Short Quirky Quotes

Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

Only criminals and madmen walk into Central Park after midnight...or, occasionally, an actor. (Dark City Lights)

But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don’t care what those themes are – they’re yours to uncover and stand behind – so long as, at the very least, there is courage. Guts. Mut, in German. Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

He had to die someday too. He might do it on sheets with a six-hundred-plus thread count, but he'd die just the same. Death wouldn't forget about him.

The first thing you lose when you die is your motor skills.

It was about time he opened his eyes to see just to whom he was speaking. After several quick blinks, he managed to do just that, gazing up into a small, heart-shaped face. A pretty face. Not one of a curvy seductress or a cool-hearted courtesan, but a feminine, delicately featured face. He knew this face. He adored this face. "Miss Charlotte Greene," he stated finally, taking a risk and raising his head to get a better look. Sitting at his side, the white skirt of her thick night rail tucked around her legs, she smiled down at him with concerned eyes of deep blue. Gorgeous sapphire eyes often hidden behind the rims of small, round spectacles. Truthfully, she happened to be the complete opposite of what he was usually attracted to. She was a bit too thin, too short, and too quiet for his tastes, which had always leaned toward the voluptuous, the tall, and the spirited. Normally, she wasn't one to stand out. And he rather suspected she preferred it that way. However, while most young bucks readily discounted her merits and furtively joked about her quirky behavior behind her back, Rothbury had always sensed a subtle undercurrent of passion in her dark blue gaze. Unlike the "diamonds" of the ton and demimonde, who slinked across assembly rooms completely aware of their beauty and the power that accompanied it, Miss Greene moved like a woman who hadn't yet realized how utterly fetching she truly was. She clung to the walls, sometimes barely raising her eyes from the floor, rarely spoke but to her closest friends, and shied away from situations that demanded she converse with the opposite sex. Strange it was for him to notice those facets in such an unassuming woman. Strange it was he should have noticed her at all. But he always did. The second she walked into a room.

If you stand too close to your reflection, you cannot see the full picture of who you are.

Always keep your mouth closed when cleaning the toilet.

Imagine that you are in your house—no—you are locked in your house, cannot get out. It is the dead of winter. The drifted snow is higher than your windows, blocking the light of both moon and sun. Around the house, the wind moans, night and day. Now imagine that even though you have plenty of electric lights, and perfectly good central heating, you are almost always in the dark and quite cold, because something is wrong with the old-fashioned fuse box in the basement. Inside this cobwebbed, innocuous-looking box, the fuses keep burning out, and on account of this small malfunction, all the power in the house repeatedly fails. You have replaced so many melted fuses that now your little bag of new ones is empty; there are no more. You sigh in frustration, and regard your frozen breath in the light of the flashlight. Your house, which could be so cozy, is tomblike instead. In all probability, there is something quirky in the antiquated fuse box; it has developed some kind of needless hair trigger, and is not really reacting to any dangerous electrical overload at all. Should you get some pennies out of your pocket, and use them to replace the burned-out fuses? That would solve the power-outage problem. No more shorts, not with copper coins in there. Using coins would scuttle the safeguard function of the fuse box, but the need for a safeguard right now is questionable, and the box is keeping you cold and in the dark for no good reason. Well, probably for no good reason. On the other hand, what if the wiring in the house really is overloaded somehow? A fire could result, probably will result eventually. If you do not find the fire soon enough, if you cannot manage to put the fire out, the whole house could go up, with you trapped inside. You know that death by burning is hideous. You know also that your mind is playing tricks, but thinking about fire, you almost imagine there is smoke in your nostrils right now. So, do you go back upstairs and sit endlessly in a dark living room, defeated, numb from the cold, though you have buried yourself under every blanket in the house? No light to read by, no music, just the wail and rattle of the icy wind outside? Or, in an attempt to feel more human, do you make things warm and comfortable? Is it wise to gamble with calamity and howling pain? If you turn the power back on, will you not smell nonexistent smoke every moment you are awake? And will you not have far too many of these waking moments, for how will you ever risk going to sleep? Do you sabotage the fuse box? I

He’s short, but his cheekbones are so high he can barely reach them.

