Quotes about diner (20 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964)
Context: I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American. Why, if birth made you American, you wouldn't need any legislation; you wouldn't need any amendments to the Constitution; you wouldn't be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, D. C., right now.

“There's a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milkshake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

Coffee , Thinking

“[having been recognized by a woman in a diner]
She sits down across the table from me, and didn't say "Hi, hello, my name is…." She just said "this is what I'm going to tell my husband when he gets home from work today. I'm going to tell him that I had lunch with Jeff Foxworthy."”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

[looks up] Really God? Really?
Aged and Confused (2009)

God , Home

“So we pulled up to this diner, where people told us that we could get some good pie. And I like pie. Do you like pie too? So, we go in there, and we say, "Oh, what kind of pie you got?' And they didn't have sweet potato pie, they didn't have pumpkin pie. They had some cream pies mostly, which is OK with me. So, I got some coconut cream pie. And Governor Strickland, he got lemon meringue pie.
So while we're waiting for our pie, the staff come and they want to take a picture with me because they say, you know, the owner of this dinner is a staunch die-hard Republican, so we want to kind of tease him a little bit by getting this picture with you. So we're taking this picture and suddenly the owner comes out with the pie. And he looks at me and I say, "Sir, I understand that you are a die-hard Republican." He says, "That's right." I said, "How's business?" He said, "Not so good." He said, "My customer, they can't afford to eat out anymore." I said, "Who's been in charge of the economy for the last eight years?" He said, "Republicans." I said, "You know, if you kept on hitting your head against a wall over and over again and it started to hurt, at some point would you stop hitting your head against the wall?"”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

He said, "You've got a point."
At a rally in Londonberry, New Hampshire (16 October 2008) http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0810/16/cnr.04.html
2008

People , Understanding , Business , Waiting

“Because when I looked at you across that table at the diner, no one else existed. And whether or not anything happens between you and me, it took meeting you to show me what I was missing.”

Jessica Bird book Covet

Source: Covet

“She glanced at the other diners, all of them going into their act, and thought is this what it all boils down to? Romantic love, is this all it is, a talent show?”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Love

“Lemony Snicket: (narrating) When you are invited to dine, particularly with people you do not know very well, it always helps to have a conversational opener, a phrase which here means "an interesting sentence to say out loud in order to get people talking." Although lately it has become more and more difficult to attend dinner parties without the evening ending in gunfire or tapioca, I keep a list of good and bad conversational openers in my commonplace book in order to avoid awkward pauses at the dinner table. "Who would like to see an assortment of photographs taken while I was on vacation?" for instance, is a very poor conversational opener, because it is likely to make your fellow diners shudder instead of talk, whereas good conversational openers are sentences such as "What would drive a man to commit arson?," "Why do so many stories of true love end in tragedy and despair?," and "Madame diLustro, I believe I've discovered your true identity!," all of which are likely to provoke discussions, arguments, and accusations, thus making the dinner party much more entertaining.”

Daniel Handler book The Grim Grotto

The Grim Grotto (2004)

Love , People , Books , Help

“Many a young fellow has found himself in a similar predicament, but I doubt whether anyone ever became so desperately hungry as I did on that day. I recollect that, having rashly eaten up my sausage before eight o'clock, I felt a sinking towards twelve; it was aggravated by the savoury smell of roast meat which steamed from the cookshops and dining-rooms as I walked along the streets. About one o'clock I gazed with malignant envy on the happy clerks who could go in and order platefuls of the roast and boiled which smoked in the windows, and threw a perfume more delicious than the sweetest strains of music into the streets where I lingered and looked. And at two I observed the diners come out again, walking more slowly, but with an upright and satisfied air, while I -- the sinking had been succeeded by a dull gnawing pain -- was slowly doubling up. At half-past two I felt as if I could bear it no longer. I had been walking about, trying different offices for a clerkship. I might as well have asked for a partnership. But I could walk no more.”

