Quotes about pick (1112 quotes, page 9)

“Why aren't we letting ISIS go and fight Assad and then we pick up the remnants?”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Interview in 60 Minutes http://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-60-minutes-scott-pelley/, 2015-09-27
Cited by Mitt Romney in Business Insider http://uk.businessinsider.com/mitt-romney-donald-trump-isis-60-minutes-ridiculous-2016-3?r=US&IR=T, 2016-03-03
2010s, 2015

Fight

“Like Eisenhower, Patton ordinarily messed with a group of inmates from his headquarters. Breakfast was spirited and talkative. Patton picked up the GI holster in which I carried my 30-year-old Colt.45. "Hell, Brad," he said, "what you need is a social gun. You can't carry that cannon with you everywhere you go."”

Omar Bradley (1893–1981) United States Army field commander during World War II

Source: A Soldier's Story (1951), p. 5-6.

Hell

“In the course of the last few generations, society has developed in such a way that we can live more and more safely, both financially and socially. We have got used to being able to pick and choose quite freely in big and small matters. Our circumstances are so good now that we have almost forgotten that our decisions also have consequences and that we cannot opt into or out of all life’s conditions.”

Margrethe II of Denmark (1940) Queen of Denmark

New Year's Address 2010/2011 http://kongehuset.dk/english/Menu/news/her-majesty-the-queens-new-year-address-2010 (01 January 2011).
Society

Life , Way , Decision

“The picture of law triumphant and justice prostrate, is not, I am aware, without admirers. To me it is a sorry spectacle. The spirit of justice does not reside in formalities, or words, nor is the triumph of its administration to be found in successfully picking a way between the pitfalls of technicality. After all, the law is, or ought to be, but the handmaid of justice, and inflexibility, which is the most becoming robe of the latter, often serves to render the former grotesque. But any real inroad upon the rights and opportunities for defence of a person charged with a breach of the law, whereby the certainty of justice might be imperilled, I conceive to be a matter of the highest moment.”

James Wilde, 1st Baron Penzance (1816–1899) British judge and rose breeder

Combe v. Edwards (1878), L. R. 3 P. D. 142.

Justice , Law , Way , Personality

“Though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.”

Herman Melville book White-Jacket

Source: White-Jacket (1850), Ch. 41

Books , Chance

“More than the atrocities committed or the condemnations that followed, perhaps the most important and also inspirational element of the events of last Friday was the demonstrations themselves. Tens of thousands of Palestinians congregated in disciplined, organized demonstrations at various points along the fence of the besieged Gaza Strip. People of all ages joined, songs were sung, meals were cooked, pick-up volleyball games were played. All of this, importantly, was done as a unified Palestinian front. Despite Israel’s efforts to slap a Hamas label on it, the only visible flags were Palestinian, not factional. For Palestinians, this was a vision that brought us together with great hope.”

Yousef Munayyer American writer

In Gaza, Israel Aims To Massacre Hope (2018)

People , Age , Hope , Game

“Bly is a poet, he is a big cat, so to speak, and not some chipmunk from the how-to culture. But it is the how-to culture that has picked up on his book. … And yet, for a while Iron John transformed male consciousness in the United States. The wild men weekends and initiation, adventure holidays and whatnot, which were big business, may prove to be ephemeral. But what does one make of the unabashed references in the press to "men's liberation" and the men's movement and the fact that there are now at least half a dozen magazines devoted to nothing else? Changing men, journeymen, man. … Bly's average reader is not a poet and a critic, but a weightlifter from Brooklyn.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

Men , Books , Cats , Business

“Sandra Bullock on 'Gravity' Oscar Nom: 'I've Just Gotten Better at Not Picking Crap”

Sandra Bullock (1964) American actress and producer

As quoted in http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/sandra-bullock-gravity-oscar-nom-671771

“As far as they were concerned, gunfire was nothing but noise. That’s why wars can keep going. Even the people who make them, who fight in them, don’t really get the picture. Even with a bullet in their gut, they’d go on picking up old shoes that “might come in handy.” The way a sheep, lying on its side in a meadow, will keep on grazing with its dying breath. Most people don’t die until the last moment; others start twenty years in advance, sometimes more. Those are the unfortunates.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 4

War , People , Shoe , Way

“If the Catholic Church hadn't so consistently and virulently condemned the Jews for killing Jesus, there would have been no Holocaust. There would have been no reason for anyone to think about picking on Jews. And that means today there might be no Jewish state, and no Middle East conflict. That's quite a lot to have on your conscience, isn't it? How fortunate for the Catholic Church that it doesn't possess a conscience, but at least it gives ordinary Catholics an opportunity to feel guilty about something real for a change, if they feel so inclined, and to reflect on the reality that the Jews didn't kill Jesus at all. The Catholic Church killed Jesus, and has spent the last two thousand years dragging his entrails through the dirt. And if he came back tomorrow, he'd be the first to say so. You know it's true. We all do.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Is Satan a Catholic?" (27 March 2010) http://youtube.com/watch?v=LKg4HLsu5gE
2010

Feeling , Thinking , Reality , Change

“When I first met Kate I knew there was something very special about her. I knew there was possibly something that I wanted to explore there. But we ended up being friends for a while and that was a good foundation.
I do generally believe now that being friends with one another is a massive advantage. It just went from there. I knew over the years, I knew that things were getting better and better and we went through a few stumbling blocks as every relationship does, but we picked ourselves up and carried on. From were you had the odd problem when you are first getting to know each other, those have all gone and it is just really easy being with each other, it is really fun and I'm extremely funny and she loves that so it's been good.”

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge (1982) a member of the British royal family

First post-engagement interview (2010)

Love , Problem

“Certainly one thing that I've learned is that it is important to pick a problem based on how much you care about it.”

Andrew Wiles (1953) British mathematician

Nova Interview

Problem , Learning

“And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed, and crammed—as space was then—with isolated corpuscles, surrounded by emptiness, containing no destination or meaning. And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time where the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines….”

