A Quote by Derren Brown

I went to a party when I was a student and they had a mynah bird up in the bedroom where people put their coats. I was completely captivated - I just sat there all night talking to it. The next day I passed a pet shop and they had a conure - it's a little parakeet - in the window. I bought it, not knowing what it was or how to look after it.
That I had never heard of such a bird did not surprise me.... But others more experienced also did not know of the Carolina Parakeet. The more I spoke of the bird, the more it seemed that, somehow, its existence had been a chimera. Admittedly, my survey was small and unscientific, but intelligent people who could reel off the names of various dinosaurs and identify sparrows at epic distances could not name the forgotten parakeet. I realized, forcefully, what I suppose I knew abstractly: Histories, like species, can go extinct.
Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
Will urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature? Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is a canary in a pet shop window? When the only wild animal he knows is a rat-glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum? When the only tree he touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades his gifts on Christmas morning?
The man I marvel at is the one that's in there day after day, and night after night and still puts the figures on the board. I'm talking about Pete Rose, Stan Musial, the real stars. Believe me, especially the way we travel today, flying all night with a game the next night and then the next afternoon, if you can play one-hundred and sixty-two games, you're a man.
The first year I had money, I really went shopping. I got really caught up in it. I bought all my brothers sets of luggage, and I bought 'em winter coats from Giorgio Armani - winter coats. And I got a pair of socks from this brother.
I've never really been star struck. I was a little bit taken aback when I was doing a chat show recently and I was sat in the make-up chair chatting to a guy say next to me but I couldn't look round and see who it was, it was only when I got up I realised it had been Bryan Adams I'd been talking to!
I went in, and there, in the front room, a converted bedroom, sat the first radio I had ever seen. The equipment was so bulky that it took up one entire wall of the bedroom. The set, which could send or receive signals, was tuned to KDKA in Pittsburgh, and I remember being completely flabbergasted at the thought of sounds coming from that box.
In the words of Alice Walker, the biggest way people give up power is by not knowing we have it to start with. We have it: just to look at the power of fighting student debt or 25 million Latinos who learned that the Republicans are the party that hate and fear but Democrats are the party of people deportation and detention.
I can still remember how my mother would shout my name out of the window because I was playing football late at night and had school to attend the next day.
I bought a house, it's a two bedroom house, but I think it's up to me to decide how many bedrooms there are. This bedroom has an oven in it. This bedroom has a lot of people sitting around watching TV. This bedroom is over in that other guy's house.
I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.
I went to my friend's house one day, and he had an electric guitar he had just bought with a tiny little amp. I turned the volume up to 10 and I hit one chord, and I said, I'm in love.
I ended up moving to Miami and bartending, but the party atmosphere is a black hole down there. People party all the time, and if you're working in the industry, you're sleeping all day and at the club all night, day after day.
Tommy had felt alone in a crowd before, even inferior to everyone in a crowd, but now he felt, well, different. It wasn't just the clothes and the make up, it was the humanity. He wasn't part of it. Heightened senses or not, he felt like he had his nose pressed against the window, looking in. The problem was, it was the window of a donut shop.
I'm so thankful when I have a job. I would say the worst job I ever had was the one I quit after the first night. I was an overnight restaurant janitor. And it wasn't because of the job. We had to do four restaurants in the night, overnight. But I was working with a den of thieves. I just quit the next day.
There was a four year old child whose next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman's yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there. When his Mother asked what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy said, “Nothing, I just helped him cry.²” “Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth “You owe me” Look what happens with a love like that, It lights the whole sky..”
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