty taste that is quite good added to cereals, salads, potatoes, rice, or cooked vegetables. A tablespoon of the meal once a day will give you a good ration of omega-3s.

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ – and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing – oh, that eternal hand! – a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.

But sympathy we cannot have. Wisest Fate says no. If her children, weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on them that burden too, adding in imagination other pains to their own, buildings would cease to rise; roads would peter out into grassy tracks; there would be an end of music and of paintings; one great sigh alone would rise to Heaven, and the only attitudes for men and women would be those of horror and despair. As it is, there is always some little distraction—an organ grinder at the corner of the hospital, a shop with book or trinket to decoy one past the prison or the workhouse, some absurdity of cat or dog to prevent one from turning the old beggar's hieroglyphic of misery into volumes of sordid suffering, and the vast effort of sympathy which those barracks of pain and discipline, those dried symbols of sorrow, ask us to exert on their behalf, is uneasily shuffled off for another time.

He remembered Amy reading a review of The Organ-Grinder’s Boy which had first acknowledged the book’s pace and readability, and then suggested a certain derivativeness in its plotting. She’d said, “So what? Don’t these people know there are only about five really good stories, and writers just tell them over and over, with different characters?” Mort himself believed there were at least six stories: success; failure; love and loss; revenge; mistaken identity; the search for a higher power, be it God or the devil. He had told the first four over and over, obsessively,

Lucinda,” she finally returned most cordially, “if I were to be marooned on a desert island for the remainder of my days and must needs choose between your company and that of an organ-grinder’s flea-bitten monkey, I should not hesitate a moment before opting for the latter.

It was really about insurance costs and the ability of wealth to make working America dance like organ-grinder monkeys. We may not have a drug-free country yet, but we’re well on the way to a dignity-free country.

The greeting of risk, the willingness to discover through (certain classes of non-lethal) trial and error, the subordination of success to exploration and discovery, and the insistence of finding the edge of patterns; where they fail, all of these seem to contain echoes of field work in Special Forces and related intelligence organizations, the passion for languages, the recognition that much of what passes for effective communication can be achieved with very little actual understanding, the primacy of non-verbal communication in influencing face-to-face communications, a tolerance for ambiguity and vagueness, and a fascination with the unknown.

Once upon a time, luck arranged things so that a baby named Malachi Constant was born the richest child on Earth. On the same day, luck arranged things so that a blind grandmother stepped on a rollerskate at the head of a flight of cement stairs, a policeman’s horse stepped on an organ-grinder’s monkey, and a paroled bank robber found a postage stamp worth nine hundred dollars in the bottom of a trunk in his attic. I ask you—is luck the hand of God?

CHAPTER 1 THE BARISTA AND THE TASTER 1. The barista Chung Lee at my local Joe Coffee. 2. Ed Kaufmann, the head coffee buyer at Joe Coffee Company. 3. Jonathan Rubinstein, the founder of Joe Coffee Company. 4–5. Richard and Alice Rubinstein, Jonathan’s parents who invested in the very first Joe Coffee shop. 6–11. Other key Joe Coffee staff, including Tim Hinton, manager of my local Joe Coffee Company, and Frankie Tin, Brandon Wall, Doug Satzman, Will Hewes, and Jonathan’s sister, Gabrielle Rubinstein. 12–15. The employees of Mazzer coffee grinders, which ground my coffee beans, including Luca Maccatrozzo, Cristian Cipolotti, Luigi Mazzer, and Mattia Miatto. 16–19. Thunder Group, makers of the strainer used at Joe Coffee, including Michael Sklar, Brian Young, Takia Augustine, and Robert Huang. 20–22. The folks at Hario digital scale for coffee, including Shin Nemoto, Sakai Hario, and Tagawa Hario. 23–25. The workers at the Specialty Coffee Association, including Don Schoenholt, Spencer Turer, and Kim Elena Ionescu, who organize coffee conventions where Joe Coffee employees find new supplies. 26–29. Oxo kitchen tools, including Juan Escobar, John DeLamar, Eddy Viana, and Lynna Borden. 30–31. The developers of the coffee flavor chart, including Edward Chambers and Rhonda Miller,

How many children could say their home hosted the humblest and highest at the same time, on any given evening invaded by expatriates their father never hesitated to invite in? Through the back door he welcomed a bookseller, organ grinder, biscuit maker, vagrant macaroni man, and one called Galli who thought he was Christ. Through the front, disgraced Italian counts and generals made as officious entrances as a small house on Charlotte Street afforded.

My maternal grandmother,” says Sibelius, “would not have approved by any means had I chosen such a risky and disreputable career as that of a musician. It is true she appreciated my artistic gifts and thoroughly approved of my efforts at composing, but the mere thought of music as an occupation seemed an abomination to her. She was old-fashioned, and had spent her life in the country and in the provincial town and looked upon a musician as on the same level as a wandering organ-grinder, or not far removed from it.

Me? Good Lord, I haven’t done anything,” James said. “I’m the monkey; Susan’s the organ grinder. In every sense.

You just the organ grinder monkey, he told her. Alvin turns the crank and you just hold the cup for the pennies.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been the centuries when space was extended, when the realm of the visible had suddenly been increased by the invention of the microscope and the telescope. We have images from that era which remind us of quite how astonishing that sudden stretching of space must have been. There is the Dutch lens-grinder Antony van Leeuwenhoek, peering down his rudimentary microscope in 1674 to see a host of micro-organisms teeming in a drop of pond-water ('The motion of most of these animalcules in the water was so swift , and so various upwards, downwards and round about, that 'twas wonderful to see …'). There is Galileo scrying upwards through his telescope in 1609, and becoming the first human to realize that there are "lofty mountains" and "deep valleys" on the moon. And there is Blaise Pascal's mingled wonder and horror at the realization that man is poised teeteringly between two abysses: between the visible atomic world and, with its 'infinity of universes, each with its firmament, planets, and its earth', and the invisible cosmos, too big to see, also with its "infinity of universes", stretching unstoppably away in the night sky. The nineteenth century, though, was the century in which time was extended. The two previous centuries had revealed the so-called "plurality of worlds" which existed in the tracts of space and the microcosmos of atoms. What geology revealed in the 1800s was the multitude of 'former worlds' on earth, which had once existed but no longer did. Some inhabitants of these former worlds offered an excitement beyond the general thrill of antiquity. This was the range of monstrous creatures which had formerly lived on earth: mammoths, mammals, 'sea-dragons' and dinosaurs (literally 'fearfully great lizards'), as they were christened in 1842 by the palaeoanatomist Richard Owen. Fossilized bones and teeth had been plucked from the earth for centuries, but not until the early 1800s was it realized that some of these relics belonged to distinct, and extinct, species.