Quote collection
978 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Shortridge High School was an elitist high school. In a way it was a scandal because you could go there no matter where you lived, if you could get there. It was for over-achievers. It was for people who were going to college. So we were very special and we were hated for being ritzy."
"My ancestors came over from Germany about the time of the Civil War and one of them lost a leg and went back to Germany."
"[People] want to feel superior, so they imagine we're Bible thumpers and uneducated and all that."
"One of [ways being lucky] was to go to school during the Great Depression because teaching became a plum job."
"I'm so sorry - we had this cottage up in Lake Maxinkuckee, in Culver. I've thought so often of the poor Pottawattomies we took this land away from. They must have loved it so."
"Somebody realized, hey, students are printing dummy ads and dummy news stories, why don't they really print something. So there was the Shortridge Daily Echo, and a hell of a lot of writers have come out of Shortridge on that account. The head writer of the I Love Lucy show, Madelyn Pugh, was a schoolmate of mine. Dan Wakefield. Writing was a perfectly reasonable thing to do."
"The thing my father was proudest of was the Ayres clock at the intersection of Washington Street and Meridian. That made him so happy. Ayres complained because he wouldn't send them a bill. There was stuff my family had done there - particularly my father and grandfather - that was quite permanent and wonderful."
"The Circle Theatre, black people had to sit in the balcony. Any theater with a balcony, black people had to sit up there. Black people couldn't check into any hotel except their own. And black people couldn't eat anywhere except in their own restaurants."
"I'm a painter in my dreams, you know."
"As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide."
"I think that scientific persons of the future will scoff at scientific persons of the present. They will scoff because scientific persons of the present thought so many important things were superstitious."
"He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so."
"This is what I find encouraging about the writing trades: ... They allow lunatics to seem saner than sane."
"It was headquartered in Michigan City, a long way off. I never saw Ku Klux Klan march."
"Where you can see tribal behavior now is in this business about teaching evolution in a science class and intelligent design. It's the scientists themselves are behaving tribally."
"It's incumbent on the President to entertain. Clinton did a better job of it - and was forgiven for the scandals, incidentally. Bush is entertaining us with what I call the Republican Super Bowl, which is played by the lower classes using live ammunition."
"I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work."
"We used to have superb public schools. I guess we don't anymore, but, boy, the public schools were really something and I am a product of those in Indianapolis."
"This had been going on at Shortridge since 1906. My parents had also worked on the Shortridge Daily Echo. The way it came into being was that when they built Shortridge High School, they had a vocational department and they had a print shop."
"Our classes were relatively small. Those small classes can feel like family. After a class in French or chemistry or whatever, we'd be talking in the halls about what we just learned."