Top 100 Maria Semple Quotes
#2. Living too long in New York does that to a girl, gives her the false sense that the world is full of interesting people. Or at least people who are crazy in an interesting way. At
Maria Semple
#3. I don't know if it's possible to feel everything all at once, so much that you think you're going to burst.
Maria Semple
#4. I think that everyone in Seattle, their daily existence, is enriched by all the charitable giving that is courtesy of Microsoft.
Maria Semple
#5. As for my constant low-grade state of confusion - the Blur is a term that seems to be sticking - let me break it into three categories: (1) things I should know but never learned, (2) things I choose not to know, and (3) things I know but totally screw up.
Maria Semple
#6. Was it happiness I'd found in my long marriage? Or capitulation? Or is that all happiness is, capitulation?
Maria Semple
#7. Maybe that's what religion is, hurling yourself off a cliff and trusting that something bigger will take care of you and carry you to the right place.
Maria Semple
#8. I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on YOU to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.""
Bernadette
Maria Semple
#9. Galer Street School is a place where compassion, academics, and global connectitude join together to create civic-minded citizens of a sustainable and diverse planet. Student:
Maria Semple
#10. As everybody knows, being raised Catholic with half a brain means becoming an atheist.
Maria Semple
#11. You've traded vocabulary, lucidity, and memory for motherhood.
Maria Semple
#12. I'm consistently blown away by 'Mad Men.' Having spent so much time in the writers' room, I'm cursed in that anytime I watch something, I'm always calculating what the writers are up to.
Maria Semple
#13. The world will be hostile, it will be suspicious of your intent, it will misinterpret you, it will inject you with doubt, it will flatter you into self-sabotage. What the world is, more than anything? It's indifferent.
Maria Semple
#14. We live a life of privilege. That doesn't mean we can literally switch off these women, whose only fault was being born in the Congo during civil war. We need to bear witness.
Maria Semple
#15. But with every step, I felt my anger falling way. Underneath that anger: fear. In the middle of one of her self-help phases, Ivy had once proclaimed that all anger was fear. I'd long since wondered what, if anything, was underneath all fear.
Maria Semple
#16. The sky in Seattle is so low, it felt like God had lowered a silk parachute over us.
Maria Semple
#18. When people die, their handwriting dies too. You don't think about that.
Maria Semple
#20. Sometimes these cars have Idaho plates. And I think, What the hell is a car from Idaho doing here? Then I remember, That's right, we neighbor Idaho. I've moved to a state that neighbors Idaho. And any life that might still be left in me kind of goes poof.
Maria Semple
#21. Breezy, sophisticated, hilarious, rude and aching with sweetness: LOVE, NINA might be the most charming book I've ever read.
Maria Semple
#22. People like you must create. If you don't create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.
Maria Semple
#23. Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.
Maria Semple
#24. My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television.
Maria Semple
#25. don't care where you live, but here in Seattle, our restaurants are better than your restaurants. "Hmmm,
Maria Semple
#26. There's a story that during the filming of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola had a sign on his trailer: Fast, Cheap, Good: Pick Two.
Maria Semple
#27. We'd pass icebergs floating in the middle of the ocean. They were gigantic, with strange formations carved into them. They were so haunting and majestic you could feel your heart break, but really they're just chunks of ice and they mean nothing.
Maria Semple
#29. On the drive home, I started playing my new flute. Mom never lets me play in the car because she's afraid someone might crash into us and my flute will impale me into the seat. I find that ridiculous, because how could that even happen?
Maria Semple
#30. I learned that comedy is born out of strong characters. I won't begin writing a character until I have a clear take on them.
Maria Semple
#31. My talent isn't so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions.
Maria Semple
#32. All those people I didn't even know, I couldn't pick them out of a lineup if I had to, but they had worked their whole lives to get the knowledge that ended up saving my life. It was because of them that I was in this magnificent wave of people and music.
Maria Semple
#33. I just want to hold you close." I gave Timby a squeeze. He relaxed in my embrace. "I'm wild about you, you know that, right?"
"I know." He smiled up at me.
"You don't have to be wild about me too. Just try to like me a little more than you do now.
Maria Semple
#34. And dialogue, I'm good at it, and it's because it's the only thing you have to work with in TV writing.
Maria Semple
#35. It's great to be able to just go with an idea and not have 10 people in a room telling me why I can't write in a huge mud slide at a school function with 50 kindergartners running around.