Italo Calvino book Cosmicomics

Pages 92-93, "How Much Shall We Bet?"
Cosmicomics (1965)

Beauty , Way , Spring , Thinking

“The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket; and the glorious uncertainty of it is of mair use to the professors than the justice of it.”

Charles Macklin (1699–1797) Irish actor

Love à la Mode (1759), Act ii. Sc. 1.

Justice , Law , Smile , Science

“It is easier to pick it up fallen than not to let it fall. Let it fall and you will pick it up.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Es más fácil levantar la caída que no dejarla caer. Déjala caer y la levantarás.
Voces (1943)

“Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race. Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever…? Whether there is a race so inferior I do not know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle’s plea for slavery, that there are “natural slaves,” lies in the fact that there are no “natural” masters… The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to exterminate it. Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to “race suicide,” as the British administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race… If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive—they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind. Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian white may think. These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving “black-fellows” are there. Every one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity…Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of their own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in the great synthesis of the future.”

H. G. Wells book A Modern Utopia

Source: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 10, sect. 3

Death , Women , World , Education

“You know, in my experience,” said Kareem, caging his fingers and drawing out his words, “the jokers…who talk the most about ‘playing the race card’…are the people who own all the diamonds…who’ve picked up the clubs…to beat down the spades…because they’ve got no heart.”

Malcolm Azania book From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 1 “Operation: Cooperation!” (p. 14)

People , Heart , Drawing

“Because of my job, I learned to be confident a little earlier than most. People pick you apart when you're in the public eye - you're wearing the wrong shoes or you have ugly nail polish on or they're wondering if you got your boobs done - so you have to be a strong person right away.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Interview by Kate Sullivan for Allure, April 2010

People , Shoe , Confidence , Strong

“Test this out on yourself. Imagine that for a month you have neither had your garbage picked up nor an opportunity to read about new anthropological discoveries. Which would you pay more money to remedy? A society that functions effectively adjusts the pay until the supply matches the need. Failure to make these adjustments not only leaves streets filled with garbage, but also leaves unemployment lines filled with anthropologists.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 211.

Money , Imagination , Failure , Reading

“There is absolutely no reason the command group can not pick the five most probable contingencies or missions that your unit could be called on to execute today. Identify those missions and then schedule a crisis planning session for each mission. The training and preparation value of doing this is tremendous.”

Wheeler L. Baker (1938) President of Hargrave Military Academy

Source: Crisis Management: A Model For Managers (1993), p. 76

Training

“Well, what if I'm wrong, I mean — anybody could be wrong. We could all be wrong about the up the mountain. There's no particular reason to pick on the Judeo-Christian god, in which by the sheerest accident you happen to have been brought up and ask me the question, "What if I'm wrong?" What if you're wrong about the great Juju at the bottom of the sea?”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Answering audience questions after a reading of The God Delusion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mmskXXetcg,Randolph-Macon Woman's College,
Posed question: "This is probably going to be the most simplest one for you to answer, but: What if you're wrong?"

God , Mountain , Question , Sea

“By MANNERS, I mean not here Decency of behaviour; as how one man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company, and such other points of the Small Morals; But those qualities of mankind that concern their living together in Peace and Unity. To which end we are to consider that the Felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such Finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor Summum Bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old Moral Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live whose desires are at an end than he whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 47
Leviathan (1651)

Life , Books , Peace , Imagination

“I’m just a regular girl who likes to go snowboarding and picks her nose like anybody else. I just like to dive into things and take risks.”

Cameron Richardson (1979) American actress

Maxim Magazine

Girl

“I disagree with Les. We always found good cunt at the Lyceum. Friendly cunt, clean cunt, spare cunt, jeans and knicker stuffed full of nice juicy hairy cunt, handfuls of cunt, palmful grabbing the cunt by the stem, or the root – infantile memories of cunt – backrow slides – slithery oily cunt, the cunt that breathes – the cunt that’s neatly wrapped in cotton, in silk, in nylon, that announces, that speaks or thrusts, that winks that’s squeezed in a triangle of furtive cloth backed by an arse that’s creamy, springy billowy cushiony tight, knicker lined, knicker skinned, circumscribed by flowers and cotton, by views, clinging knicker, juice ridden knicker, hot knicker, wet knicker, swelling vulva knicker, witty cunt, teeth smiling the eyes biting cunt, cultured cunt, culture vulture cunt, finger biting cunt, cunt that pours, cunt that spreads itself over your soft lips, that attacks, cunt that imagines – cunt you dream about, cunt you create as a Melba, a meringue with smooth sides – remembered from school boys’ smelly first cunt, first foreign cunt, amazing cunt – cunt that’s cruel. Cunt that protects itself and makes you want it even more cunt – cunt that smells of the air, of the earth, of bakeries, of old apples, of figs, of sweat of hands of sour yeast of fresh fish cunt. So – are we going Les? We might pick up a bit of crumpet.”

Steven Berkoff East

East (1975), Scene 17

School , Smile , Dreams , Imagination

“When I get sick I start scripting the video tape that I'm gonna leave behind when I die. Sometimes imagining that even makes me cry. Both hurting and happiness make me feel more alive, but as I get older it seems that hurting's the low hanging fruit. So I pick it.”

Ze Frank (1972) American online performance artist

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/06/060506.html
"The Show" (www.zefrank.com/theshow/)

Feeling , Imagination , Hurt , Cry

“I have always paid great attention to natural forms, such as bones, shells, and pebbles, etc. Sometimes for several years running I have been to the same part of the seashore – but each year a new shape of pebble has caught my eye, which the year before, though it was there in hundreds, I never saw… Pebbles show Nature's way of working stone. Some of the pebbles I pick up have holes right through them... A piece of stone can have [for the sculptor] a hole through it and not be weakened – if the hole is of a studied size, shape and direction. On the principle of the arch, it can remain just as strong.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), pp. 250-251

Way , Nature , Study , Strong

“I see no reason why children as young as six, seven, or even three shouldn't be allowed to produce corporate comic books to relentless monthly deadlines. And have to write several titles at once to make a decent living. That's what a proper childhood's all about isn't it? This is the 21st century after all and these unruly little bastards have been milking post-Victorian sentimentality for all it's worth for way too long. Time to get kids back where they belong - up chimneys, down mines, and tied to the printing presses! If you can pick up a brick to smash a car window, then you can build me a textile factory, son … here's a whole half dollar for your day's labor. Now put down that Justin Timberlake bio-comic and get back on the production line!”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2003
http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=36&t=001597
On comics

Children , Books , Cars , Way

“I have a form of ESP that allows me to consistently pick losing lottery numbers, and generally make poor life choices.”

