“Someday, by God, I want to throw a wedding for that kid.”
“You can either be on the right side of history or the wrong side of history. Your choice. But if you’re on the wrong side, be ready to look like an asshole to your grandchildren, no matter how many savings bonds you give them.”
“They pitched a fit and wouldn’t leave until something happened.”
(That’s biblical.)
“That is not legal argument or empirical evidence. It is the death rattle of a movement that has no legal argument or empirical evidence.”
“Son, this is a real question, not like them others. How is it possible for a man to go to church for 50 or even 60 years, and it not make a lick of difference in him? Sit there, year after year – in Sunday school and preachin’, readin’ the Bible, listenin’ to sermons and prayin’ prayers – sit there all that time, all them long years, and be just as mean, as mean as a snake, as the day he started goin’?”
“In hell, everyone gets a sweater vest.”
“First of all, talking with my mom about mule sex is a little weird, but that didn’t catch me off guard as much as her ruminations about the soundness of a GOP candidate’s positions on sexuality.”
“Yes, I can understand how one might think that being stopped for directions under a street lamp on the corner of an iconic city isn’t a very big deal, but I think it’s pretty much the coolest thing ever.”
“The care of the public must oversway all private respects, by which, not only conscience, but mere civil policy, doth bind us. For it is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public. … We must not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren.”
“The danger with pretending to be persecuted, misunderstood and all alone is that you might wake up and find that it is true.”
“Given the history of forced sterilization in Virginia, you’d think they’d be more sensitive on this issue. This is the state where Buck v Bell brought the issue of forced medical procedures to light.”
“The class that they call ‘job creators’ used to have another name. Lords.”
“The trees are the right height.”
– – – – – – – – – – – –
Let me try to defend Mitt Romney for that one. “I love the state,” Romney said of Michigan, his boyhood home. “It seems right here. Trees are the right height.” He went on and on, unfortunately, babbling about lakes in “the parts of Michigan” and, yes, sounding eerily like Steve Carell in Anchorman when he said “I love cars.”
But that bit about the trees was almost poetry. Keep it in the context of the previous sentence: “It seems right here.” This is the fuzzy territory of memory and place and home that can be so hard to articulate. When you say a place feels like home, what do you mean? You mean a whole host of things, some of which you’ll never find words to express. “The trees are the right height,” is a decent attempt.
I think it was Larry Kramer who, on moving back to New York, said he didn’t like the West Coast because “the ocean was on the wrong side.” I know what he meant, and my guess is it’s the sort of thing Romney meant too.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In