Quotes about a smile
page 12

Edward R. Murrow photo

“Is it not possible that an unruly head of hair, an infectious smile, eyes that seem remarkable for the depths of their sincerity, a cultivated air of authority, may attract huge television audiences regardless of the violence that may be done to truth or objectivity?”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

As quoted in The Saturday Evening Post (December 1949) http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/flbk/Murrow_Sticks_to_the_News/pubData/mobile/index.htm#/1/

Muhammad al-Taqi photo
Nicholas Hilliard photo
Anthony Burgess photo
Nicholas Roerich photo

“I am — your Bliss
I am — your Smile
I am — your Joy
I am — your Rest
I am — your Strength
I am — your Valor
I am — your Wisdom”

Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, enlightener, philosopher

Leaves Of Morya's Garden (1924 - 1925), Book I : The Call (1924)

Laurell K. Hamilton photo
Bill Bryson photo
Thomas Campbell photo

“The world was sad, the garden was a wild,
And man the hermit sigh'd — till woman smiled.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Part II, line 37
Pleasures of Hope (1799)

Charlie Brooker photo
Carlos Drummond de Andrade photo

“p>I'm making a song
where my mother and all mothers
will see themselves mirrored,
a song that speaks like two eyes.I'm walking on a road
that runs through many countries.
They may not see me, but I see
and salute old friends.I'm spreading a secret
like a man who loves or smiles.
Affection seeks affection
in the most natural way.My life, our lives,
form a single diamond.
I've learned new words
and made others more beautiful.I'm making a song
for waking up men
and putting children to sleep.”

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987) Brazilian poet

<p>Eu preparo uma canção
em que minha mãe se reconheça,
todas as mães se reconheçam,
e que fale como dois olhos.</p><p>Caminho por uma rua
que passa em muitos países.
Se não me vêem, eu vejo
e saúdo velhos amigos.</p><p>Eu distribuo um segredo
como quem ama ou sorri.
No jeito mais natural
dois carinhos se procuram.</p><p>Minha vida, nossas vidas
formam um só diamante.
Aprendi novas palavras
e tornei outras mais belas.</p><p>Eu preparo uma canção
que faça acordar os homens
e adormecer as crianças.</p>
"Canção amiga" ["I'm Making a Song"]
Novos Poemas [New Poems] (1948)

Norman Mailer photo
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson photo

“Unlike a human smile, purring cannot be, as far as anyone knows, faked.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats (2002), Ch. 3

George William Russell photo

“I pitied one whose tattered dress
Was patched, and stained with dust and rain;
He smiled on me; I could not guess
The viewless spirit's wide domain.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

By Still Waters (1906)

Cole Porter photo

“You're the smile
On the Mona Lisa.”

Cole Porter (1891–1964) American composer and songwriter

"You're the Top"
Anything Goes (1934)

Leo Buscaglia photo
Elizabeth Barrett Browning photo

“And I said in underbreath —
All our life is mixed with death, —
And who knoweth which is best?
And I smiled to think God's greatness
Flowed around our incompleteness, —
Round our restlessness, His rest.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) English poet, author

Rhyme of the Duchess; reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 514.

Farah Pahlavi photo

“Out where the handclasp’s a little stronger,
Out where the smile dwells a little longer,
That’s where the West begins.”

Arthur Chapman (poet) (1873–1935) American poet and newspaper columnist

Out Where the West Begins http://www.cowboypoetry.com/ac.htm#OUT, st. 1.
Out Where the West Begins and Other Western Verses http://www.cowboypoetry.com/ac.htm#outbk (1917)

