Middle Quotes - Page 10

• On the news two dozen events of fantastically different importance are announced in exactly the same tone of voice. The voice doesn't discriminate between a divorce, a horse race, a war in the Middle East.

  Doris Lessing

  Horse, War, Divorce

  4 Copy quote

• My greatest fear in working is always the end. Lately I have taken to tricking myself into finishing by leaving a hole in the middle somewhere, then stitching the two pieces together - the Union Pacific approach.

  Twyla Tharp

  Taken, Artist, Two

  Twyla Tharp (1992). “Push Comes to Shove”, Bantam Dell Publishing Group

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Actions from youth, advice from the middle-aged, prayers from the aged.

  Hesiod

  Prayer, Advice, Action

  6 Copy quote

• Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness.

  Margaret Fuller

  Age, Mediocrity, Fancy

  8 Copy quote

• But none of us wants to be average. That we are so is a melancholy fact borne in upon us in middle life, and we do not always relish it.

  Margaret Benson

  Average, Mediocrity, Want

  Margaret Benson (1908). “The Venture of Rational Faih”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.

  Randall Jarrell

  Baby, Book, Men

  5 Copy quote

• Historians differ on when the consumer culture came to dominate American culture. Some say it was in the twenties, when advertising became a major industry and the middle class bought radios to hear the ads and cars to get to the stores. ... But there is no question that the consumer culture had begun to crowd out all other cultural possibilities by the years following World War II.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  War, Years, Class

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1989). “FEAR OF FALLING”, Pantheon

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In a process that had begun in the 1980s and suddenly accelerated in the early 2000s ... [t]he peaks of great wealth grew higher, rising up beyond the clouds, while the valleys of poverty sank lower into perpetual shadow. The once broad plateau of the middle class eroded away into a narrow ledge, with the white-knuckled occupants holding on for dear life.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Clouds, Class, White

  Barbara Ehrenreich (2008). “Going to Extremes: Notes from a Divided Nation”, Granta Books (UK)

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• in our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream - from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Taken, Class, White

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1989). “FEAR OF FALLING”, Pantheon

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of 'traditional values' installed. ... the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and their loose change funneled blithely upwards to the already overfed.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Class, Down And, Rich

  14 Copy quote

• The war with Iraq ... had to be one of the greatest non sequiturs in military history. Attacked by a gang composed largely of Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, the United States countered by invading an unrelated country, and one of the most secular in the Middle East at that.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Country, Military, War

  Barbara Ehrenreich (2008). “Going to Extremes: Notes from a Divided Nation”, Granta Books (UK)

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  War, Distance, Class

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1989). “FEAR OF FALLING”, Pantheon

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is a reason why America produced the most vigorous feminist movement in the world: We were one of the only countries in which the middle class (which is wealthy by world standards) customarily employed its own women as domestic servants.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Country, Class, America

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1989). “FEAR OF FALLING”, Pantheon

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I looked into the mirror and saw this middle-aged woman who keeps invading my face.

  Liv Ullmann

  Mirrors, Age, Saws

  10 Copy quote

• Sometimes there's nothing but Sundays for weeks on end. Why can't they move Sunday to the middle of the week so you could put it in the OUT tray on your desk?

  Russell Hoban

  Moving, Sunday, Sometimes

  Russell Hoban (2012). “The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz”, p.168, Bloomsbury Publishing

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The world doesn't go around on love between men and women. Lovers get very little done. But friends do. When you are past middle life - and I hope you have the rich experience of love along the way - don't think everything is all over. Don't regret the vanished cocktail when the stuffed turkey is about to come in. Flip out your napkin and bite into it! Friends you can gather around you in the later years of life are worth the whole thing.

  Marie Dressler

  Regret, Past, Love Is

  19 Copy quote

• I like to think of myself as the running LT. I like to run up the middle and wear defenses down. It's more exciting in between the tackles.

  LaDainian Tomlinson

  Running, Thinking, Nfl

  8 Copy quote

• I do think that all economies need a sense of fiscal discipline especially over the midterm and if you are in the middle of a debt crisis you can't borrow your way out of a debt crisis. That's logically impossible.

  Stephen Harper

  Thinking, Discipline, Needs

  Interview with Peter Mansbridge, www.theglobeandmail.com. June 5, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As a critic, I try very hard to say exactly what I think. And in a medium in which we are well-known for the binary thumbs up and thumbs down, I try to be able to give the mixed review. But most pictures fall into that middle ground, so I wrestle over which way my thumb is going to turn. It's not flip.

  Gene Siskel

  Fall, Thinking, Thumbs Down

  "Read Playboy … for the Interviews". Interview with David Sheff, www.slate.com. October 1995.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• That's not going to happen, because I don't want it to happen. I don't want a movie about me until I'm very, very old - when I'm very, very old, everybody that wants to play me will be middle-aged.

  Stevie Nicks

  Play, Want, Happens

  Source: www.usmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I spent so much time as a child thinking what if I was a robot, what if my mind were somewhere else? As a kid you're in the middle of all that.

  Darcey Steinke

  Children, Kids, Thinking

  "Road Trip". Interview with Ali Liebegott, logger.believermag.com. October 25, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My writing is translated into every Indian language, it's distributed in pamphlets, in little private video things, it's everywhere. So it's a lovely pastime for the middle class to think of itself as the whole nation.

  Arundhati Roy

  Writing, Thinking, Class

  Source: www.abc.net.au

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are lots of cycles to markets - boom and bust - and also in perceptions of people. The conventional wisdom of Steve Case as genius or fool was highly cyclical. The truth was always in the middle.

  Steve Case

  People, Perception, Genius

  4 Copy quote

• Life isn't perfect and that's the kind of world where Jesus showed up. He wasn't born in a palace on a perfect day. He was born in the middle of the night during tax season to an unwed couple in a stable or a cave in a sheep field. That was God's way of showing us that nothing is perfect. Life is chaotic. It's messy. That's what Jesus was stepping into.

  Louie Giglio

  Jesus, Couple, Night

  "A conversation with pastor, author and songwriter Louie Giglio". Interview with Chad Bonham, www.beliefnet.com.

  133 Copy quote

  Show source

• What I lack in style and craft, I can make up for in joy and enthusiasm. I like to be around people who are at ease so I like to think the 25-year-old would find me quite an easy-going late-middle-aged hippie.

  Robert Plant

  Hippie, Thinking, Years

  "The Survivors: Robert Plant". Interview with Chris Heath, www.gq.com. November 7, 2011.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source