Joey Comeau book Overqualified

Letter to Nova Magnetics, pg 59.
Overqualified

Life

“What decent person would want to spend a life picking and cavilling? Picture this scene. A critic arrives at the gates of heaven. 'And what did you do?' asks Saint Peter. 'Well', says the dead soul. 'I criticised things'. 'I beg your pardon?' 'You know, other people wrote things, performed things, painted things and I said stuff like, "thin and unconvincing", "turgid and uninspired", "competent and serviceable,"… you know'.”

Stephen Fry book Paperweight

On critics, from "Paperweight", 2006. <sup> http://wongablog.co.uk/2006/07/14/stephen-fry-on-critics/</sup>
2000s

Life , People , Soul , Painting

“My mom was always my biggest teacher, my inspiration, my role model. My mom was just the most amazing person. She was like a bon vivant in that she just lived each day to the fullest. As soon as I became a vegetarian, she became a vegetarian. … I was actually inspired by a book she was reading that I picked up off the nightstand when I was about 13. It was a Norman Mailer book [Miami and the Siege of Chicago] and it had a very graphic scene of the slaughterhouses in Chicago. So I read that and I said, "I love animals. I don't want to be a part of that system."”

Christie Brinkley (1954) American model

“Christie Brinkley on Skin Care and the Secret to Staying Young”, interview with Elle (5 March 2015) http://www.elle.com/beauty/makeup-skin-care/news/a27143/christie-brinkley-on-skincare-and-the-secret-to-staying-young/.

Love , Books , Moms , Teachers

“Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women's cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought stay.”

Amy Hempel book The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, (2006)

Women , Men , Children , Dogs

“Now, so far as we may ascribe any great historic result to a single cause, it is the cotton-gin which has thwarted the Constitution and defeated the expectation of our fathers. The cotton-gin — which in seven years saw a crop twenty times as large as before; the cotton-gin, which enabled a man to pick a thousand pounds of cotton in a day instead of one pound — has seemed also to pick the moral perceptions out of the minds of a great many sober and kindly people; to pick all the intention, the spirit, the humanity, the meaning, the very soul, out of the Constitution of the United States, making it not the charter of equal freedom to all who are subject to it, but a mere commercial band by which a part of the population are compelled, directly or indirectly, to hold another part in slavery.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

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

People , Soul , Freedom , Time

“Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Maximes et anecdotes (1795)

“Privately run jails are a mark of American "reinvented government" that has been picked up by neoconservatives in Canada.”

Jane Jacobs book Dark Age Ahead

Notes And Comments, p. 189
Dark Age Ahead (2004)

“There are two main principles I've picked up over the years as they pertain to cultivating the type of faith that moves mountains. The first is this: Faith comes by looking at God, not at the mountain. The second is this: God gives us faith as we walk by his side.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

God , Faith , Mountain

“Well? You just repeat yourself all the time, don't you? Ian, how bad is it in this goal? Look, space. Who's picking Philipp Lahm up? Nobody, nobody. The crowd venting their anger, yet again.”

Steve McManaman (1972) English footballer

2010s, 2014 FIFA World Cup, Brazil v. Germany (2014)

Time , Anger

“Mr. Owen looked upon men through the spectacles of his own good-nature. He seldom took Lord Brougham's advice "to pick his men." He never acted on the maxim that the working class are as jealous of each other as the upper classes are of them. The resolution he displayed as a manufacturer he was wanting in as a founder of communities…. No leader ever took so little care as Mr, Owen in guarding his own reputation. He scarcely protested when others attached his name to schemes which were not his. The failure of Queenwood was not chargeable to him. When his advice was not followed he would say : "Well, gentlemen, I tell you what you ought to do. You differ from me. Carry out your own plans. Experience will show you who is right." When the affair went wrong then it was ascribed to him. Whatever failed under his name the public inferred failed through him. Mr. Owen was a general who never provided himself with a rear guard. While he was fighting in the front ranks priests might come up and cut off his commissariat. His own troops fell into pits against which he had warned them. Yet he would write his next dispatch without it occurring to him to mention his own defeat, and he would return to his camp without missing his army. Yet society is not so well served that it need hesitate to forgive the omissions of its generous friends. To Mr. Owen will be accorded the distinction of being a philosopher who devoted himself to founding a Science of Social Improvement and a philanthropist who gave his fortune to advance it. Association, which was but casual before his day, he converted into a policy and taught it as an art. He substituted Co-operation for coercion in the conduct ot industry and the willing co-operation of intelligence certain of its own reward, for sullen labour enforced by the necessity of subsistence, seldom to be relied on and never satisfied.”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

George Jacob Holyoake in The History of Co-operation in England (1875; 1902).

Men , Art , Intelligence , Communication

“In the name of a new theory past theory is declared honorable but feeble; one can lay aside Freud and Marx—or appreciate their limitations—and pick up the latest at the drive-in window of thought.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 3

Past

“I have another feeling that in working with a canvas, and with something you picked up off the street and you work on it for three or four days or maybe a couple of weeks and then, all of a sudden, it is in another situation. Much later, you go to see somebody in California, and there it is. You know that you know everything about that painting, so much more than anybody else in that room. You know where you ran out of nails... At the time I did that early piece, I didn't know it was the lower right-hand corner that had the new element – that that part would grow and that other parts would relate more to the past.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1960's, I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)

Feeling , Time , Past , Parting

“Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it up?!?”

