Top 263 Quotes & Sayings by Garrison Keillor - Page 3

This is Democratic bedrock: we don't let people lie in the ditch and drive past and pretend not to see them dying. Here on the frozen tundra of Minnesota, if your neighbor's car won't start, you put on your parka and get the jumper cables out and deliver the Sacred Spark that starts their car. Everybody knows this. The logical extension of this spirit is social welfare and the myriad government programs with long dry names all very uninteresting to you until you suddenly need one.

To Norwegians, the polka is a form of martial art.

Sport is a seductive metaphor (life as a game in which we gain victory through hard work, discipline, and visualizing success). but the older metaphor of farming (life as hard labor that is subject to weather and quirks of blind fate and may return no reward whatsoever and don't be surprised) is still in our blood.

No innocent man buys a gun, and no happy man writes his memoirs.

Being Lutheran, Mother believed that self-pity is a deadly sin and so is nostalgia, and she had no time for either

In the end, all solutions are temporary.

The problem with paradise is that it's temporary: You don't belong here and the neighbors are nobody you care to know, so it's only blissful for a week or so.

Most men are prisoners at best, Who some strong habit every drag about Like chain and ball.

You've got work to do. Don't put this off. And don't take the long view, here. You know? Life is today and tomorrow and - and if you're lucky, next week.

Give guilt - the gift that lasts forever.

It's better to be burnished with use than rusty with principle.

My generation was secretive, brooding, ambitious, show-offy, and this generation is congenial. Totally. I imagine them walking around with GPS chips that notify them when a friend is in the vicinity, and their GPSes guide them to each other in clipped electronic lady voices and they sit down side by side in a coffee shop and text-message each other while checking their e-mail and hopping and skipping around Facebook to see who has posted pictures of their weekend.

I was afraid you had deceased,' he said. 'Or gotten engrossed in a long book.

People always are encouraging about a terrible loss, so that sometimes the loser would like to strangle them.

We English majors...need to promote public libraries as a tool in the war against terror. How many readers of Edith Wharton have engaged in terroristic acts? I challenge you to name one...Do we need to wait until our cities lie in smoking ruins before we wake up to the fact that a first-class public library is a vital link in national defense?

Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.

Have interesting failures.... If you need to have a personal crisis have it now. Don't wait until midlife, when it will take longer to resolve.... Don't pity yourselves. Lighten up. Seek people with a sense of humor. Avoid humorless people-and do not marry one, for God's sake.

When in doubt, look intelligent.

Freedom doesn't mean aimlessness. We can't just sleepwalk through life.... Freedom demands structure.

I remember when I switched from Christmas to sex as the secret of happiness.

Secret of life is to go through something harrowing that doesnt kill you...and to love one woman for the rest of your life.

I don't want them to be told to remember me.

For me, the monologue was the favorite thing I had done in radio. It was based on writing, but in the end it was radio, it was standing up and leaning forward into the dark and talking, letting words come out of you.

I was brought up imagining that cream rises to the top, merit wins out, the race is to the swift and riches to men of understanding, but it ain't necessarily so. The swift stand a better chance if they are also beautiful.

Second violins can play a concerto perfectly if they're in their own home and nobody's there.

It is a sin to believe evil of others but it is seldom a mistake.

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have.

Vacation cruises are advertised as luxurious journeys to exotic places, but a chief pleasure is the reading of books ... . On steamer chairs topside or poolside, in the lounges, everywhere you see men and women with their noses in books, devouring them for hours.

To choose Norm Coleman over Walter Mondale is like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich.

..people (in Minnesota) avoid stupidity when possible, not wanting to be a $10 haircut on a 50 cent head.

People in cars cause accidents and accidents in cars cause people.

Boys, the first drink is a boon, the second is a gamble, the third is poor judgment, and then the rate of descent gets steep

Men peak at age nineteen and go downhill.

Every show is your last show. That's my philosophy.

If the marriage needs help, the answer almost always is have more fun. Drop your list of grievances and go ride a roller coaster.

Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth breather there is.

America of the future will be all malls connected by interstates. All because your parents no longer can their own tomatoes.

Evelyn was an insomniac so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that.

Easter is so disappointing. You suffer all the way through lent, and what do you get for it? A ham.

Give up your good 'Christian' life and follow Jesus

This is the big reason most humorists fail. Drunks don't read books.

The French have a new president, the British will soon have a new P.M., and we envy them as we endure the endless wait for this small dim man to go back to Texas and resume his life.

People meet writers and are bowled over when the writer is friendly to them and invites them to his house for a glass of wine or to shoot up heroin or whatever they do, and they talk their heads off, and a year later it comes out in a book, and there follow years of bitter and fruitless litigation, and that is why you should always keep a writer at arm's length.

Majestic doesn't appeal to us. We [Americans] like the Grand Canyon better with Clarence and Arlene parked in front of it, smiling.

My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.

I think there's a lot of power in listening to one person talking to you. And this should never be underestimated.One person sitting and talking to you and, you're pulled in, in ways that technology and art and all cannot.

The audience is invisible and that's good. Somewhere my voice is drifting through a swine barn and the sound of it seems to perk up the sows' appetite. Or a lady is listening on headphones as she jogs along a beach, running to my cadence. Or a dog sits in front of the radio, head cocked, and the sibilants excite him in some mysterious way. A dog's humorist, that's me.

All fiction comes from a little bit of reality, otherwise it would have no relevance. The fun is in innovation, take something real like this fair, and make it something larger than life.

Some people have a love of their fellow man in their hearts, and others require a light anesthetic.

Those people on daytime TV talking about how their parents never gave them the positive feedback they needed and that's why they shot them- those are not Minnesotans.

You're such a big liar you gotta get your neighbor to call your dog.

God is a great humorist. He just has a slow audience to work with.

I thought A Prairie Home Companion would be an interesting thing to do for a summer or so. Public radio was just seven years old in 1974. It was a tiny organization in which a lot of things got started simply because there was all this time to fill. If you wanted to do an hour on Lithuanian folk dancing, you probably could have done it.

Marriage, friends, is a lifelong feast; love is no light lunch.

In romance, as in life, you only learn when you're losing.

Humor, a good sense of it, is to Americans what manhood is to Spaniards and we will go to great lengths to prove it.

We have nearly complete misunderstanding between people of different faiths in Lake Wobegon, and that's probably one reason why we get along so very well. It's when you are trying to convince another person to think the same way that you do that there is friction and trouble between people. But when you feel that the other person is dumber than dirt, too dumb for words - why waste your breath - you get along pretty well. There's no bond between people that's quite so strong as when people each feel slightly superior towards the other one.

A romp in the hay lingers like the first line of a song, but your true love is the one you make a life with and write more than a line about, you write a whole book.

Honesty is a rare commodity in a palace, and that is why so many fairy-tale marriages end up on the rocks.

... and people are to march around the church to commemorate the event, Palm Sunday, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem and was greeted with applause and with palms. People thought he had come to overthrow the Romans, but ... no ... he had come to change THEM ... and that led to things turning bad.