Maria Semple
#36. I wish a camera had been trained on me, because it would show what it looks like for a woman to be awakened to the truth. The truth? My lies and exaggerations would be responsible for a mother being locked up.
Maria Semple
#37. Parking in Seattle is an eight-step process. Step one, find a place to park (gooood luuuuck!). Step two, back into the angled parking space (who ever innovated that should be sentenced to the chokey).
Maria Semple
#39. The first stop on this crazy train is Kindergarten Junction, and nobody gets off until it pulls into Harvard Station.
Maria Semple
#40. I think because I try to keep things as real as I can, or I try to start from a place of reality, I almost don't have the imagination to write a book that's not set where I am.
Maria Semple
#42. How's your day so far?"
"Oh, can't complain," he said. "You?"
"Can complain, but won't.
Maria Semple
#43. That's right,' she told the girls. 'You are bored. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.
Maria Semple
#44. Seattle is the only city where you step in shit and you pray, Please God, let this be dog shit.
Maria Semple
#45. The sight of Elgie flat on the slimy dock, groaning "My wife, my wife", with a gun pointed at him, and me jumping up and down, was even enough for a German to take pity.
Maria Semple
#46. It's a quantum physics concept where everything that can happen, is happening, in an infinite number of parallel universes.
Maria Semple
#47. If you're an artist and you're on Twitter, you are doomed to mediocrity.
Maria Semple
#48. Failure has got its teeth in me, and it won't stop shaking. Ask
Maria Semple
#49. 'Mad About You' fit my sensibility the most of any show that I worked on, and as a result, it was really fun. It felt like a very natural fit.
Maria Semple
#50. The most random things get her way too full of love
Maria Semple
#51. I attended TED in 2007 and 2008, the last two years the conference was held in Monterey.
Maria Semple
#52. All you can do when it comes to ferries is get in line and hope.
Maria Semple
#53. Judging from the contents of her shopping cart - imported cheese, organic raspberries, fruit wash spray - she is the exact quality of parent we need at Galer Street. I saw her in the parking lot. She was driving a Lexus. Not a Mercedes, but close enough! Did
Maria Semple
#54. Life is a stew, and pot is poop.If someone stirred even a teeny-bit of poop in the stew, would you really want to eat it?
Maria Semple
#55. Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.
Maria Semple
#56. It was important for me early on to find the voice of each character and figure out what was unique about them and their individual worldview that I could use for comedy or conflict.
Maria Semple
#57. You bet your bindi that's how big I want it.
Maria Semple
#58. Earlier this year, I'd told a mother at school I'd been married fifteen year. She asked, "What's the secret to a long marriage?" I thought for a second, then answered, "Staying married.
Maria Semple
#59. I hear you're going to boarding school," she said. "Whose idea was that?"
"Mine," I said.
"I could never send Kyle to boarding school," Audrey said.
"I guess you love Kyle more than my mom loves me," I said, and played my flute as I skipped down the hall.
Maria Semple
#60. Stepping off the plane in Miami was like reentering the womb. Was it the welcoming voices of LeBron James and Gloria Estefan? No, it was the scent of Cinnabon.
Maria Semple
#61. We were quiet for a while, and then I said, "I think my favorite part of Antarctica is just looking out." You know why?" Dad asked. "When your eyes are softly focused on the horizon for sustained periods, your brain releases endorphins. It's the same as a runner's high.
Maria Semple
#62. A live concert needs to be listened to live. Otherwise, it's like eating day-old salad.
Maria Semple
#63. I suppose I could admire all these slow Seattle drivers for their safety-mindedness, consideration for others, and peace of mind. Instead, I'm a fury of annoyance.
Maria Semple
#64. 1. The choice of private schools is both fear-based and aspirational. Mercedes Parents are afraid their children won't get "the best education possible," which has nothing to do with actual education and everything to do with the number of other Mercedes Parents at a school. 2.
Maria Semple
#65. The ghost-walking, the short-tempered distraction, the hurried fog. (All of this I'm just assuming, because I have no idea how I come across, my consciousness is that underground, like a toad in winter.)
Maria Semple
#66. Know what one of the guys at the drive-through Starbucks has on his forearm?" Bernadette said. "A paper clip! It used to be so daring to get a tattoo. And now people are tattooing office supplies on their bodies.
Maria Semple
#67. I felt so alone in this world, and so loved at the same time. The
Maria Semple
#68. Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.
Maria Semple
#69. My summer reading suggestion: Pick a really famous, really long novel.