Bruce Sterling (1954) American writer, speaker, futurist, and design instructor

in the Long Now talk "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole" (2004).

Death

“I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny -- "The sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or 10 headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot —one thing after another.
From the very beginning, we were convinced that we would succeed, and that means that that regime would end. And we were convinced that as we went from the end of that regime to something other than that regime, there would be a period of transition. And, you cannot do everything instantaneously; it's never been done, everything instantaneously. We did, however, recognize that there was at least a chance of catastrophic success, if you will, to reverse the phrase, that you could in a given place or places have a victory that occurred well before reasonable people might have expected it, and that we needed to be ready for that; we needed to be ready with medicine, with food, with water. And, we have been.
Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here.”

Donald Rumsfeld (1932) U.S. Secretary of Defense

DOD news briefing following the fall of Baghdad (11 April 2003) http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030411-secdef0090.html

People , Food , Freedom , Water

“If a Martian were asked to pick the most efficient and humane economic systems on earth, it would certainly not choose the countries which rely most on markets. The United States is a stagnant economy in which real wages have been constant for more than a decade and the real income of the bottom 40 percent of the population declined. It is an inhumane society in which 11.5 percent of the population, some 32 million people, including 20 percent of all children, live in absolute poverty. It is the oldest democracy on earth but also one with the lowest voting rates among democracies and the highest per capita prison population in the world. The fastest developing countries in the world today are among those where the state pursues active industrial and trade policies; the few countries in the world in which almost no one is poor today are those in which the state has been engaged in massive social welfare and labor market policies.”

Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic

Source: Journal of Democracy. Vol. 3, Nr. 3 (1992), p. 46

Children , People , World , Democracy

“Well, there was a guy, a blacksmith, in Abbott, and he and my granddad both had blacksmith's jobs. I hung around there a lot. And he had a family band. He just let me play because he knew I wanted to work and needed the work. So, I played a guitar in a big polka band with a lot of horns and everything. So, fortunately, no one ever heard me, because I wasn't that great. But I was nine or 10 years old and making eight to 10 dollars a night. So, it was easier than picking cotton.”

Willie Nelson (1933) American country music singer-songwriter.

Willie Nelson: Road Rules And Deep Thoughts, NPR Staff, NPR.org, National Public Radio, November 18, 2012, November 18, 2012 http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=165223056,

Family , Guy , Night

“Marina was about eight years older than my sister Tencha, so this made her about eighteen years older than me. She was presently a reporter for the New York Times. When she was in high school, she’d won the Underwood Typewriter typing contest, doing well over a hundred words a minute without a single mistake, setting a national record. She attributed her fast hands to her cotton-picking days as a young girl in Scottsdale, Arizona.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

School , Girl , Sister , Time

“I mean, did you think I was just a fake person here, that they picked out of, you know, that they picked out of a supermarket? Didn't you think that I had any legal experience at all, sir?”

Judith Sheindlin (1942) American lawyer, judge, television personality, and author

Quotes from Judge Judy cases, Being cocky
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37tcUYWijiw

Thinking , Personality

“"One time, when I was with Boston and he was with the Lakers, Happy Hairston and I were about to get in a scrape," said Charlotte Hornets coach Paul Silas, who was a rugged, no-nonsense enforcer. "All of a sudden, I felt an enormous vise around me. I was 6-7, 235, and Wilt had picked me up and turned me around. He said, 'We're not going to have that stuff.'”

Wilt Chamberlain (1936–1999) basketball player

I said, 'Yes sir.'"
Goliath's Wonderful Life, Hoop Magazine; May 1999; Chris Ekstrand
Strength

Time , Happiness

“If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. […] For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. […]
And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (2008)

Way , Time

“He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Hubbard, Elbert (1922). Selected Writings of Elbert Hubbard. V. Wm. H. Wise & Co./The Roycrofters. p. 237.
Often quoted as "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade"
Also: A genius is a man who takes the lemons that Fate hands him and starts a lemonade stand with them. (As quoted in Reader's Digest (October 1927) http://archive.org/details/ReadersDigestno.66October1927, p. 343).

Fate

“There is current in our land (and several European countries) at this moment a kind of nit-picking worship of historic im-po-tence. They say, they say, that Bach must not be interpreted and that he must have no emotion, his notes speak for themselves. You want know what that is? Pure unadulterated rot! Bach has the red blood. He has the communion with the people! He has all of this amazing spirit and imagine that you could put all the music on one side of the agenda with his great interpretation and great feeling and put the greatest man of all right up on top of a dusty shelf underneath some glass case in a museum and say that he must not be interpreted! They're full of you know what and they are so untalented that they had to hide behind this thing 'cause they couldn't get in the House of Music any other way!”

Virgil Fox (1912–1980) American musician

Heavy Organ (introduction to the Bach Toccata and Fugue in Dm, BWV 565)

People , Music , Way , Feeling

“Partly what you need to do is decide what your highest value is. It's the star. What are you aiming for? You can decide. But there are some criteria. It should be good for you in a way that facilitates your moving forward. Maybe it should be good for you in a way that's also good for your family, as well as for the larger community. It should cover the domain of life. There's constraints on what you should regard as a value, but within those constraints you have the choice. You have choice. The thing is that people will carry a heavy load if they get to pick the load. And they think, 'well, I won't carry any load.' Ok, fine, but then you'll be like the slead dog that has nothing to pull. You'll get bored. People are pack animals. They need to pull against a wait. And that's not true for everyone. It's not true for conscientious people. For the typical person, they'll eat themselves up unless they have a load. This is why there's such an opiate epidemic among so many dispossessed white, middle aged, unemployed men in the U. S. They lose their job, and then they're done. They despise themselves. They develop chronic pain syndromes and depression. And the chronic pain is treated with opiates. That's what we're doing. And you should watch when you talk to young men about responsibility. They're so thrilled about it. It just blows me away. Really?! That's what the counter-culture is? Grow up and do something useful. Really? I can do that? Oh, I'm so excited by that idea. No one ever mentioned that before. Rights, rights, rights, rights. Jesus. It's appalling. People have had enough of that. And they better have, because it's a non-productive mode of being. Responsibility, man. That's where the meaning in life is.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Life , Men , Pain , People

“Limbaugh hasn't had a natural erection since the Nixon Administration; think he's compensating for something? Now, I wouldn't pick on him for any of this stuff, not his blubbiness, not his man-boobs, not his inability to have a natural erection -- none of that stuff -- to me, off limits until! until! -- Mr. Limbaugh, you turn that sort of gun on somebody else -- once you start doing that, you're fair game, fat boy. Absolutely, you jiggly pile of mess. You're just fair game, and you're going to get it, too. [Laughs] You'd better watch what you say, Limbaugh, because it can come back the other way.”