Rosey Grier photo
Robin Sloan photo
Paul Bourget photo

“Well, you must now imagine my friend at my age or almost there. You must picture him growing gray, tired of life and convinced that he had at last discovered the secret of peace. At this time he met, while visiting some relatives in a country house, a mere girl of twenty, who was the image, the haunting image of her whom he had hoped to marry thirty years before. It was one of those strange resemblances which extend from the color of the eyes to the 'timbre' of the voice, from the smile to the thought, from the gestures to the finest feelings of the heart. I could not, in a few disjointed phrases describe to you the strange emotions of my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naïve and spontaneous thing in it, a young girl. She comes, she goes, she laughs, she sings, you go about with her in the intimacy of country life, and at her side walks one long dead. After two weeks of almost careless abandon to the dangerous delights of this inward agitation imagine my friend entering by chance one morning one of the less frequented rooms of the house, a gallery, where, among other pictures, hung a portrait of himself, painted when he was twenty-five. He approaches the portrait abstractedly. There had been a fire in the room, so that a slight moisture dimmed the glass which protected the pastel, and on this glass, because of this moisture, he sees distinctly the trace of two lips which had been placed upon the eyes of the portrait, two small delicate lips, the sight of which makes his heart beat. He leaves the gallery, questions a servant, who tells him that no one but the young woman he has in mind has been in the room that morning.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love

John Greenleaf Whittier photo

“Thus he spake, honouring her; and she cast her eyes down with a smile divinely sweet; and her soul melted within her, uplifted by his praise.”

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book III. Jason and Medea, Lines 1008–1010 (tr. R. C. Seaton)

W. Clement Stone photo

“Give a smile to everyone you meet (smile with your eyes) — and you’ll smile and receive smiles…”

W. Clement Stone (1902–2002) American New Thought author

Be Generous!

Robert Lynn Asprin photo

“Education,” he smiled, “is never a waste of time.”

Robert Lynn Asprin (1946–2008) American science fiction and fantasy author

Source: Time Scout (1995), Chapter 9 (p. 175)

Isaac Barrow photo

“Smiling always with a never fading serenity of countenance, and flourishing in an immortal youth.”

Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician

Isaac Barrow, Duty of Thanksgiving, Works, Volume I, p. 66; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 921-24

Mallika Sherawat photo
Horace photo

“Enjoy the present smiling hour,
And put it out of Fortune's power.”

Quod adest memento componere aequus.

Horace book Odes

Book III, ode xxix, line 32 (as translated by John Dryden)
Odes (c. 23 BC and 13 BC)

Abraham Cowley photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo

“There was a time, and not so long ago, when one could score a success also here with a bit of irony, which compensated for all other deficiencies and helped one get through the world rather respectably, gave one the appearance of being cultured, of having a perspective on life, an understanding of the world, and to the initiated marked one as a member of an extensive intellectual freemasonry. Occasionally we still meet a representative of that vanished age who has preserved that subtle, sententious, equivocally divulging smile, that air of an intellectual courtier with which he has made his fortune in his youth and upon which he had built his whole future in the hope that he had overcome the world. Ah, but it was an illusion! His watchful eye looks in vain for a kindred soul, and if his days of glory were not still a fresh memory for a few, his facial expression would be a riddle to the contemporary age, in which he lives as a stranger and foreigner. Our age demands more; it demands, if not lofty pathos then at least loud pathos, if not speculation then at least conclusions, if not truth then at least persuasion, if not integrity then at least protestations of integrity, if not feeling then at least verbosity of feelings. Therefore it also coins a totally different kind of privileged faces. It will not allow the mouth to be defiantly compressed or the upper lip to quiver mischievously; it demands that the mouth be open, for how, indeed, could one imagine a true and genuine patriot who is not delivering speeches; how could one visualize a profound thinker’s dogmatic face without a mouth able to swallow the whole world; how could one picture a virtuoso on the cornucopia of the living world without a gaping mouth? It does not permit one to stand still and to concentrate; to walk slowly is already suspicious; and how could one even put up with anything like that in the stirring period in which we live, in this momentous age, which all agree is pregnant with the extraordinary? It hates isolation; indeed, how could it tolerate a person’s having the daft idea of going through life alone-this age that hand in hand and arm in arm (just like itinerant journeymen and soldiers) lives for the idea of community.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), p. 246-247

