Quotes by Podcasters - Page 2

We're not going to make it," I said.The words caught in my throat, choking me. What was it Leslie had said to me when we were discussing Shannon's and Antoinetta's disappearance? 'You're beginning to sound like one of the characters in your books, Adam.' She'd been right. If this were a novel my heroes would have arrived just in the nick of time and saved the day. But real life didn't work like that. Real life had no happy endings. Despite our best efforts, despite my love for Tara [his wife] and my determination to protect her, and after everything we'd been through at the LeHorn house, fate conspired against us. We were still nine or ten miles from home, and night was almost upon us. By the time we got there it would already be too late. I fought back tears. I had the urge just to lie down in the middle of the road and let the next car run over me.

A life filled with challenge will never be boring.

I don't like doing anything that makes you sweat if you don't come at the end of it.

Writing feels safer somehow. I can catch myself before I say the wrong thing.

A choice made having devastating consequences for another is really not a choice. It is an act.

Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.

To me, comedy is a great occupation because I don't really worry that much about what other people think of me.

He doesn't have anything like wisdom of age or hindsight. He's a biased historian of self, an emotional revisionist. We all are, for the most part.

Love people. Use things. The opposite never works.

Have you been out in society recently? 'Cause it's SHIT.

Trust = telling someone about the things that make you sleepless.

All hail, Queen Shit-of-Liesville!

Infighting would be stupid, since, y'know, claws and teeth.

What I've learnt - to my cost - on several occasions in my life, is that people will put up with all manner of bad behaviour so long as you're giving them what they want. They'll laugh and get into it and enjoy the anecdotes and the craziness and the mayhem as long as you're going your job well, but the minute you're not, you're fucked. They'll wipe their hands of you without a second glance.

Tea drinking is a liturgy of comfort, and we partake of it everywhere in the world. It’s a ceremony of simplicity, nourishment for both the nomads in foreign teahouses and homebodies in their beds.

I am naïve and I have fucked up but I tell you something else. I believe in change. I don't mind getting my hands dirty because my hands are dirty already. I don't mind giving my life to this because I'm only alive because of the compassion and love of others.

When someone in vulnerability tells you everything they’ve known has fallen apart, the correct response is not to quote scripture, the correct response is not biblical apologetics, the correct response is a hug. The correct response is to say, I love you. They have to encounter an impossible love. It’s the only way the gospel comes to life.

Under a sky that hasn't been blue for weeks.

A "breakdown" is when you've exhausted every option and have no choice but to accept the fact that you are powerless to create the outcome you want. A "breakthrough" has the same definition.

Desperation does not breed empathy or clear thinking.

I’d been traveling in Asia long enough to know that monkeys there are nothing like their trombone-playing, tambourine-banging cousins I’d seen on TV as a kid. Free-living Asian primates possess a characteristic I found shocking and confusing the first time I saw it: self-respect. If you make the mistake of holding the gaze of a street monkey in India, Nepal, or Malaysia, you’ll find you’re facing a belligerently intelligent creature whose expression says, with a Robert DeNiro–like scowl, “What the hell are you looking at? You wanna piece of me?” Forget about putting one of these guys in a little red vest.

She loved him the way one loves an old bridge or a wool sweater or the sound of a growing tulip.

My feeling is this whole country is founded on the principle of 'if you are not hurting anyone, and you're not fucking with someone else's shit, and you are paying your taxes, you should be able to just do what you want to do.' It's the freedom and the independence.

Living on purpose means stopping to make sure your actions still match your big goals.

The world is awash with colours unseen and abuzz with unheard frequencies. Undetected and disregarded. The wise have always known that these inaccessible realms, these dimensions that cannot be breached by our beautifully blunt senses, hold the very codes to our existence, the invisible, electromagnetic foundations upon which our gross reality clumsily rests.

I hope it is not necessary for me to stress the platonic nature of our relationship- not platonic in the purest sense, there was no philosophical discourse, but we certainly didn't fuck, which is usually what people mean by platonic; which I bet would really piss Plato off, that for all his thinking and chatting his name has become an adjective for describing sexless trysts.

Some of you may be perfectly happy with mediocrity. Some of you will get nothing but heartbreak. Some of you will be heralded as geniuses and become huge. Of course, all of you think that one describes you...hence the delusion necessary to push on.

It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had “brought it on themselves?

What was so painful about Amy’s death is that I know that there is something I could have done. I could have passed on to her the solution that was freely given to me. Don’t pick up a drink or drug, one day at a time. It sounds so simple; it actually is simple but it isn’t easy; it requires incredible support and fastidious structuring.

But, self, that thing was on TV, and this one wants to tear your liver out your nose. Run.

I didn't cross the line, you drew it in after I traversed it.

Some people, though related by blood, are as sworn enemies. Others, bound only by friendship, would die for one another.