Ron Reagan (1958) talk radio host and political analyst

On Rush Limbaugh - ' "The Ron Reagan Show http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2009/05/20/ron-reagan-junior-limbaugh-hasnt-had-natural-erection-nixon-administrati (18 May 2009).

Way , Game , Boy , Nature

“We were aware of her profile, and it was… first, it’s artistic: can she do it? Is she capable of handling this? Can she handle it emotionally? The song. Because it’s a very emotional song. Can she handle it melodically? Does she have the range for it? Second, now then, you’ve got that, now you look to see…because it’s a very strange duet, and I’ve always said it was meant to be a duet. I had the song in ’86, and I don’t care what anybody else says; I know it was my song, it was given to me in ’86, I was gonna do it, it was always gonna be a duet, and I think the only real life of it is a duet. And that’s my opinion, and my opinion only. That’s it. But when it’s a duet, it’s a definitive duet. And then because of how it’s a call-and-response duet, you needed the timbre of the voices. If you get someone with the same timbres… I’m being analytical, but that’s exactly why we picked Marion Raven. And then on the fourth hand… what, she’s twenty-two years old? She can get MTV where I can’t!”

Meat Loaf (1947) American musician, singer, songwriter, record producer and actor

On working with Marion Raven in a duet performance of "It's All Coming Back to Me Now".
A chat with Meat Loaf (2006)

Life , Thinking

“Of the seven deadly sins, lust is definitely the pick of the litter.”

Tom Robbins Skinny Legs and All

Skinny Legs and All (1990)

“I already see things backwards! You see, in printmaking everything comes out backwards so printing is an absolute natural for me. It is difficult for a lot of artists to do prints because they draw one way and can’t imagine it the other way. I always had trouble reading as a child. Every few minutes my mind would shift and I would pick out all the o's, than all the letter a's on a page.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

Source: 21st Century, Robert Rauschenberg, Works, Writings and Interviews, 2006, p. 28

Way , Imagination , Nature , Reading

“It was an ideological war for some—the defenders of democracy versus the rebel strong-arm charismatic leaders. Or the capitalist land-grabbers versus the protectors of the people, take your pick.”

Joe Haldeman book Forever Peace

Source: Forever Peace (1997), p. 36

War , People , Democracy , Strong

“He [Arjun Nair] started as a batsman and the bowling took over, now he's picking up the batting again, which is good because it is important he offers something [more] than his bowling. Finger spin in Australia is challenging at the best of times and you just have to give yourself more opportunities to be selected. In this professional age it is important he offers as much as possible to maximise the number of opportunities he gets. Fielding is another aspect, like all young cricketers. Arjun needs to make sure he nails that because you can't afford any deficiencies if you want to break through.”

Greg Chappell (1948) Australian cricketer

Chappel on cricketer Arjun Nair, The Sydney Morning Herald (January 30, 2016), "Arjun Nair is a name to remember, says Cricket Australia's Greg Chappell" http://www.smh.com.au/sport/cricket/arjun-nair-is-a-name-to-remember-says-cricket-australias-greg-chappell-20160129-gmhk9z.html

Age , Time

“Brenda and Eddie had had it already
By the summer of '75
From the high to the low
To the end of the show
For the rest of their lives.
They couldn't go back to the greasers.
The best they could do was pick up the pieces.
We always knew they would both find a way to get by.
That's all I heard about Brenda and Eddie.
Can't tell you more than I told you already.
And here we are wavin' Brenda and Eddie goodbye.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

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

Way , Summer

“On the morning when I moved into my new office, when the telephone rang for the first time I eagerly picked up the receiver to find out who the caller could be, only to discover that the person on the other end of the line wanted to speak to Edwina Currie.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Maiden speech to Parliament https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=1997-06-02a.59.0 (02 June 1997)

Time , Personality

“The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.”

Alan Greenspan (1926) 13th Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States

Source: 2000s, The Age of Turbulence (2008), Chapter Twenty-Five, "The Delphic Future", p. 465.

Success

“Janeway Smithson was a little, insane, grey-haired bantam rooster of a man. He loaded five or six of us in one cab, and we rolled down to the bed of the L. A. River. Now in those days the L. A. River was a fake - there was no water, just a wide, flat, dry cement runway. The bums lived down there by the hundreds in little cement alcoves under the bridges and overpasses. Some of them even had potted plants in front of their places. All they needed to live like kings was canned heat (Sterno) and what they picked out of the nearby garbage dump. They were tan and relaxed and most of them looked a hell of a lot healthier than the average Los Angeles business man. Those guys down there had no problems with women, income tax, landlords, burial expenses, dentists, time payments, car repairs, or with climbing into a voting booth and pulling the curtain closed.”

Charles Bukowski book Factotum

Source: Factotum (1975), Ch. 71

Women , Angels , Cars , Guy

“He uttered a coarse expression which I wouldn't have thought he would have known. It just shows that you can bury yourself in the country and still somehow acquire a vocabulary. No doubt one picks up things from the neighbours -- the vicar, the local doctor, the man who brings the milk, and so on.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Right Ho, Jeeves

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Country

“If we were choosing sides and every player was in the pool, my first pick would be Whitey Ford and my second would be Ted Williams. Beyond that there would be just too many and I'd be afraid of leaving somebody out. Besides, with Whitey on the mound and Williams in the lineup, we'd still beat just about anybody.”

