Favourite quotes!

I identify with that quote an awful lot

That has really moved me 

‘Amazing though. The Star Whale. All that pain, and misery. And loneliness. And it just made it kind.’ 

Amy Pond says that to the Doctor in The Beast Below. She’s talking about a tortured alien. She really or also) means him. Many people would consider that quote to outline the definition of naivety and stupidity. Doctor Who has always looked at it another way. Be impossibly kind if you can, or try. No matter how many times the universe kicks you in the face. There is nothing more important. Never have I heard the whole spirit of the show more concisely yet profoundly put. And I admire conciseness hugely, as I struggle with it so much!

Appropriately for me: "Hell is other people" (John Paul Sartre)

I'm not sure why, perhaps because it has a sudden 'drop' at the end, but since first reading it at about 18 years old, I have been very fond of this sentence from The Golden Barge, by Michael Moorcock, "She was a sharp-jawed, pout-lipped beauty and her eyes were as green as scum."

That’s what I read in his book, apparently he ‘sat on’  the quote for quite a long time  waiting for a perfect opportunity. Another one of his was. 
"He Dealt, He Diddled, He Died.“ the perfect eulogy.

Not sure who said either of these first, but two of my favourites are:

"It's better to regret something you have done rather than something you haven't "

And

"Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day"

"Don't hate the player, hate the game!" (From a Yahoo! Profile twenty years ago)

"Democracy is two Wolves and one Sheep voting to decide what to have for Lunch! Liberty is an armed Sheep resisting that decision!" (Thomas Jefferson)

"Truth without compassion will offend you, but compassion without truth will kill you!" (Twelve Step Slogan) 

That's great! A lot of truth in that, cleverly put. The other way that they manage to spend lesss money is by quarelling over every tiny thing that must be paid. Not universally of course, mustn't tar all rich people with the same brush. But...

When I worked in public libraries I was between two main sites: one in a working class area. Another in a well-to-do one. Guess in which one the vast majority paid fines politely and apologetically without question, often even raising the subject themselves? Meanwhile, in poshville, a twenty pence fine would be quibbled over by some rich lawyer driving a fancy car and living in a huge near-mansion of a house. Very much an attitude of 'I didn't get where I am today...' Like getting blood out of a stone sometimes. 

I'll just do the one, because it's quite long:

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

From 'Men at Arms' by Terry Pratchett

I love Arthur Daley. Watching Minder helped get me through lockdown!

Thats quite a good quote

Child, be strange. Dark, true, impure and dissonant. Cherish our flame. Our dawn shall come. 

From Penda's Fen. A beguiling and challenging one-off television play from 1974. I think I'll need to rewatch soon to remind myself exactly what I thought I understood that line to mean, but it resonated. Some sense of the outsider who once tried to fit in finding freedom in a different path. One less 'normal'

George Cole I mean, not Arfur

Arfur I mean, not Abe

I like his story about overhearing that in a restaurant and paying the guy fifty quid to 'buy it' from him 

On an adjacent theme, and also from Doctor Who: 'There never was a golden age, it's all an illusion'. (The Third Doctor, 1974) Maybe a few Brexiteers are coming to understand this! 

It's better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission. 

In the end, It’s not the years in your life that count , it’s the life in your years.

Abraham Lincoln 

And obviously, The worlds your Lobster!

Arthur Daley.

"There is no such thing as a problem, without a gift for you in its hands.  You seek problems, because you need their gifts"

Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

Most of mine are from TV too. a couple of quotes that have always stuck with me are 

"You're where you are and you've got to make the best of it" from Nelson the barman to Sam Tyler in Life on Mars

"You can never go back to the way things were, because they were never that way in the first place" from Roger Moore in the Persuaders

I think those two really help with just trying to find contentment and happiness where you are rather than always wishing to be somewhere else