Volkswagen Van Quotes

There are children on the island who go barefoot all summer and wear feathers in their hair, the Volkswagen vans in which their parents arrived in the ’70s turning to rust in the forest. Every year there are approximately two hundred days of rain. There’s a village of sorts by the ferry terminal: a general store with one gas pump, a health-food store, a real-estate office, an elementary school with sixty students, a community hall with two massive carved mermaids holding hands to form an archway over the front door and a tiny library attached. The rest of the island is mostly rock and forest, narrow roads with dirt driveways disappearing into the trees.

A young man dreamed of being an actor, but in the early 1980s, he wasn’t getting the big parts he wanted. Broke and discouraged, he drove his beat-up old car to the top of a hill overlooking the city of Los Angeles and did something unusual. He wrote himself a check for ten million dollars for “Acting services rendered.” This young man had grown up so poor his family lived in a Volkswagen van at one time. He put that check in his wallet and kept it there. When things got tough, he’d pull it out and look at it to remind himself of his dream. A dozen years later, that same young man, the comedian Jim Carrey, was making fifteen million to twenty-five million a movie. Studies tell us that we move toward what we consistently see. You should keep something in front of you, even if it’s symbolic, to remind you of what you are believing for.

Damn straight I am. You called me a child and stupid. It’s going to take more than a van to make that up.” “It’s not a van. It’s a Mystery Machine.” “It’s a Volkswagen Bus.” I sniff. “Not even a proper Chevrolet.” “You’re killing me. This is how I die.

You don’t need to be a hippie to own a Volkswagen campervan. VW camper soon became just as well known for its funky yet functional design, as well as a fashion statement.

down. ‘Good evening,’ he said innocently. ‘Just checking why you’re parked here at 10.30 p.m. on a Saturday night,’ the security guard said suspiciously, eyeing our baby wipes in the middle of the seats. ‘We’re just out for a drive,’ Dan replied. ‘Seeing the sights.’ ‘Round ’ere? Good luck finding them,’ he scoffed, taking a cigarette from the pocket of his shirt. ‘Not to worry, mate. Drive on. Just checking you’re not up to no good.’ He winked, slapping the side of the van as he walked back to his post. Dan started the knackered engine of the scruffy Volkswagen. ‘Let’s get all this food back to the fridge at the kitchen. We can sort through it in the morning,’ he said. His hand brushed mine as I reached over to turn the radio on, and he changed gear. ‘Sorry,’ we mumbled at the same time, but I couldn’t ignore the rush of excitement I felt when our skin touched. I averted my eyes from Dan to the window and watched his reflection in the driver’s seat as we trundled through the dark streets. ‘You survived your first dumpster diving trip then,’ Dan said, breaking the tension between us. ‘It appears so,’ I agreed. ‘I don’t suppose you’re free tomorrow afternoon, after work, are you?’ My stomach did a teeny flip.

And so they ride through the city, father and child, seeing, each, a different place. Jane, with the liberation of childhood, without rationality or expectations, sees an anarchic landscape in which anything is possible and many things are provocative. She wrestles with language, scans advertisements, shop-signs, logos on vans and trucks. She pays professional attention to other children, in the way that animals are most sensitive to their own species. She searches out the things that tether her to a known world — a bus with a familiar destination, a hoarding that proclaims her favourite brand of chocolate, Volkswagen cars that are like her father’s. Hers is a heliocentric universe, and she is the sun. She is fettered by a child’s careless egotism, but freed from adult preconceptions. She does not know what to expect, and can therefore assess what she sees in its own terms. She does not interpret, and therefore can construct her own system of references. The Arabic script on the windows of the Bank of Kuwait becomes little dancing figures. The caryatids outside the church in Euston Road are ladies wearing bath towels with books on their heads. For her, the city is alternately mysterious and familiar, baffling and instructive. She tests her own capacities against the view from the window of the bus; she rhymes and puns, she counts, she classifies. She plays games with words and sounds, she flexes her imagination, she takes the place as she sees it and twists it to her own ends.

Why the hell is Senile Suzy in your driveway?” I squeak, my tone bordering on hysterical. Right before me is my big, yellow Volkswagen van in all its glory, gleaming beneath the sunlight. He quirks a brow. “You never said why you chose that name,” he deflects. “She’s a goddamn imbecile and moody as fuck. Why is she here?” “Because this is where she belongs. This is where you belong.” I curl my bottom lip between my teeth, tears welling in my eyes. “How did you find her?” I ask, the words raspy and uneven. He shrugs casually. “After you fell asleep at the hospital, a nurse let me use her phone, and I called to make sure it was still parked at Vilen’s Bend. It was, so I had my friend, Troy, retrieve it for me and bring it here.” I laugh, because if I don’t, I’ll cry. The fact that he remembered where I parked it is enough to have my ovaries exploding. “You didn’t have to do that,” I choke out. “Didn’t I say it would be waiting for you? Don’t ever doubt what I would do for you, Sawyer.” He doesn’t let me answer, nor that I’d have one for him anyway.

When Chief Justice John Roberts was an advocate, he once wrote that determining the “best” technology for controlling air pollution is like asking people to pick the “best” car: Mario Andretti may select a Ferrari; a college student a Volkswagen Beetle; a family of six a mini-van. A Minnesotan’s choice will doubtless have four-wheel drive; a Floridian’s might well be a convertible. The choices would turn on how the decisionmaker weighed competing priorities such as cost, mileage, safety, cargo space, speed, handling, and so on. I have shared this passage with lawyers all over the world. “Brilliant,” exclaim some. “Look how he gets his point across,” say others. But they all agree on one thing: “Writing like that is an art.” This book will reveal the craft behind that art. I am convinced that if you learn why the best advocates write the way they do, you can import those same techniques into your own work.

growing up so poor that for a time his family lived in their Volkswagen van on a relative’s lawn, Jim Carrey believed in his future. Every night in the late 1980’s, Carrey would drive atop a large hill that looked down over Los Angeles and visualize directors valuing his work. At the time, he was a broke and struggling young comic. One night in 1990, while looking down on Los Angeles and dreaming of his future, Carrey wrote himself a check for $10 million and put in the notation line “for acting services rendered.” He dated the check for Thanksgiving 1995 and stuck it in his wallet. He gave himself five years. And just before Thanksgiving of 1995, he got paid $10 million for Dumb and Dumber.