Rudyard Kipling photo
Michael Moorcock photo
Tom Petty photo

“They say be careful who you believe,
Be careful who you trust.
Did you smile when you pulled the trigger
That dropped me in the dust?”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Billy the Kid
Lyrics, Echo (1999)

Roger Ebert photo

“Terri (Hilary Duff)'s new roommate is Denise (Dana Davis), who plans to work hard for a scholarship, and resents Terri as a distraction. Sizing up Terri's wardrobe and her smile, she tells her: "You're like some kind of retro Brady Buncher."”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

I hate it when a movie contains its own review.
Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/raise-your-voice-2004 of Raise Your Voice (8 October 2004)
Reviews, One-star reviews

Tucker Max photo

“Redheadedcalin doll: Doll comes with an innocent smile. Pull her string and doesn't speak, she just opens her legs.”

Tucker Max (1975) Internet personality; blogger; author

Action Figures http://messageboard.tuckermax.com/showpost.php?p=126574&postcount=22,
The Tucker Max Stories

Thomas Haynes Bayly photo

“Oh, I have roamed o'er many lands,
And many friends I've met;
Not one fair scene or kindly smile
Can this fond heart forget.”

Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797–1839) English poet, songwriter, dramatist, and writer

Oh, steer my Bark to Erin's Isle, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Henry Van Dyke photo
Albert Szent-Györgyi photo

“It is impossible to encircle the hips of a girl with my right arm and hold her smile in my left hand, then proceed to study the two items separately. Similarly, we can not separate life from living matter, in order to study only living matter and its reactions. Inevitably, studying living matter and its reactions, we study life itself”

Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893–1986) Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937

Mi è impossibile cingere i fianchi di una ragazza con il mio braccio destro e serrare il suo sorriso nella mia mano sinistra, per poi tentare di studiare i due oggetti separatamente. Allo stesso modo, non ci è possibile separare la vita dalla materia vivente, allo scopo di studiare la sola materia vivente e le sue reazioni. Inevitabilmente, studiando la materia vivente e le sue reazioni, studiamo la vita stessa.
The Nature of Life, Academic press, 1948.

Ivan Turgenev photo

“"What is Bazarov?" Arkady smiled. "Would you like me to tell you, uncle, what he really is?""Please do, nephew.""He is a nihilist!""What?" asked Nikolai Petrovich, while Pavel Petrovich lifted his knife in the air with a small piece of butter on the tip and remained motionless."He is a nihilist," repeated Arkady."A nihilist," said Nikolai Petrovich. "That comes from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who… who recognizes nothing?""Say — who respects nothing," interposed Pavel Petrovich and lowered his knife with the butter on it."Who regards everything from the critical point of view," said Arkady."Isn't that exactly the same thing?" asked Pavel Petrovich."No, it's not the same thing. A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered.""Well, and is that good?" asked Pavel Petrovich. "That depends, uncle dear. For some it is good, for others very bad.""Indeed. Well, I see that's not in our line. We old-fashioned people think that without principles, taken as you say on faith, one can't take a step or even breathe. Vous avez changé tout cela; may God grant you health and a general's rank, and we shall be content to look on and admire your… what was the name?""Nihilists," said Arkady, pronouncing very distinctly."Yes, there used to be Hegelists and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring, please, brother Nikolai, it's time for me to drink my cocoa."”

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) Russian writer

Source: Father and Sons (1862), Ch. 5.

William Blake photo

“My silks and fine array,
My smiles and languished air,
By love are driv'n away;
And mournful lean Despair
Brings me yew to deck my grave:
Such end true lovers have.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Song (My Silks and Fine Arrays), st. 1
1780s, Poetical Sketches (1783)

Daniel Johns photo

“There's hopeless smiles better than mine”

Daniel Johns (1979) Australian musician

Without You
Song lyrics, Diorama (2002)

Robert Graves photo
Ernest Thayer photo
Tom Stoppard photo

“What do I want from this life? What makes you happy is not enough. All the things that satisfy our instincts only satisfy the animal in us. I want to be proud of myself. I want more. I want to look up to myself and when I die, I want to smile because of the things I have done, not cry for the things I haven't done.”