I used to think of work as a bad word. Back in the corporate world, work was something that prevented me from living, something that kept me from feeling satisfied or fulfilled or passionate. Even the word itself carried with it a negative connotation. Work—bluck! When I left the corporate world, I swore off the word altogether. Noun, verb, adjective—I avoided all of work’s iterations. I no longer ‘went to work,’ so that was easy to remove from my vocabulary. In fact, I no longer ‘worked’ at all; instead I replaced the word with a more specific verb: I would ‘write’ or ‘teach’ or ‘speak’ or ‘volunteer,’ but I refused to ‘work.’ I no longer went to the gym to ‘workout’; instead I ‘exercised.’ And I stopped wearing ‘work clothes’; I chose instead to wear ‘dress clothes.’ And I avoided getting ‘worked up,’ preferring to call it ‘stress’ or ‘anxiety.’ And I didn’t bring my car to the shop to get ‘worked on,’ deciding instead to have my vehicle ‘repaired.’ Hell, I even avoided ‘handiwork’ 92 and ‘housework,’ selecting their more banal alternatives. Suffice it to say, I wanted nothing to do with the word. I wanted it not only stricken from my lexicon, but from my memory, erasing every shred of the thing that kept me from pursuing my dream for over a decade. But after a year of that nonsense, I realized something: it wasn’t the word that was bad; it was the meaning I gave to the word. It took removing the word from my everyday speech for a year to discover that it wasn’t a bad word at all. During that year, I had been pursuing my dream, and guess what—when I looked over my shoulder at everything I’d accomplished, I realized that pursuing my dream was, in fact, a lot of work. It took a lot of work to grow a website. It took a lot of work to publish five books. It took a lot of work to embark on a coast-to-coast tour. It took a lot of work to teach my first writing class. It took a lot of work to pursue my dream. Work wasn’t the problem. What I did as my work was the problem. I wasn’t passionate about my work before—my work wasn’t my mission—and so I wanted to escape from work so I could live a more rewarding life, looking to balance out the tedium of the daily grind. But work and life don’t work that way. Even when you’re pursuing your dream, there will be times of boredom and stress and long stretches of drudgery. That’s alright. It’s all worth it in the end. When your work becomes your life’s mission, you no longer need a work-life balance.

We are nature; we are nature as we munch gum and check the phone; we are nature as we queasily regret our imperfection, turning the glossy page, turning our glossy stomachs; we are nature as we hear them witter inanely on the radio, desecrating the silence with the violence of their idiocy and dumb verdicts, chattering and grooming, picking through the ticks in their hair, marveling at new minutia.

I want to change the world, and do something valuable and beautiful. I want people to remember me before I'm dead, and then more afterwards.

Please stay safe inside, and should you see yourself, I cannot condone murdering yourself. I just do not believe violence is ever the answer. (It is a question. The real answer is far more terrifying.)

This is no time for drinking a mug of water - which you would do nowhere else in the world. A mug of water! You just don't drink water from mugs, do ya? Except on the telly. Water out of a mug! Should be a hot drink... mug of water.

But babies become children, and they go to elementary schools that indoctrinate them on how to overthrow governments, and they get interested in boys and girls, or they don't, and anyway they change.

Dear Lynda Carter, Please be with me in my hour of need. Especially if I don't have to twirl around to get my powers.

You can be an expert on anything if you just use logic.

Of all the consumer products, chewing gum is perhaps the most ridiculous: it literally has no nourishment – you just chew it to give yourself something to do with your stupid idiot Western mouth.Half the world is starving, and the other’s going, ‘I don’t actually need any nutrition, but it would be good to masticate, just to keep my mind off things.

One of the classier features of this home was the padded toilet seat. It was high-mileage puffy brown vinyl-colored foam and made that weird sigh when you sat down on it. I'm not a germaphobe or anything like that, but it is weird to think about all the ass time this seat had seen before we moved in. This is a horrible invention. What's the plan? You want to create a toilet seat so comfortable that you can fall asleep while you're taking a shit? You're going to show up late for work or end up like Elvis.

Some people were just getting on with their lives, chatting, being young. It simply wouldn't do.

I don't care if you're gay, black, Chinese, straight. That means nothing to me. It's all an illusion.

Valentine's Day is a disaster. Any day that is designed to perfectly encapsulate something as messy and personal as two people in a romantic relationship would have to be. But in Night Vale it also kills people. This is called satire.

Ascott scrambled for his dive knife, he and waved the four- inch blade between himself and the octopus. The floating sack of tentacles hesitated and then all eight of its arms snapped forward. Curled in the tip of each was a variety of sharpened implements, from swords and dive knives to a fishing spear. The large unblinking eyes seemed to be saying, Your move.

We contract with them.”“And demons –”“Are one of those group.”“Like, from Hell?”“Sometimes. And sometimes from Park Avenue.

I know, in my soul, that a love for travel is a gift and not a hindrance. It feels like a burden when the bucket list is bigger than the bank account, but a thirst for more of the world is not something to apologize for. Denying its presence feels like denying something good in me, something God put there. Wanderlust has a reputation as the epitome of unrequited love, something the young and naive chase after because they don’t yet realize it’s as futile as a dog chasing its tail. Turns out, ever-burning wanderlust is a good thing.

No matter how much we might wish it, there is no way to build a lock that only angels can open and demons cannot. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant of the mathematics or less of an angel than they appear.

When purchasing gifts becomes the focal point of the season, we lose focus on what's truly important.

I am the wind...I am death.

Over the road there was a church: a modern gray building, which constantly played a recording of church bells. Strange it was. Why no proper bells? I never went in but I bet it was a robot church for androids, where the Bible was in binary and their Jesus had laser eyes and metal claws.

Rituals are missing nowadays

The need to find out what will happen if I don't relent or moderate my actions has been a constant source of difficulty and discomfort in my life.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto.The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing.In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out.A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.”Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag.This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done.After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber?What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here.It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness.“What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?”They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.

Taking a shower often solved problems for her. She would find herself with thoughts that seemed to come from outside her, thoughts that would question decisions or offer suggestions or just consider life hazily in a way that made it seem like the thoughts could not possibly be her own.

If you ever start taking things too seriously, just remember that we are talking monkeys on an organic spaceship flying through the universe.

Arousal begins within the mind, then seeps out where fantasy propels physicality.

You don't have to sit on top of a mountain to discover what's right for you. You always know in your heart what you need to do.

As we all know, the spine ridges of adult cats are highly poisonous. If you are coming to see a kitten that you have adopted, it is important that you check for the location and severity of the spine ridge before attempting any petting. Also, keep your hands away from their mouths. A few of them have developed their venom sacks. We lost two cat adopters already this month, so...let's just be careful people.