Walter Mitty Quotes

Walter Mitty: To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.

Beautiful things don't ask for attention.

Sean O'Connell: Sometimes I don't. If I like a moment, for me, personally, I don't like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it.

To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of life.

To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.

Live life by the abc's...adventure, bravery and creativity.

Lately, I have been wondering if there is time left for daydreaming in this 21st-century world of constant communication.

It’s forty kilometers through hell, sir,” said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. “After all,” he said softly, “what isn’t?

Walter Mittys with Everest dreams need to bear in mind that when things go wrong up in the Death Zone--and sooner or later they always do--the strongest guides in the world may be powerless to save a client's life; indeed, as the events of 1996 demonstrated, the strongest guides in the world are sometimes powerless to save even their own lives. Four of my teammates died not so much because Rob Hall's systems were faulty--indeed, nobody's were better--but because on Everest it is the nature of systems to break down with a vengeance.

Después de todo ¿dónde no hay infierno?

ta-pocketa, ta-pocketa

ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

He accused them of being untrained meddlers with an unhealthy interest in rape and murder. “WALTER MITTY DETECTIVE,” he wrote. By then I was convinced one of the Mittys was probably going to solve this thing.

Index investing is an investment strategy that Walter Mitty would love. It takes very little investment knowledge, no skill, practically no time or effort-and outperforms about 80 percent of all investors. It allows you to spend your time working, playing, or doing anything else while your nest egg compounds on autopilot. It's about as difficult as breathing and about as time consuming as going to a fast-food restaurant once a year.

On my drive from Salt Lake City to Moab, Utah, I passed an eighteen-wheeler with mud flaps on the rear tires. The flaps were black and featured the silver silhouette of a very statuesque naked woman. I’m sure you’ve seen this artistic expression in your travels. I wondered: has this ploy ever worked, like some kind of perverted fishing lure?

If I like a moment, I don't like to have the distraction of camera - I just want to stay in it.

Su cabeza trabaja tan deprisa que su cuerpo no puede seguirla

¿Por qué no le preguntó usted como era que se encontraba allí con el? Encendí un cigarro y contesté: - Señora, tenía miedo de que desapareciera de repente

Of course the other side of this coin is that many men like to cultivate hobbies that give them a chance to get off alone—gardening, stamp collecting, building something in the basement, for example. And that’s a cue to let him have his privacy. Just find out whether he wants to share an interest with you or go off like Walter Mitty and have extravagant daydreams in the carrot patch.

Often we'll stop paying attention to the world outside our minds and walk around in a Walter Mitty-like state that causes people who have no idea what's going on to label us as “crazy.” It often takes a conscious effort to pull ourselves out of our own heads enough to interact with people in a normal fashion, especially if we're dealing with small-talk rather than a conversation with depth. So

Anyway, this is actually a big deal. I could use it to create all kinds of very cool products, like batteries that last forever, ships that can get into orbit without jet fuel, cars that don’t need engines, cars that fly…

Lately, I have been wondering if there is time left for daydreaming in this 21st-century world of constant communication. Or are we held hostage by our fascination and focus on small, lighted screens seemingly glued to the palms of our hands?

Con una visión perfecta uno se ve inextricablemente atrapado en el mundo cotidiano, prisionero de la realidad (...) Para la persona con ojos de halcón, la vida no posee ninguno de aquellos aspectos suaves que para mí se confunde con la fantasía

I intend to see that justice is done by presiding, in the manner of the omnipotent Walter Mitty, as chief justice of a tribunal trying the case of those plotting further advances for the Chinese characters on an international scale. Emulating the operatic Mikado's "object all sublime... to let the punishment fit the crime," I hand down the following dread decree: Anyone who believes Chinese characters to be a superior system of writing that can function as a universal script is condemned to complete the task of rendering the whole of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Singlish.

I had read everything I could find about magnets, gravity, and electricity. I’d stumbled onto a bunch of hopelessly complicated information about some surfer searching for a unified Theory of Everything and a theoretical particle called a graviton that was supposed to tie everything together.

I have often thought that Walter Mitty had it in him to be more than a hen-pecked loser. Instead of living it up as a flamboyant daredevil in his dreams, he could have chosen to be a responsible man in real life, going about his work with dignity, and people may just have treated him with respect. Did his failures in life lead him to seek solace in daydreams or did his wandering mind stand in the way of his potential success? One must have triggered the other, and then it would have been both working together. An empty life drives you to fantasies of fulfilment, which then form a deadly, vicious circle which can turn you into a cartoon, as it did poor Mitty. Or lead you to ruin like Madame Bovary.

