Picked Quotes
More Picked Quotes
The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.
frederick lewis allen— Fred Allen, "Introduction to Art Buchwald", Paris after Dark (1954)
He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
stanley baldwin— Winston Churchill
The Mao quote is one I picked up from the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater from something I read in the late 1980s, so I hope I don't get my progressive friends mad at me. The use of the phrase 'favorite political philosophers' was intended as irony, but clearly the effort fell flat -- at least with a certain Fox commentator whose sense of irony may be missing.
anita dunn— CNN interview, October 16, 2009. [5]
The moment Colin sat down, Hollis asked Hassan, "Would you like to say grace?" "Sure thing." Hassan cleared his throat. "Bismallah." Then he picked up his fork. "That's it?" Hollis wondered. "That's it. We are a terse people. Terse, and also hungry."
john green— An Abundance of Katherines, Hollis Wells and Hassan Harbish (2006, p. 62)
This song goes out to those with coke bottle glasses, to all you lonely kids who were the last picked in gym classes. We got your back, detract your malefactors - all you up in the back, unite like Thundercats!
2 Skinnee J's— "Riot Nrrrd" (1998)
Never tell me that not one star of all That slip from heaven at night and softly fall Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.
— 1923 'A Star in a Stoneboat'.
A group of theunwilling, picked fromtheunfit, to dothe unnecessary.
— 1960 Definition of a committee. In the NewYork Herald Tribune, 15 Jun.
Somewhere in the trash he reads Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun.
kyril bonfiglioli— Ch. 1 (Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972))
"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.' I said, 'Yes sir.'"
wilt chamberlain— Goliath's Wonderful Life, Hoop Magazine; May 1999; Chris Ekstrand
To create a balance of power and pedigree in the house, Hunter sent five bucks off to an ad he'd seen in the back pages of a magazine and received his mail-order doctor-of-divinity degree. He began referring to himself as Dr. Thompson and punctuated remarks with his afterword: "I am, after all, a doctor." Friends picked up on the joke, and he was "the Good Doctor" for the rest of his life.
william mckeen— Chapter 6, Stranger In A Strange Land, p. 89
I've always been pretty much a quiet person. When I was little, I got picked on a lot. After I went through all that, I pretty much kept to myself.
terrell owens— Brian Murphy (January 8, 1999) "What A Great Catch 49ers Struck Gold By Picking Owens", The Press Democrat, p. C1.
I love irony in pictures. There's one photograph from Vietnam by Philip Jones Griffiths that shows a very large GI having his pocket picked by a tiny Vietnamese woman. It told the whole story of the clash of two cultures and how the invader could never win.
john pilger— John Pilger, This much i know, The Observer, 13 November 2005
If he isn't named Footballer of the Year, football should be stopped and the men who picked any other player should be sent to the Kremlin.
tommy smith— Bill Shankly On Tommy Smith.[1]
I suddenly dreamt that I picked up the revolver and aimed it straight at my heart - my heart, and not my head; and I had determined beforehand to fire at my head, at my right temple. After aiming at my chest I waited a second or two, and suddenly my candle, my table, and the wall in front of me began moving and heaving. I made haste to pull the trigger.
fyodor dostoevsky— The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877)
He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand.
elbert hubbard— 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), p. 343.)
Privately run jails are a mark of American "reinvented government" that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.
jane jacobs— Notes And Comments, p. 189
Good news from France, where the man picked by Nicolas Sarkozy as his foreign minister is not the execrable Hubert Védrine, but Bernard Kouchner - a socialist who supports Israel and the invasion of Iraq.
charles foster johnson— May 18, 2007 [14]
The loveliest girl in Vienna Was Alma, the smartest as well. Once you picked her up on your antenna, You'd never be free of her spell.
tom lehrer— "Alma"
Neither of us said a word as we picked our way down the path for the next quarter of an hour, and the sky receded to a deep violet. I had the illusion that, as it got darker, it moved away from us, expanding like a bubble, rushing away at a million light-years an hour, and as it whooshed past stars, we began to see them.
neal stephenson— Part 8, "Orithena"
On the whole,one would say that their strength is in their infantry, which fights along with the cavalry; admirably adapted to the action of the latter is the swiftness of certain foot soldiers, who are picked from the entire youth of their country, and stationed in front of the line.
Tacitus— Chapter 6. (Germania (98))
She vowed that if God gave her the strength she would resume her political campaign to overthrow the government, which was full of men not fit to be picked up out of the gutter.
victoria woodhull— Reformation or Revolution, Which? or Behind the Political Scenes, speech, Oct. 17, 1873, excerpted in Gabriel, Mary, Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored (Chapel Hill, N.Car.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1st ed. 1998 (ISBN 1-56512-132-5)), pp. 220–221 & n. [13], esp. p. 221 (vow) (author Mary Gabriel journalist, Reuters News Service), in turn as reprinted in Stern, Madeleine B., ed., The Victoria Woodhull Reader (Weston, Mass.: M&S Press, 1974).
He who has ever turned with abhorrence from the skeleton of a beast which has been picked whole by birds or vermin, must confess that habit alone could have enabled him to endure the sight of the mangled bones and flesh of a dead carcase which every day cover his table.
— John Hawkesworth, in his edition of Jonathan Swift's Works.
’Politically Correct’ was originally a phrase on the Leninist left to denote someone who steadfastly toed the party line. Then it evolved into ‘PC’, an ironic phrase among wised up leftists to denote someone whose line-toeing fervour was too much to bear. Only in connection with the PC debate itself did the phrase get picked up by people who had no fidelity to radicalism at all, but who relished the nasty syllables for their twist of irony.
— Paul Berman, "Intoduction", in Debating PC: The Debate over Political Correctness on College Campuses (New York 1992), p. 5.
Naw, that's an old trick I picked up at Benny's shooting gallery on Coney Island. And if you don't quit stalling, I'll show you some other tricks I learned in Brooklyn.
— Who: Lou Spinelli
— Source: "You, Murderer" [Episode 6x15]
— Note: Says this before being bludgeoned with a statue by his cheating wife, Betty Spinelli.
Nupedia launched in March 2000 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. ... Wales's company Bomis, an Internet search portal and a vendor of online 'erotic images' (featuring the Bomis Babe Report), picked up the tab initially.
— Roy Rosenzweig (2013). Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age. Columbia University Press. pp. 54, 81, 258, 261. ISBN 0231521715.
Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn, but I shall have my pocket picked?
— Falstaff, scene iii
A mermaid found a swimming lad picked him for her own, Pressed her body to his body, Laughed; and plunging down Forgot in cruel happiness That even lovers drown.
— William Butler Yeats, "A Man Young And Old: III. The Mermaid" (1926).