Walter Besant (1836–1901) English novelist and historian

The Case of Mr. Lucraft (with James Rice), 1875 http://books.google.com/books?id=fn5lH8qnLygC&pg=PA19, p. 19

Pain , Music , Past , Envy

“Brenda and Eddie were the popular steadies
And the king and the queen of the prom
Riding around with the car top down and the radio on
Nobody looked any finer
Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner
We never knew we could want more than that out of life
Surely Brenda and Eddie would always know how to survive.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.
Song lyrics, The Stranger (1977)

Life , Cars

“And yet I think that the Full House model does teach us to treasure variety for its own sake—for tough reasons of evolutionary theory and nature's ontology, and not from a lamentable failure of thought that accepts all beliefs on the absurd rationale that disagreement must imply disrespect. Excellence is a range of differences, not a spot. Each location on the range can be occupied by an excellent or an inadequate representative—and we must struggle for excellence at each of these varied locations. In a society driven, often unconsciously, to impose a uniform mediocrity upon a former richness of excellence—where McDonald's drives out the local diner, and the mega-Stop & Shop eliminates the corner Mom and Pop—an understanding and defense of full ranges as natural reality might help to stem the tide and preserve the rich raw material of any evolving system: variation itself.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

Source: Full House (1996), p. 230

Moms , Failure , Understanding , Nature

“Ye diners-out from whom we guard our spoons.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Political Georgics (June 29, 1831)

“Historical Slumming: The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural village -- locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back -- so as to experience relief when one returns back to “the present.””

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

Definitions

Appearance , Time

“I am the midnight watchman down at Miller's Tool and Die.
And I watch the metal rusting, and I watch the time go by.
A week ago at the diner I stopped to get a bite.
And this here lovely lady she sat two seats from my right.
And Lord, Lord, Lord she was alright.
Oh she was so damned beautiful that she'd warm a winter's frost.
But she was long past lonely, and well nigh unto lost.
Now I'm not much of a mover, or a pick-em-up easy guy,
But I decided to glide on over, and give her one good try.
And Lord, Lord, Lord she was worth a try.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Better Place to Be
Song lyrics, Sniper and Other Love Songs (1972)

Love , Beauty , Guy , Winter

“One night at the diner over eggs,
Over easy she showed me the length of her legs,
But that gold plated cross on her neck, it was real
And you don't get that kind of money from pushing a meal.”

Ryan Adams (1974) American alt-country/rock singer-songwriter

Carolina Rain
29 (2005)

Money , Night

“Marriage is a diner that begins with dessert.”

Jules Sandeau (1811–1883) French writer

Source: Frans romanschrijver, geboren Léonard Sylvani Julien,

Marriage

“The Lierna Chair is a chair specially designed as a seat to be placed next to the dining table. It was therefore with the rather high back that shields behind the diner, tight to facilitate the movements of those who serve lunch and that is well suited to the position composed of people sitting. The chair was designed by us for the Cassina, and we are oriented on a light chair with joints in sections reduced to the essentials …”

Achille Castiglioni (1918–2002) Italian designers and architect

Sedia Lierna, Achille e Pier Giacomo Casiglioni, Lierna (Lake Como), 1971. Scultore. in: Fondazione Achille Castiglioni., Lierna Village, Lake Como, p. 201 ( online http://fondazioneachillecastiglioni.it/progetto/sedia-lierna/)

People , Light

“The immigrant who comes to us from a life of oppression must be made to realize that he assumes an obligation; otherwise, he is not wanted. Either he must live with us in the light of the highest citizenship, or else society will impose upon him the very restrictions he has sought to escape by coming here. It is the wolf in sheep's clothing who has cast a slur on immigration. There are many who land here who really never get to America. They become Americanized in everything but in heart. To teach the foreigner English is a necessary step; but it is not an end in itself; it is merely one of the implements of Americanization. This may hold diners peoples together for a while, just as economic opportunity and financial reward may cover their isolation. But unless, in their living—rather than in then livelihood—they daily exercise the principles on which the Republic rests, we have among us a shell of citizenship liable to explode at the least upsetting of economic balance, rather than the vital spirit which is at the basis of American life.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

Life , People , Exercises , Light

“Is the hotel Marge? It has to be Marge. I want atmosphere.' Marge is Anna-Louise's word describing sad, 1950s-ish diner-type places where the waitresses are named Marge.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

Sadness

“A diner having a row with a waiter in a swanky restaurant chills the blood in a way that a quarrel over a pizza order elsewhere would never do. Compassion is rarely the custom of the privileged.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

Way

“I am sitting in the morning
at the diner on the corner”

Suzanne Vega (1959) American singer

Tom's Diner
Solitude Standing (1987)
Context: I am sitting in the morning
at the diner on the corner
I am waiting at the counter
for the man to pour the coffee
and he fills it only halfway
and before I even argue
he is looking out the window
at somebody coming in.