Mickey Mantle (1931–1995) Professional baseball player

When asked "to choose the ideal team he would field if he had to win game," with "the stipulation that he confine his choices to one-time teammates and rivals"; as quoted in The Greatest Team of All Time: As Selected by Baseball's Immortals, From Ty Cobb to Willie Mays (1994), compiled by Nicholas Acocella and Donald Dewey, p. 121.

“Late at night the horses stumble
Around the camp and I awake.
I lie on my elbow watching
Your beautiful sleeping face
Like a jewel in the moonlight.
If you are lucky and the
Nations let you, you will live
Far into the twenty-first
Century. I pick up the glass
And watch the Great Nebula
Of Andromeda swim like
A phosphorescent amoeba
Slowly around the Pole. Far
Away in distant cities
Fat-hearted men are planning
To murder you while you sleep.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

In Defense of the Earth (1956), The Great Nebula of Andromeda

Men , Lie , Beauty , Sleep

“Every day before supper and before we went to services on Sundays my grandmother would read the Bible to me, and my grandfather would pray. We even had devotions before going to pick cotton in the fields. Prayer and the Bible, became a part of my everyday thoughts and beliefs. I learned to put my trust in God and to seek Him as my strength.”

Rosa Parks (1913–2005) African-American civil rights activist

Quiet Strength (2000)

God , Learning , Reading , Parting

“First, the eight rules of tolerance: 1. Stay out of the way. 2. Don't pick a fight. 3. If challenged, walk away. 4. Avoid eye contact. 5. If your enemy is diurnal, learn to be nocturnal. 6. Vice versa. 7. Possess nothing the other wants. 8. Draw the line at hurting kids: I will fight to the death.
After tolerance is achieved comes play. Here are the nine rules of play: 1. Know when to quit. 2. Learn how to handicap. 3. Learn what frightens the other (cat claws). 4. Don't let it get to you. It's just a game; you mustn't take it seriously (cats have trouble with this one—escalation is always a risk in cat games). 5. Don't eat your playmate. 6. Pay attention to the signals on the other side—for instance, “enough” and “quit.” 7. Don't suddenly change the rules. 8. Don't be a sore loser. 9. Remember: It's only a game.
And if play succeeds, we can move on to the eight rules of friendship: 1. Learn the rules of your opposite number. 2. Recognize that danger is no longer relevant. 3. Take your time. 4. One step at a time. 5. Apologize often by learning the other's words, gestures, sounds, or postures for “I'm sorry.””

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

6. Acknowledge mistakes. 7. Make the offer of friendship more than once. 8. Express curiosity about what the other is like.
Source: Raising the Peaceable Kingdom (2005), Ch. 5

Death , Friendship , Way , Game

“When Andy [Andrew Wood] died, I couldn't listen to his songs for about two years after that, and it was for that reason — his lyrics often seem as though they can tell that story. But then again, my lyrics often could tell the same one. In terms of seeing everything as a matter of life and death — if that's what you're feeling at the time, then that's what you're going to write. It's sort of a morbid exchange when somebody who is a writer like that dies, and then everyone starts picking through all their lyrics. In Kurt [Cobain]'s case, whatever he was thinking and whatever he was writing, there wasn't an arrow pointing at what his demise was. It's a stream of thought, it's a possibility — it's definitely something that somebody was feeling when they were writing. It doesn't mean that it's going to happen. But it doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't, either.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Chris Cornell: The Rolling Stone Interview, Alec Foege, Rolling Stone, 29 December 1994 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/the-rolling-stone-interview-chris-cornell-19941229,
Soundgarden Era

Life , Death , Feeling , Thinking

“I definitely picked up Renee's talent for saying hateful things, and I would use it against her. That's why I'm always so afraid of losing my temper on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. If I ever did, I would really eviscerate someone.”

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

pg. 31
Pretty Mess book (2018)

Hate

“The universe has resources of death which we have barely begun to pick at.”

Algis Budrys book Rogue Moon

Source: Rogue Moon (1960), Chapter 5, Section 6 (p. 116)

Death , Universe

“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Septimus, Act I
Arcadia (1993)

Life , Disease , Travel , Mathematics

“You've got to pick up every stitch.
Mmm… must be the season of the witch,
Must be the season of the witch.”

Donovan (1946) Scottish singer, songwriter and guitarist

Sunshine Superman (1966), Season Of The Witch

Season

“When I was very young I was Judy. On good days I was Dorothy, on bad days I was the Wicked Witch. The interesting thing about it, too, is that I’ve always related to it mainly because I don’t relate much to Frank Sinatra. I appreciate Frank, but there are so many Frank Sinatra imitators, whether it’s Harry Connick Jr. or Michael Bublé—the kind of guys who [Snaps his fingers in quick succession] basically want to get laid. And there’s nobody being the flip side of that, which is the hungry, lonely, desperate, crazy-person singer [Laughs]. So I wanted to pick up that mantle and try to be a little less cool.”

Rufus Wainwright (1973) American-Canadian singer-songwriter and composer

About Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall concert, Time Out New York Issue 551, April 20–26, 2006

Guy , Success , Personality

“However, I try not to think that way, because not all the women are like Virtanen, Biaudet and Filatov. Rapes will eventually get more frequent. Because, this being the case, more women will be raped anyway, I sincerely hope that the predators who randomly pick their victims would catch the right women meaning green-left liberals and their voters. It is rather them than someone else. For them nothing else works except if they get to taste their own multicultural medicine.”