On 8 September 1947, Lewis appeared on the front cover of Time magazine, which declared this “best-selling author,” who was also “the most popular lecturer in [Oxford] University,” to be “one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world.” Screwtape had taken England and America by storm. (America, it must be recalled, had not heard Lewis’s broadcast talks on the BBC.) The opening paragraph helps capture the tone of the piece: a quirky and slightly weird Oxford academic—“a short, thickset man with a ruddy face and a big voice”—unexpectedly hits the big time.[524] Were there more bestsellers on the way? Time cautioned its excited readers that they would just have to wait: “He has no immediate plans for further ‘popular’ books, fantastic or theological.” The Time article of 1947 can be seen as a tipping point—both signaling Lewis’s arrival on the broader cultural scene, and extending his reach by drawing wider attention to his works.

Newton was a decidedly odd figure – brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness. He built his own laboratory, the first at Cambridge, but then engaged in the most bizarre experiments. Once he inserted a bodkin – a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather – into his eye socket and rubbed it around ‘betwixt my eye and the bone as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could’ just to see what would happen. What happened, miraculously, was nothing – at least, nothing lasting. On another occasion, he stared at the Sun for as long as he could bear, to determine what effect it would have upon his vision. Again he escaped lasting damage, though he had to spend some days in a darkened room before his eyes forgave him. Set atop these odd beliefs and quirky traits, however, was the mind of a supreme genius-though even when working in conventional channels he often showed a tendency to peculiarity. As a student, frustrated by the limitations of conventional mathematics, he invented an entirely new form, the calculus, but then told no one about it for twenty-seven years. In like manner, he did work in optics that transformed our understanding of light and laid the foundation for the science of spectroscopy, and again chose not to share the results for three decades.

A true story. One afternoon when our son, Richard, was in fifth grade, my wife called me at work to say he had received a one-day suspension for losing his temper during recess. Because we both worked, this was more of a punishment for us than it was for Richard. He hated going to school anyway. I called the school immediately and attempted to reason with the principal. She refused to understand my point of view, and by the time I finished yelling at her, she had suspended Richard for two more days.

I read somewhere that as much as 90% of the enjoyment we experience in life is experienced through anticipation. What that means is that we normally get more enjoyment out of the anticipation of upcoming events than we derive out of experiencing the actual events themselves. I don’t know if this is always true, but in 1991 I took my family on a vacation where I’d have to say that just about all of our enjoyment was experienced through the anticipation. Not that the vacation was horrible (which it was), but the anticipation of this vacation was incredible.

In the YouTube video, I am talking about my middle school English teacher. I am doing so with a level of zeal that I now recognize is mortifying. My English teacher was a quirky woman in her late twenties who had short hair that she wore butterfly clips in. She wore overalls, beaded necklaces, and colorful eye shadow. It is painfully obvious in retrospect that I was in love with her.

Plenty of people have borrowed the term “OCD” to make fun of the way they feel compelled to alphabetize their spices or wash their tennis shoes. And many of us do exhibit OCD-like characteristics every now and then—running back to the front door to make sure it’s locked or stepping over cracks in the sidewalk. But more often than not, these behaviors are quirky and short-lived; they don’t cause us ongoing distress, significantly impede our lives, or drive our family members too crazy. A severe case of clinical obsessive-compulsive disorder, on the other hand, can be as debilitating as the worst case of depression. The constant pattern of repetition may help reduce uncertainty by creating the appearance of warding off trouble and keeping people safe—but it is enormously stressful and a terrible burden to bear. Some people with OCD commit suicide to escape the constant barrage of messages and impulses. “It’s horrible,” says Elias. “It’s torture from the inside.

and even though we’ve only known each other such a short time, my heart knows her. My soul knows her. She’s quirky but sweet.

When one heart speaks, other hearts cannot help but listen.

The recipes, even the heroes, are dead simple, and all but one’s ingredients (Quirky Furki) can be found at any Walmart in our great nation. In short, nothing in this book is gonna have you searching the Internet for leaf lard or setting multiple timers in the name of precision.