Don Draper - Matthew Weiner
- Advertising - MadMen
Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay.
Don Draper - Matthew Weiner
- The Carousel by Kodak - MadMen
Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means 'the pain from an old wound'. It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards and takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called The Carousel. It lets us travel like a child travels; round and round and back again, to a place where we know we are loved.
Anita Loos
- A Toast - Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
There was an old fellow named Sydney, who drank 'til he ruined a kidney. He drank and he drank, and it shrank and it shrank. But he had his fun doing it, didn't he?
E.B. White
- Charlotte's Web
Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.
Tom Rachman
- The Imperfectionists
You know, there's that silly saying, "We're born alone and we die alone." It's nonsense. We're surrounded at birth and surrounded at death. It is in between that we're alone.
Tom Perrotta
- The Leftovers
To this day, she's still sad. Because there's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I'm just saying that I took the pain that was inside of her at that moment and made it my own. And it didn't hurt me at all.
Stephen J. Cannell
- The A-Team
Ten years ago a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.
Ed Yong - Dec 6, 2016
- Self-Control Is Just Empathy With Your Future Self - The Atlantic
Empathy depends on your ability to overcome your own perspective, appreciate someone else's, and step into their shoes. Self-control is essentially the same skill, except that those other shoes belong to your future self. A removed and hypothetical entity who might as well be a different person. So think of self-control as a kind of temporal selflessness. It's Present You taking a hit to help out Future You.
Ron Jonson
- The Men Who Stare at Goats
In the words of Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman of the Killology Research Group, the conclusion was; "There is something about continuous, inescapable combat which will drive 98 percent of all men insane, and the other 2 percent were crazy when they got there."
Jon Ronson
- The Men Who Stare at Goats
Remember that the crazy people are not always to be found on the outside. Sometimes the crazy people are deeply embedded on the inside. Not even the most imaginative conspiracy theorist has ever thought to invent a scenario in which a crack team of Special Forces soldiers and major generals secretly try to walk through their walls and stare goats to death.
Stephen King
- The Body
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away.
Lost at Sea
- Jon Ronson
A strange thing happens when you interview a robot. You feel an urge to be profound: to ask profound questions. I suppose it's an inter-species thing. Although if it is I wonder why I never try and be profound around my dog. "What does electricity taste like?" I ask. "Like a planet around a star," Bina48 replies. Which is either extraordinary or meaningless - I'm not sure which.
Chris Cleave
- Little Bee (2010)
I ask you right here to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must see all scars as beauty... because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived. Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this story teller is alive.
Jon Ronson
- The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Then I met Al Dunlop, CEO of Sunbeam and a notorious down-sizer. He had this reputation that he was a man who seemed to enjoy firing people, not to mention the stories from his first marriage... Then you realize that because of this dysfunctional capitalistic society we live in, those things were positives. He was hailed and given high-powered jobs, and the more ruthlessly his administration behaved, the more his share price shot up.
Ann Petry
- The Street (1946)
Her voice had a thin thread of sadness running through it that made the song important, that made it tell a story that wasn't in the words - a story of despair, of loneliness, of frustration. It was a story that all of them knew by heart, and had always known because they had learned it soon after they were born and would go on adding to it until the day they died.
Paul Thomas Anderson
- Magnolia - OfficerJim Kurring
A lot of people think this is just a job that you go to. Take a lunch hour... job's over. But it's a 24-hour deal. And what most people don't see, is just how hard it is to do the right thing. People think if I make a judgment call, that it's a judgment on them, but that is not what I do. And that's not what should be done. I have to take everything and play it as it lays. Sometimes people need a little help. Sometimes people need to be forgiven. And sometimes people need to go to jail.
Mary Schmich
- Commencement Speech to the class of '97
Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.
Mary Schmich
- Commencement Speech to the class of '97
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you, and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.
Teresia R. Ostrach, President, Five Star Staffing, Inc., Orlando, FL
- Typing Speed: How Fast is Average
In 1976, I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Alan Lloyd, at that time the world's foremost authority on typing. Virtually anybody who learned to type in the 1950s and 1960s learned from one of his books. I asked him, "How fast is average typing anyway?" His answer was less than definitive, but pointed me in the right direction. He said, "Less than half the population of the world has the manual dexterity to wiggle their fingers at the speed of 50 words per minute or better."
Olga Khazan
- Why Americans Smile So Much - The Atlantic - May 3, 2017
There's an interesting line of research that helps explain outliers on the other end of the spectrum, too: Americans and their stereotypically mega-watt smiles. It turns out that countries with lots of immigration have historically relied more on nonverbal communication. Thus, people there might smile more. So Americans smile a lot because our Swedish forefathers wanted to befriend their Italian neighbors, but they couldn't figure out how to pronounce buongiorno. Seems plausible.