During one of his incoherent pre-game Pep talks he said he was preparing us in case we ever had to storm the beaches at Iwo Jima. Hey coach, we already won that war! He never mentioned trying to win a game, it was always about killing or hurting the other team. He did mention blood a lot. But if we ever lost, we were required to mope around like it was the worst thing to ever happen in history, and it was definitely our fault, and besides we hadn’t even killed anybody on the other team.

Kalinske then described what made the videogame industry unique, what made it superbly unpredictable, and what tomorrow might or might not bring. But along this wild roller-coaster ride, there was one thing that would not change. “Suspension of disbelief. It’s always been the fundamental component of diversion, whether that diversion is books, movies, or the theater. Advances in gaming mean we will come to supply that component more effectively than any other medium. The interactive entertainment business is going to allow the Walter Mitty in all of us to finally realize our dreams. We are going to become great football players, race car drivers, or aviators. We are going to move into and occupy new worlds that were formerly only available to us in dreams.

I have often thought that Walter Mitty had it in him to be more than a hen-pecked loser. Instead of living it up as a flamboyant daredevil in his dreams, he could have chosen to be a responsible man in real life, going about his work with dignity, and people may just have treated him with respect. Did his failures in life lead him to seek solace in daydreams or did his wandering mind stand in the way of his potential success? One must have triggered the other, and then it would have been both working together. An empty life drives you to fantasies of fulfilment, which then form a deadly, vicious circle which can turn you into a cartoon, as it did poor Mitty. Or lead you to ruin like Madame Bovary.

Don’t ask, don’t tell. Keep your head down. Don’t lie—just keep them talking about themselves and pretty soon they’ll see their reflection. It’s easy to be liked that way: people love themselves.

This violence is attributed in no small part to the gangs that prey on illegals who don’t use banks. Pockets stuffed with cashed paychecks make inviting targets on a Friday night.   Though

Oh, for crying out loud, it’s because you’re so uptight and self-righteous. Somebody said your ass was probably as watertight as a frog, and next thing you know they were calling you Kermit.

We rode in silence. Outkast’s Spaghetti Junction played in the background as we hit I-85, southbound toward town.   Jessica

Jessica shook her head violently. “This isn’t real! This is a floating skateboard. You did not just solve the world’s energy crisis. All this is, is a really neat toy.”   Okay,

This presentation was truly a testament to the epic magnitude of getting into Thomas Treadwell’s class. This exercise was pointedly not some theoretical simulation dreamed up by an academic with no real-world experience. We were presenting our ideas to real venture capitalists and angel investors.

Ah, Master Bates,” I said with deep thought. “Why yes, I think I will speak to him.”   “I

Orange is the New Black is a really boring porn.

Yes, as unlikely as that sounds, there are indeed black skinheads. There’s no other name for a baldheaded, shit-kicking, black punk in a white T-shirt, suspenders, rolled-up jeans, and ten-hole oxblood Doc Martens. We used to call them ska skins because large groups of them would turn up for ska shows. Ska, for the uninitiated, was born in Jamaica as a fusion of calypso and jazz, a precursor to reggae.

Gravity is the attractive force between all matter, but they say magnetism is nothing more than a quirky relationship caused by charged particles. Pretty much everything I’ve read agrees that they’re two totally different things. But I’m beginning to think it’s all the same song; only magnets sing in a different language and at a higher volume.

I think magnets are the key to understanding gravity,” I explained. “Magnetism is just a subset of gravity.

Now, I know what you're all thinking," Stevenson added quickly, casting about to see who was preparing to laugh at him. "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, right? But if gravity can be controlled, it seems clear that there exist possibilities outside of Newton's Law of Conservation of Energy.

Imagine a world with no gasoline. No need for gasoline if you don’t need an engine. How about power plants that don’t need coal or nuclear material? Better yet, what if we didn’t need power plants because every house ran on its own everlasting battery?

But one thing I do know: Every major shift in technology has resulted in an economic boom.

