Lileks Quotes

#1. There are three stages to a man's life. 1. He laughs at Clark Griswold. 2. He sympathizes deeply with Clark Griswold. 3. He laughs at Clark Griswold.

James Lileks

#2. When your opponent sets up a straw man, set it on fire and kick the cinders around the stage. Don't worry about losing the Strawperson- American community vote.

James Lileks

#3. She was moving slowly, appearing to come no closer. Perhaps she was losing ground against the earth's rotation.

James Lileks

#4. So now we're after a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a guy-and-gal thing. To the founders, this would have been like an amendment requiring the sun to rise in the east; it would fall under the category of obvious truths that the Constitution need not address.

James Lileks

#5. If God were not only to hear our prayers, as he does ever and always, but to answer them as we want them answered, he would not be God our Saviour but the ministering genius of our destruction.

George MacDonald

#6. Look. Every partisan in every party has to learn one thing: Sometimes your people are wrong. To paraphrase an old retort, saying "My party, right or wrong" is like saying "My Kennedy, drunk or sober." Credibility is earned, and standing up and saying "Fie!" now and then reinforces your truthfulness.

James Lileks

#7. If Mother had to be told not to shove the entire brick of Ivory up Junior's hindquarters, constipation is the least of his problems.

James Lileks

#8. If you can pick the baby up without him squirting our of your hands like a bar of soap in the shower, he's not oiled up enough.

James Lileks

#9. Look. Folks. It's simple. If you have poor taste in decorating, don't go nuts in the entryway. Wait until your guests are inside before you spring something unusual on them.

James Lileks

#10. I'll feel that horrible feeling in my stomach you get when you've gone over to the Dark Side. But I'll be fine. That's the good thing about the Dark Side. Eventually, your eyes adjust.

James Lileks

#11. I love the early hours of the day. It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.

James Lileks

#12. We always ask where the time went. We never ask where it's coming from.

James Lileks

#13. The newspaper is a lecture. The Web is a conversation.

James Lileks

#14. The popular Arab imagination is a pliant and inventive thing; it can explain any defeat. It is a compass that always points toward the Jew.

James Lileks

#15. It is we that are blind, not Fortune: because our eye is too dim to discover the mystery of her effects, we foolishly paint her blind, and hoodwink the providence of the Almighty.

Thomas Browne

#16. Liberals really, really, really like to talk about how open-minded they are - a lot. And yet, today, there are few doing more to suppress the individual's freedom to act, think, say, and write what they want in the United States than so-called progressives.

Eric Bolling

#17. In the early '70s, the nation was afflicted with incurable pattern viruses - small microbes that reproduced and multiplied from a single swatch left on a sofa, and soon covered an entire room.

James Lileks

#18. I'll start drinking tea over coffee when the big hand is on Never and the little hand is on Ain't Gonna Happen.

James Lileks

#19. It's always something when you let other people in your world.

James Lileks

#20. If you think the '80s were dumber than the '70s, either you weren't there or you weren't paying attention.

James Lileks

#21. I still couldn't imagine that she was really, truly pregnant; maybe this was an hysterical pregnancy. But Sarah was never hysterical. Enthusiastic, yes, ironic on occasion. I couldn't imagine a doctor saying, No, it's just an ironic pregnancy.

James Lileks

#22. When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#23. He wanted to sink down and hug the coals to his chest. Flamboyant...coins of light...oil, wood, tatters...fumes from acids, soap, smoke...the sunlight shattered.

William H Gass

#24. THE TECHNIQUES OF the Art of Peace are neither fast nor slow, nor are they inside or outside.. They transcend time and space.

Morihei Ueshiba

#25. I want to believe in intelligent design, and hence I am suspicious of anything that seems to confirm my desire to believe.

James Lileks

#26. I can't stand too long of a record.

Shelby Lynne

#27. Yay Condi Rice. I want her to go to Saudi Arabia, and I want her first words upon getting off the plane to be 'I'll drive.'

James Lileks

#28. Allowing someone to be who they really are, on their terms, instead of expecting them to be who you wish they were - that's always a choice.

Sarah Fine

#29. I don't believe in the very concept of "first thing in the morning." I'm a "third thing in the afternoon" fellow.

James Lileks

#30. So Jane was getting married. Well, more power to her. In fact, let me tighten those straps. Any word from the governor on the pardon? No? All right, then, more power to her.

James Lileks

#31. No, you've got it all wrong, John." Reading his emotions, she shook her head. "You're not half the male you could be because of what was done to you. You're twice what anyone else is because you survived.

J.R. Ward

#32. She was from the wrong side of the tracks no matter how you gerrymandered the town.

James Lileks

#33. A killer on the payroll isn't good for business

L.A. Larkin

#34. This dissent isn't going to suppress itself.

James Lileks

#35. Synthesis is the process of making a natural product, or some other substance, artificially, in the lab, one step at a time, from extremely simple building blocks.

Gregory Petsko

#36. The mind forever turns on the lathe of its own contradictions.

James Lileks

#37. Contempt for the things people choose of their own free will is, at its heart, contempt for free will.

James Lileks

#38. It wasn't that I was tired of life, really - just my own. Other people's lives seemed perfectly worthwhile, and only the logistical difficultly of assuming them and the likelihood of being caught kept me from concocting some sort of swap.

James Lileks