Jussi Halla-aho (1971) Finnish Slavic linguist, blogger and a politician

Jussi Halla-aho (2008), published in the blog Vasarahammer Multiculturalism and Woman http://vasarahammer.blogspot.fr/2008/11/multiculturalism-and-woman-translation.html, October 19, 2008
2005-09

Women , Hope , Way , Thinking

“Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

Source: The Conduct Of Life (1951), Ch. 1

Life , Food , Revenge , Animals

“And Charlie asked questions! His unease had long since disappeared, and two of his most deep-dyed characteristics took over: one, the result of his omnivorous, undisciplined, indefatigable reading and picking of brains; second, the great gaping holes this had left in his considerable body of knowledge. Both appeared far more drastic than he had heretofore known; he knew ever so much more than he knew he knew, and he had between five and seven times as much misinformation and ignorance than he had ever dreamed.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 19 (p. 59)
Venus Plus X (1960)

Dreams , Question , Knowledge , Appearance

“Chelsea Liew! A ridiculous name - par for the course with the adoption of Western names by Singaporeans aiming to give themselves a cosmopolitan air. Unfortunately, they often picked the most improbable monikers. Inspector Singh had come across young Singaporeans revelling in first names like Mayfair and Rothmans.”

Shamini Flint book Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder

Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder, Cap 4

“The absolute morality that a religious person might profess would include what, stoning people for adultery, death for apostasy, punishment for breaking the Sabbath. These are all things which are religiously based absolute moralities. I don’t think I want an absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought out, reasoned, argued, discussed and based upon, I’d almost say, intelligent design [pun intended]. Can we not design our society, which has the sort of morality, the sort of society that we want to live in – if you actually look at the moralities that are accepted among modern people, among 21st century people, we don’t believe in slavery anymore. We believe in equality of women. We believe in being gentle. We believe in being kind to animals. These are all things which are entirely recent. They have very little basis in Biblical or Quranic scripture. They are things that have developed over historical time through a consensus of reasoning, of sober discussion, argument, legal theory, political and moral philosophy. These do not come from religion. To the extent that you can find the good bits in religious scriptures, you have to cherry pick. You search your way through the Bible or the Quran and you find the occasional verse that is an acceptable profession of morality and you say, ‘Look at that. That’s religion,’ and you leave out all the horrible bits and you say, ‘Oh, we don’t believe that anymore. We’ve grown out of that.’ Well, of course we’ve grown out it. We’ve grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy and rational discussion.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Richard Dawkins-George Pell Q&A (2012)

Death , Women , People , Religion

“I dialed the number slowly, wanting to get it right. Two rings, and he picked up.”

Sarah Dessen (1970) American writer

What Happened To Goodbye (2011)

“On their date, my father said to Renee, "Tomorrow I'm going to come by your parents' house, pick you up, and we're going to go hunt for apartments. The three of us will live together and be a little family." It was really romantic at the drive-in, so this was all fabulous. He dropped her off at my grandparents' house. The next day, my mother waited and waited. He never came. He never called. Finally, she called her friend, Janet, who had recently married Nicolas' brother Gabriel. She asked if Janet had seen my father. "Oh honey, he's moved to California. He left this morning," Janet said.”

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

pg. 39-40
Pretty Mess book (2018)

Family , Parent , Waiting , Housing

“A cop won't pick you up for vagrancy in Los Angeles if you wear a fancy polo shirt and a pair of sunglasses. But if there is dust on your shoes and that sweater you wear is thick like the sweaters they wear in the snow countries, he'll grab you.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Angels , Shoe , Country

“3031. It is Wit to pick a Lock, and steal a Horse; but it is Wisdom to let it alone.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1735) : The cunning man steals a horse, the wise man lets him alone.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Wisdom , Horse

“There is no such thing as a casual, non-significant sexual act; everyone knows this. Contrast sex with eating - you're strolling along a lane, you see a mushroom on a bank as you pass by, you know about mushrooms, you pick it and you eat it quite casually - sex is never like that. That's why virtue in connection with eating is basically a matter only of the pattern of one's eating habits. But virtue in sex - chastity - is not only a matter of such a pattern, that is of its role in a pair of lives. A single sexual action can be bad even without regard to its context, its further intentions and its motives.”

G. E. M. Anscombe (1919–2001) British analytic philosopher

Contraception and Chastity (1975)

Sex , Motivation

“The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired someone to pick up the socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the place down. Michelangelo would have been distressed by its proportions, which were neither lofty nor shaped by any noticeable inner harmony or symmetry, other than that all parts of the room were pretty much equally full of old coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays, most of which were now sharing their tasks with each other. The walls were painted in almost precisely that shade of green which Raffaello Sanzio would have bitten off his own right hand at the wrist rather than use, and Hercules, on seeing the room, would probably have returned half an hour later armed with a navigable river. It was, in short, a dump, and was likely to remain so for as long as it remained in the custody of Mr Svlad, or 'Dirk', Gently, né Cjelli.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 3

Shoe , Soul , Coffee , Parting

“It wasn't intelligence — it was propaganda. They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together.”

Karen Kwiatkowski (1960) retired military officer and author

Interview by Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, " The Lie Factory http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html", Mother Jones, January/February 2004.

Intelligence

“Dad joined the US Army by this point [1964], and initially he was stationed in Texas and then South Carolina. But the Vietnam war brought our normal life to an end. Once again, Dad was gone. Communications were very basic back then: Dad couldn't just pick up a cellphone and let us know he was okay. Months would go by without a letter or anything. Eventually he bought two tape recorders -- one he kept with him and one for our house. Dad used to talk into the recorder and send the tapes home. Then we would gather round our machine and tell Dad stories. And I would sing. I still have all the tapes, but I can't listen to them. It hurts too much. After Dad came back from Nam, he wasn't well. He'd been poisoned by Agent Orange and needed quite a lot of looking after. Mum was busy trying to get her Cuban qualifications revalidated by a US university, so I had to take care of Dad and my little sister [Becky]. It was tough. Toward the end, Dad was too far gone and he didn't really know what was hapening around him. I joined Miami Sound Machine in 1975 and we were getting quite successful, but Dad didn't even know who I was. He had to be moved to the hospital. On my wedding day in 1978 [September 2] I went to visit him, still wearing my wedding dress. That was the last time that he said my name. Dad died in 1980, but he touches my life every day. On my last album [Unwrapped] I did a lot of writing while I was looking at a picture of him in his younger days -- so happy and in the prime of his life. I'm not sure if he sees me, but I can feel him all around me. I hope he knows that I am so very proud of him.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

The [London] Sunday Times (November 17, 2006)
2007, 2008

Life , War , Hope , Feeling

“Thanks to slavery, in the South capital and labor were combined in nearly four million sweating field hands picking cotton and planting rice.”