A way to make space travel as easy as going to the office—in our lifetime. A practical way to generate enough power to initiate terraforming on Mars, in the event humanity needed a new planet. A way to change the course of any large incoming asteroid pointed at Earth. Interstellar space travel at fast enough speeds to negate the need for theoretical flights of fancy, such as wormholes.

But the odds of a single person unlocking cold fusion and gravity at the same moment are laughable. It simply cannot be.

The ability to direct gravitational force and the relative strength of that force opens the door to ways of creating mechanical energy from dimensions unknown to physics!

Of course, there was no way for me to guess that I was launching cans of soda out of Earth’s atmosphere at nearly three times the speed of sound.

Emory is world renowned for its schools of Medicine and Law, but the School of Business quietly competes at a very elite level with far less fanfare. Though my SAT score put me in the top 99.9% of those who took the test, my grades were average at best,

The only work we had to do was come up with a business idea, support it in a detailed formal business plan, then present it to real investors. This presentation was truly a testament to the epic magnitude of getting into Thomas Treadwell’s class. This exercise was pointedly not some theoretical simulation dreamed up by an academic with no real-world experience. We were presenting our ideas to real venture capitalists and angel investors.

clicked to the next slide. It showed the same skateboard, only now the wheels had big red X’s over them. “What if you could get rid of the wheels entirely—and make a skate board that could float on air?” I paused dramatically and pulled up my next slide. “Introducing the ZG Board. ‘ZG’ stands for ‘zero gravity,’ of course. It is my belief that not only will every existing skater buy—

First, Mr. Treadwell and his wife died in a carbon monoxide accident. Then Dr. Miles Prestone dies of a heart attack. I almost get killed in an accident where the other driver mysteriously disappears, and then I almost get killed again by a real-life hit man during a staged robbery. And now Keith Evans, another of Treadwell’s investors, commits suicide?

How should I know?” Simons asked, shrugging. “Illuminati, Freemasons, Skull and Bones, Bilderberg Group? It’s just They.

I just wanna drink chocolate milk with my lovely!

I was actually doing in my life. I was like a young Walter Mitty; a Don Quixote with no Sancho Panza.

Dr. Purchase, the closest likeness to a flesh-and-blood Walter Mitty Logan had ever met,

When I was growing up in the late 1950s and early ’60s, there was very little in the way of literate adventure writing. Periodicals that catered to our adolescent dreams of travel and adventure clearly held us in contempt. Feature articles in magazines that might be called Man’s Testicle carried illustrations of tough, unshaven guys dragging terrified women in artfully torn blouses through jungles, caves, or submarine corridors; through hordes of menacing bikers, lions, and hippopotami. The stories bore the same relation to the truth that professional wrestling bears to sport, which is to say, they were larger-than-life contrivances of an artfully absurd nature aimed, it seemed, at lonely bachelor lip-readers, drinkers of cheap beer, violence-prone psychotics, and semiliterate Walter Mitty types whose vision of true love involved the rescue of some distressed damsel about to be ravaged by bikers, lions, or hippopotami.

The I Told You So impulse was strong. “And, while we’re at it,” Kevin Williamson wrote in National Review, “maybe turning your party over to Generalissimo Walter Mitty, his hideous scheming spawn, and the studio audience from Hee-Haw was not just absolutely aces as a political strategy.

He wouldn’t be talking about the weather or the latest Who single; he was simply off in his own world.” This man-child blend of escapism and hard-nosed careerism was intriguing; there were constant flights of fantasy and obsessions that his friends were drawn into. In essence, this seemed to be a mind-control technique, used to blot out the everyday details of life in Bromley. In a different person, such escapism and daydreaming would have been the marks of an ineffectual Walter Mitty character—but David labored to turn his fantasies into reality, spending long hours working on arrangements and planning the next steps in his career.

Si eres una hembra y tenías talento, la vida resultaba una trampa, no importaba el camino que eligieras. O te sumergías en la vida doméstica (y tenías fantasías a lo Walter Mitty para fugarte) o suspirabas por la vida doméstica en todo tu arte. Nunca podías escapar a la condición de hembra. El conflicto estaba escrito en tu mismísima sangre." Miedo a volar

NOTE: For those who enjoy listening to music while they read, a soundtrack has been placed at the back of the book. So if—like the author—you believe that music and reading go together like peanut butter and chocolate, then you may want to skip to the back and start the music before you begin reading. Enjoy!