Excerpts from October

This weekend I'll be presenting an extremely distilled version of my thesis at the annual Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association Conference in Niagara Falls. Seems like as good a time as any to post some great lines that have been ringing around in my ears all month. Some of these I've mentioned before. Some go together kind of well. Some are relevant to discussions we've had on the blogs. Some are from great songs I've been listening to. A few are just, well, cute. Some I'm not sure what they mean. You can decide which is which. Enjoy, and have a good weekend!

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Jon (to his boys in the backseat of the van, who are fighting about pretty much everything): "Guys, do you you think you can talk without arguing?"

Brady: "We can talk without arguing right Elijah?"

Elijah (harshly): "No we can't."

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Writer (in Tarkovsky's Stalker) : "Listen Einstein, I don't want to argue anymore."

Philosopher: "Truth is born of argument, damn it!"

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Mallory McGarry (in West Wing Season One): "Don't play dumb with me Sam."

Sam Seborne : "But I'm actually dumb. Most of the time I'm just playing smart."

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My son Elijah, out of nowhere: "Dad, you like books so much you should be a bookaneer."

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Sheriff Ed Bell (monologue in No Country for Old Men): "The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, 'O.K., I’ll be part of this world.'”

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M. Ward (in "Poison Cup", from the album Post-War):
If love
If love
Is a poison cup
Then drink it up
'Cause a sip
A sip
Or a spoonful won't do
Won't do nothing for you
Except mess you up

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Augustine (from Predestination of the Saints): "No one believes anything unless one first thought it believable. . . . Everything that is believed is believed after being preceded by thought. . . . Not everyone who thinks believes, since many think in order not to believe; but everyone who believes thinks, thinks in believing and believes in thinking."

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G.K. Chesterton: "Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another."

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G.K. Chesterton: “Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”