William C. Davis (1946) American historian

Source: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), p. 21

“Standing at the mirror, I tilted my hat over one eye and examined myself. The image in the glass seemed only vaguely familiar. I didn't like my new tie, so I took off my coat and tried another. I didn't like the change either. All at once everything began to irritate me. The stiff collar was strangling me. The shoes pinched my feet. The pants smelled like a clothing store basement and were too tight in the crotch. Sweat broke out at my temples where the hat band squeezed my skull. Suddenly I began to itch, and when I moved everything crackled like a paper sack. My nostrils picked up the powerful stench of lotions, and I grimaced. Mother in Heaven, what had happened to the old Bandini, author of The Little Dog Laughed? Could this hog-tied, strangling buffoon be the creator of The Long Lost Hills?”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

I pulled everything off, washed the smells out of my hair, and climbed into my old clothes.
Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter Eight

Dogs , Shoe , Change , Clothes

“Dr Williams’s book is about a number of nineteenth-century French writers who caught syphilis and probably died of paresis. They are Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and Daudet. A similar book could probably be written about nineteenth-century British writers, including such unlikely victims of syphilis as John Keats and Edward Lear. People were not so frightened of the disease as we are. Few physicians saw the connection between cerebral degeneration and the primary chancre: when the secondary stage of the infection had healed, it was generally assumed that everything was over and lightning would not strike the tree again. This was Baudelaire’s belief. One could even rejoice at picking up the pox: it was not merely an inoculation; it advertised one’s virility to the world….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

People , Books , World , Disease

“(Sylvia to blindfolded cat) Just put your paw on the map, and that's where we'll go for our vacation. It's a big country, and yet you picked Cleveland.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 36

Cats , Country

“I do not intend to replace L. Ron Hubbard. I do not intend to assume command of the junk pile. I resisted the numerous offers, both internal and external. My gauntlet has been openly thrown. Let him, and him alone, pick it up.”

Ronald DeWolf (1934–1991) American critic of Scientology

The Telling of Me, by Me (1981)

“These are the duties of the overseer: He should maintain discipline. He should observe the feast days. He should respect the rights of others and steadfastly uphold his own. He should settle all quarrels among the hands; If any one is at fault he should administer the punishment. He should take care that no one on the place is in want, or lacks food or drink; in this respect he can afford to be generous, for he will thus more easily prevent picking and stealing.”

Cato the Elder book De Agri Cultura

On the duties of the overseer
De Agri Cultura, about 160 BC

Food , Drink

“We are opposed to all cruelty, so as advocates of non-violence, opponents of oppression, people who abhor the cruelty inherent in slaughtering we say the only ethical way to consume flesh is to pick up the carcass of an animal who has died naturally or been killed accidentally, say by being hit by a car, and eat that.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

India Together, July, 2000 http://www.indiatogether.org/reports/peta/newkirk.htm
2000

People , Cars , Way , Nature

“My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still.
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

" After Apple Picking http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/after-apple-picking-3/"
1910s

Tree

“My mom picked the name "Al Hurricane", because I used to knock things over as a kid and it stuck to me. So I took it as my professional name.”

Al Hurricane (1936–2017) American singer-songwriter

"Local Legends" on the CBS Early Show (December 26, 2011)

Moms

“Waldo Butters: Screw up my life?
[He stared a me for a second and then said, deadpan]
Waldo Butters: I’m a five-foot-three, thirty-seven-year-old, single, Jewish medical examiner who needs to pick up his lederhosen from the dry cleaners so that he can play in a one-man polka band at Oktoberfest tomorrow.
[He pushed up his glasses with his forefinger, folded his arms, and said]
Waldo Butters: Do your worst.”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

Source: The Dresden Files, Dead Beat (2005), Chapter 5

Life

“Some… resistance also came from the belief that preserved historical writings could provide all anyone needed to know about the habits of past civilizations. …According to the archeologists, this site was supposed to have had an uninterrupted sequence of Israelite occupation… These archeologists "knew" that there had been a continual occupation of people practicing full-blown Jewish orthodoxy based on their interpretation of the preserved written records. …But, to the extreme surprise of the dig's staff… one-third of the bones from the floor of the synagogue were pig. Anathema! …directly beneath the floor of this synagogue… the first piece of bone I picked up was from the skull of a young human. Again, anathema! How could orthodox Jews build anything, much less a synagogue, over a human burial area? …no reports on the site including my analyses have ever seen the light of day.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

People , Light , Past

“You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.”

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Newsweek (26 May 1980)

Idea , Thinking , Heart

“I picked up my five cards from the next deal. “This ain’t a hand, it’s a foot.””

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 10 (p. 48)

“Now, Michael is claiming racism. I'm going, "Honey, you gotta pick a race first." Baby, what are you claiming, mistreatment of elves? What are you saying?”

Robin Williams (1951–2014) American actor and stand-up comedian

Robin Williams: Live on Broadway (2002)

Baby

“Who knows how to make love stay? Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

Love , World , Making love , Painting

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don't know. But — but I'll tell you what. That will be a horrible day. If — if Hillary gets to put her judges — right now, we're tied. You see what's going on.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Rally in Wilmington, North Carolina on August 9, 2016 ([Donald Trump Suggests ‘Second Amendment People' Could Act Against Hillary Clinton, The New York Times, Nick, Corasaniti, w:Maggie Haberman, Maggie, Haberman, August 9, 2016, November 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/us/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton.html]; [Donald Trump hints at assassination of Hillary Clinton by gun rights supporters, David, Smith, August 10, 2016, November 15, 2018, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/09/trump-gun-owners-clinton-judges-second-amendment]).
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Donald Trump / Quotes / 2010s / 2016 / August
2010s, 2016, August, Speech at rally in Wilmington, North Carolina (August 9, 2016)

People

Quotes about pick page 9

Quotes about pick
page 9