Penny Marshall Quotes

Marky! Pull up your pants!

I am not much different now. I have never wanted to grow up and stop playing.

I was learning that I didn’t have to have everything figured out. Often the point was to live and see what happened.

DON Luigi Giussani used to quote this example from Bruce Marshall’s novel To Every Man a Penny. The protagonist of the novel, the abbot Father Gaston, needs to hear the confession of a young German soldier whom the French partisans are about to sentence to death. The soldier confesses his love of women and the numerous amorous adventures he has had. The young priest explains that he has to repent to obtain forgiveness and absolution. The soldier answers, “How can I repent? It was something that I enjoyed, and if I had the chance I would do it again, even now. How can I repent?” Father Gaston, who wants to absolve the man who has been marked by destiny and who’s about to die, has a stroke of inspiration and asks, “But are you sorry that you are not sorry?” The young man answers impulsively, “Yes, I am sorry that I am not sorry.” In other words, he apologizes for not repenting. The door was opened just a crack, allowing absolution to come in….

Anyway, before leaving, I chatted with the Princess, who was as gorgeous as I remembered her in movies when she was Grace Kelly, the star from Philadelphia. When I asked if she missed acting, she smiled and said, “What do you think I’m doing now?

One night I'm at a basketball game, the next I'm being held up by armed ninjas. Shit happens.

Almost everyone had a theory about why Laverne & Shirley took off. I thought it was simply because Laverne and Shirley were poor and there were no poor people on TV, but there were plenty of them sitting at home and watching TV.

It's hard to imagine a time when Saturday nights didn't include the phrase "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night." Saturday Night Live is such an institution that you can forget or may not know that tuning in at 11:30 p.m. was once an adventure into the unknown, a true television event.

JULIA PHILLIPS: You know, there’s a battleground atmosphere in New York that makes you feel that it’s reality. PENNY MARSHALL: I was cold in New York.

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You want to know heaven? Walking home while eating the warm heels from a loaf of freshly baked seedless rye, sliced.

Perky is overrated.

As a general rule, don’t work with people who are getting divorced. They’re thinking about other things.

At the end of camp, my parents picked me up and we caught up during the long drive back to the Bronx. Everything was the same, my mother said, nothing was new, that is until I asked how my grandfather was doing. “Oh, he died,” my mother said. “Excuse me?” I said, shocked. “He died,” she said. “When?” I asked. “Around the beginning of the summer,” she said.

The dressy event was a benefit for the Special Olympics, a favorite organization of mine. My first husband worked for the Special Olympics in Albuquerque, and I had once volunteered as a “hugger” at the finish line during one of his events.

Those experiences taught me the lessons that came in handy later in my life: Try hard, play by the rules, help your friends, don’t get too crazy, and have fun.

Later that evening, Hunter Thompson kicked me. I had no idea who he was. He was in the kitchen, trying to smoke opium. I watched as he sucked the life out of what looked like a Tootsie Roll. It seemed like a lot of effort, almost funny—until he leapt up from the table and kicked me. “What the fuck is your story?” I said. He cursed me out with a string of colorful words that caused me to stop and stare even more intensely, not out of fear or anger but rather amazement at his vocabulary. That was when someone mentioned that he was the famous gonzo journalist and warned it was best not to rile him up any more because he carried a gun and didn’t hesitate to pull it out and start shooting.

Money, as a social means of extending and amplifying work and skill in an easily accessible and portable form, lost much of its magical power with the coming of representative money, or paper money. Just as speech lost its magic with writing, and further with printing, when printed money supplanted gold, the compelling aura of it disappeared. Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872) gave clear indications in his treatment of the mysterious prestige conferred by precious metals. His ridicule of the money medium took the form of presenting the old reverent attitude to money in a new social context. This new kind of abstract, printed money of the high industrial age, however, simply would not sustain the old attitude: This is the true philanthropy. He who makes a colossal fortune in the hosiery trade, and by his energy has succeeded in reducing the price of woollen goods by the thousandth part of a penny in the pound — this man is worth ten professional philanthropists. So strongly are the Erewhonians impressed with this, that if a man has made a fortune of over £20,000 a year they exempt him from all taxation, considering him a work of art, and too precious to be meddled with; they say, “How very much he must have done for society before society could have been prevailed upon to give him so much money”; so magnificent an organization overawes them; they regard it as a thing dropped from heaven. “Money,” they say, “is the symbol of duty, it is the sacrament of having done for mankind that which mankind wanted. Mankind may not be a very good judge, but there is no better.

Money, as a social means of extending and amplifying work and skill in an easily accessible and portable form, lost much of its magical power with the coming of representative money, or paper money. Just as speech lost its magic with writing, and further with printing, when printed money supplanted gold, the compelling aura of it disappeared. Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872) gave clear indications in his treatment of the mysterious prestige conferred by precious metals. His ridicule of the money medium took the form of presenting the old reverent attitude to money in a new social context. This new kind of abstract, printed money of the high industrial age, however, simply would not sustain the old attitude: This is the true philanthropy. He who makes a colossal fortune in the hosiery trade, and by his energy has succeeded in reducing the price of woollen goods by the thousandth part of a penny in the pound — this man is worth ten professional philanthropists. So strongly are the Erewhonians impressed with this, that if a man has made a fortune of over £20,000 a year they exempt him from all taxation, considering him a work of art, and too precious to be meddled with; they say, “How very much he must have done for society before society could have been prevailed upon to give him so much money”; so magnificent an organization overawes them; they regard it as a thing dropped from heaven.