Maria Semple
#70. This is why you must love life: one day you're offering up your social security number to the Russian Mafia; two weeks later you're using the word calve as a verb.
Maria Semple
#71. I quickly realized that shopping on Amazon had made the idea of parking my car and going into a store feel like an outrageous imposition on my time and good nature.
Maria Semple
#72. When I graduated high school, I was one of many English-majors-to-be traveling through Europe with a copy of 'Let's Go Europe' in one hand, 'Anna Karenina' in the other, a Eurail pass for a bookmark.
Maria Semple
#73. Creating art is painful. It takes time, practice, and the courage to stand alone.
Maria Semple
#74. I felt so full of love for everything. But at the same time, I felt so hung out to dry there, like nobody could ever understand. I felt so alone in this world, and so loved at the same time.
Maria Semple
#75. It's what I imagined England would look like.
Maria Semple
#76. Bernadette,
Are you done? You can't honestly believe any of this nonsense. People like you must create. If you don't create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.
Paul
Maria Semple
#77. Your mission statement says Galer Street is based on global "connectitude." (You people don't just think outside the box, you think outside the dictionary!)
Maria Semple
#78. The penguins that spent most of their time fighting were the ones with no chicks ... It's like they're supposed to be taking care of their chicks. But because they don't have any, they have nothing to do with all their energy. So they just pick fights.
Maria Semple
#79. The world isn't your friend," Joe told Eleanor. "It's not designed to go your way. All you can do is make the decision to muscle through and fight the trend.
Maria Semple
#80. Bernadette and her enthusiasm were like a hippo and water: get between them and you'll be trampled to death.
Maria Semple
#81. My problems are all problems I'm lucky to have. And I know it, so therein lies the rub.
Maria Semple
#82. My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me.
Maria Semple
#83. So why didn't I switch schools? The other good schools I could have sent Bee to ... well, to get to them, I'd have to drive past a Buca di Beppo. I hated my life enough without having to drive past a Buca di Beppo four times a day.
Maria Semple
#84. Have you ever heard that the brain is a discounting mechanism?
Maria Semple
#85. I must say, it was a lot easier writing novels than I thought it would be. I think it's because I'm a novelist at heart, and it took me a while to figure that out.
Maria Semple
#86. On Jan. 1, 2012, I resolved to not buy anything from Amazon for a year.
Maria Semple
#87. I asked Joe if he hated Ivy and Bucky. He said, "That would make as much sense as hating a rattlesnake. You don't hate rattlesnakes; you avoid them.
Maria Semple
#88. That was happiness. Not the framed greatest hits, but the moments in between. At the time, I hadn't pegged them as being particularly happy. But now, looking back at those phantom snapshots, I'm struck by my calm, my ease, the evident comfort with my life. I'm happy in retrospect.
Maria Semple
#89. In order to make the April mortgage, Kurt had been forced to sell all his CDs, disconnect his Internet, and never set foot in a Jamba Juice.
Maria Semple
#90. My heart started racing, not the bad kind of heart racing, like I'm going to die. But the good kind of heart racing, like, Hello, can I help you with something? If not, please step aside because I'm about to kick the shit out of life.
Maria Semple
#91. Now that Dad was crying, I was, like, both of us can't be sitting on rocks in Antarctica crying. It's going to be OK, Dad.
Maria Semple
#92. You don't have to comment on every boring thing you do." I said. "This isn't Olympic curling. You're just unpacking a suitcase.
Maria Semple
#93. I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.
Maria Semple
#94. If you're so hell-bent on placing blame, I suggest you look in the mirror.
Maria Semple
#95. I just feel like there's this illicit thrill in reading other people's mail and spying on their lives.
Maria Semple
#96. When I came back from my first TED, very few people knew what it was. But around the time I was sitting down to write 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' in 2010, TED was exploding.
Maria Semple
#97. The one constant in my life has been my love of books: reading them, thinking about them, talking about them, holding them, turning people on to new ones.
Maria Semple
#98. I think a novel has to be about where you are at a given moment in time. I think it really needs to represent some specific pain you're going through. it's not just a story.
Maria Semple
#99. The drivers here are horrible. And by horrible, I mean they don't realize I have someplace to be.
Maria Semple
#100. None of what's become of me was Seattle's fault. Well, it might be Seattle's fault. The people are pretty boring. But let's withhold final judgment until I start being more of an artist and less of a menace.
Maria Semple
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