Tom Hurndall (1981–2004) British activist

Diary, (November 2001) Memorial Address by Jocelyn Hurndall (PDF) https://web.archive.org/web/20060108221709/http://www.tomhurndall.co.uk/memorial/Address%20at%20Memorial%20Westminster%20Cathedral%20_2_.pdf

George William Curtis photo

“And so it went until the alarm was struck in the famous Missouri debate. Then wise men remembered what Washington had said, 'Resist with care the spirit of innovation upon the principles of the Constitution'. They saw that the letting alone was all on one side, that the unfortunate anomaly was deeply scheming to become the rule, and they roused the country. The old American love of liberty flamed out again. Meetings were everywhere held. The lips of young orators burned with the eloquence of freedom. The spirit of John Knox and of Hugh Peters thundered and lightened in the pulpits, and men were not called political preachers because they preached that we are all equal children of God. The legislatures of the free States instructed their representatives to stand fast for liberty. Daniel Webster, speaking for the merchants of Boston, said that it was a question essentially involving the perpetuity of the blessings of liberty for which the Constitution itself was formed. Daniel Webster, speaking for humanity at Plymouth, described the future of the slave as 'a widespread prospect of suffering, anguish, and death'. The land was loud with the debate, and Rufus King stated its substance in saying that it was a question of slave or free policy in the national government. Slavery hissed disunion; liberty smiled disdain. The moment of final trial came. Pinckney exulted. John Quincy Adams shook his head. Slavery triumphed and, with Southern chivalry, politely called victory compromise.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Thomas Gray photo

“The social smile, the sympathetic tear.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

Education and Government; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Sinclair Lewis photo

“Each day will be triumphant only when your smiles bring forth smiles from others.”

Source: The Greatest Salesman in the World (1968), Ch. 14 : The Scroll Marked VII, p. 86.

Edgar Guest photo
Amit Chaudhuri photo
Spider Robinson photo
Elliott Smith photo

“Here come your pride and joyThe comic little drunk you call your boy,Making everybody smile<BR”

Elliott Smith (1969–2003) American singer-songwriter

All Cleaned Out.
Lyrics, New Moon (posthumous, 2007)

Owen Wister photo

“When you call me that, smile!”

The Virginian (1902), pp. 29–30. Reported in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989), as presumably the forerunner of "Smile when you say that, partner".

Stephenie Meyer photo
Michael Ende photo

“You were compelled to?' he repeated. 'You mean you weren't sufficiently powerful to resist?'
'In order to seize power,' replied the dictator, 'I had to take it from those that had it, and in order to keep it I had to employ it against those that sought to deprive me of it.'
The chef's hat gave a nod. 'An old, old story. It has been repeated a thousand times, but no one believes it. That's why it will be repeated a thousand times more.'
The dictator felt suddenly exhausted. He would gladly have sat down to rest, but the old man and the children walked on and he followed them.
'What about you?' he blurted out, when he had caught the old man up. 'What do you know of power? Do you seriously believe that anything great can be achieved on earth without it?'
'I?' said the old man. 'I cannot tell great from small.'
'I wanted power so that I could give the world justice,' bellowed the dictator, and blood began to trickle afresh from the wound in his forehead, 'but to get it I had to commit injustice, like anyone who seeks power. I wanted to end oppression, but to do so I had to imprison and execute those who opposed me - I became an oppressor despite myself. To abolish violence we must use it, to eliminate human misery we must inflict it, to render war impossible we must wage it, to save the world we must destroy it. Such is the true nature of power.'
Chest heaving, he had once more barred the old man's path with his pistol ready.'
'Yet you love it still,' the old man said softly.
'Power is the supreme virture!' The dictator's voice quavered and broke. 'But its sole shortcoming is sufficient to spoil the whole: it can never be absolute - that's what makes it so insatiable. The only true form of power is omnipotence, which can never be attained, hence my disenchantment with it. Power has cheated me.'
'And so,' said the old man, 'you have become the very person you set out to fight. It happens again and again. That is why you cannot die.'
The dictator slowly lowered his gun. 'Yes,' he said, 'you're right. What's to be done?'
'Do you know the legend of the Happy Monarch?' asked the old man.

'When the Happy Monarch came to build the huge, mysterious palace whose planning alone had occupied ten whole years of his life, and to which marvelling crowds made pilgrimage long before its completion, he did something strange. No one will ever know for sure what made him do it, whether wisdom or self-hatred, but the night after the foundation stone had been laid, when the site was dark and deserted, he went there in secret and buried a termites' nest in a pit beneath the foundation stone itself. Many decades later - almost a life time had elapsed, and the many vicissitudes of his turbulent reign had long since banished all thought of the termites from his mind - when the unique building was finished at last and he, its architect and author, first set foot on the battlements of the topmost tower, the termites, too, completed their unseen work. We have no record of any last words that might shed light on his motives, because he and all his courtiers were buried in the dust and rubble of the fallen palace, but long-enduring legend has it that, when his almost unmarked body was finally unearthed, his face wore a happy smile.”

Michael Ende (1929–1995) German author

"Mirror in the Mirror", page 193

Sri Chinmoy photo
Morrissey photo

“In my life
Why do I smile
At people who I'd much rather kick in the eye?”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

from the 1984 song "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now"
From songs

Philip Larkin photo

“Once, along with The Transfigured Night, he played a class Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead. Most of the class had not seen the painting, so he went to the library and returned with a reproduction of it. Then he pointed, with a sober smile, to a painting which hung on the wall of the classroom (A Representation of Several Areas, Some of Them Grey, one might have called it; yet this would have been unjust to it—it was non-representational) and played for the class, on the piano, a composition which he said was an interpretation of the painting: he played very slowly and very calmly, with his elbows, so that it sounded like blocks falling downstairs, but in slow motion. But half his class took this as seriously as they took everything else, and asked him for weeks afterward about prepared pianos, tone-clusters, and the compositions of John Cage and Henry Cowell; one girl finally brought him a lovely silk-screen reproduction of a painting by Jackson Pollock, and was just opening her mouth to—
He interrupted, bewilderingly, by asking the Lord what land He had brought him into. The girl stared at him open-mouthed, and he at once said apologetically that he was only quoting Mahler, who had also diedt from America; then he gave her such a winning smile that she said to her roommate that night, forgivingly: “He really is a nice old guy. You never would know he’s famous.””

“Is he really famous?” her roommate asked. “I never heard of him before I got here. ...”
Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 4, pp. 138–139

Orson Scott Card photo
Robert Charles Wilson photo
Elie Wiesel photo

“For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Interview in O : The Oprah Magazine (November 2000)

Sri Chinmoy photo

“To be rich is to give a smile with no expectation of return.”

Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) Indian writer and guru

#26508, Part 27
Seventy Seven Thousand Service-Trees series 1-50 (1998)

“That's five stars to start with. That's five stars to start with. That's Gil Evans, isn't it? The only thing that disturbed me about this—the whole thing, in its entirety, was tremendously satisfying: performance, orchestration is good, the harmonic usage is beautiful, the contrasting texture of orchestra, the whole thing is just great—but there are certain sections there when the background was so lovely it just seemed like the alto saxophone was out of place. Now this is the type of thing that just makes me smile. I enjoy every minute of it. I don't have to go for a "peak" and then think about something else while I'm listening. Gil Evans' writing, to me, is such a boon that when he came along with the Miles Ahead album, I was thankful, because since about the Stan Kenton Orchestra of 1952, where the writing had been very good, between Mulligan and Rugolo and the whole works, between those periods there had been a void, a retrogression back to the roots, and this took writing back to a standpoint which just wasn't interesting. So when Evans came along, I just flipped.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Reviewing Evans' arrangement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao4dcHdoR4k of Dizzy Gillespie's "Manteca,", from New Bottle, Old Wine; as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#rjvay58eo774rhe

Laurell K. Hamilton photo
William Cullen Bryant photo

“And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief,
And the year smiles as it draws near its death.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

October. A Sonnet http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16341/16341-h/16341-h.htm#page115 (1866)

Joe Strummer photo

“London Calling - Yes, I was there, too,
And you know what they said? Well some of it was true.
London Calling at the top of the dial…
And after all this, won't you give me a smile?”

Joe Strummer (1952–2002) British musician, singer, actor and songwriter

Joe Strummer / Mick Jones, "London Calling", London Calling (1979).
Lyrics

Michael Swanwick photo
Mike Oldfield photo

“Something tells me how
Her bright blue eyes
Are smiling;
She turns her head and now
When she wants she denies him…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Discovery (1984)

Mallika Sherawat photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Ayn Rand photo

“A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

We The Living (1936)

Phillis Wheatley photo

“Creation smiles in various beauty gay
While day to night, and night succeeds day”

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) American poet

Works of Providence from Poems on Various Subjects kindle ebook ASIN B0083ZJ7SU

“In their speech is death, hell in their smile.”

Edward Fairfax (1580–1635) English translator

Book XIX, stanza 84
Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1600)

Ted Hughes photo
Fred Thompson photo

“My daddy always said that a man who walks around with a smile on his face all the time can't possibly know what's going on.”

Fred Thompson (1942–2015) American politician and actor

Teaching the Pig to Dance

Ann Taylor (poet) photo

“I thank the goodness and the grace
Which on my birth have smiled,
And made me in these Christian days,
A happy English child.”

Ann Taylor (poet) (1782–1866) British female poet and literary critic

Jane Taylor, "A Child's Hymn of Praise," from Hymns for Infant Minds (1810)
Misattributed

Robert Graves photo

“She in left hand bears a leafy quince;
When with her right she crooks a finger, smiling,
How may the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"To Juan at the Winter Solstice" from Poems 1938-1945 (1946).
Poems

Bruno Schulz photo
André Maurois photo

“Jack: You'll have to compromise, smile, concern yourself with your public image, measure your words as carefully as possible… and turn yourself into a dutiful party hack! [chuckles] Never mind, Nigel, never mind.”

Dennis Potter (1935–1994) English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist

Jack Hay was based on Ron Brewer, who had been Potter's agent when he was Labour candidate for East Hertfordshire in the 1964 general election.
Vote, vote, vote for Nigel Barton (1965)

Hunter S. Thompson photo
Glen Cook photo
William Blake photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and and spoken for the other. A visitor looked under black beams, through leaded casements (past apple boughs, past box, past chairs like bath-tubs on broomsticks) to a lawn ornamented with one of the statues of David Smith; in the months since the figure had been put in its place a shrike had deserted for it a neighboring thorn tree, and an archer had skinned her leg against its farthest spike. On the table in the President’s waiting-room there were copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine—a little magazine—that had no name. One walked by a mahogany hat-rack, glanced at the coat of arms on an umbrella-stand, and brushed with one’s sleeve something that gave a ghostly tinkle—four or five black and orange ellipsoids, set on grey wires, trembled in the faint breeze of the air-conditioning unit: a mobile. A cloud passed over the sun, and there came trailing from the gymnasium, in maillots and blue jeans, a melancholy procession, four dancers helping to the infirmary a friend who had dislocated her shoulder in the final variation of The Eye of Anguish.”

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1: “The President, Mrs., and Derek Robbins”, p. 3; opening paragraph of novel

John Green photo

“That smile could end wars and cure cancer.”

Colin Singleton, p. 32
An Abundance of Katherines (2006)

Thomas Moore photo
Rupert Brooke photo

“And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink.”

Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) British poet

"The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" (1912)

Jimmy Buffett photo
James Macpherson photo
Sarah Bakewell photo

“Learning should be a pleasure, and children should grow up to imagine wisdom with a smiling face, not a fierce and terrifying one.”

describing Montaigne’s view, p. 57.
How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in one Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010)