Top 100 Semple Quotes
#1. With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.
Cheryl Strayed
#2. It may be that this autobiography [Aimee Semple McPherson's] is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.
Dorothy Parker
#3. Her room is full of books by people who have radio hours. It's the gospel according to Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, and Aimee Semple McPherson - American dynamism gilded onto a platform of individual redemption. It's religion as detergent.
Carlene Bauer
#4. Hey, Trash, what did old lady Semple say when you torched her pension check?
Stephen King
#5. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that's how I fear Canadians.
Maria Semple
#7. She didn't trust people who didn't like garlic, especially big fried pieces.
Maria Semple
#8. 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
#9. I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.
Maria Semple
#10. 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' is an epistolary novel - one told in letters. I had no idea how much fun it would be, puzzling together the plot with letters and documents.
Maria Semple
#11. Pain I'm good with. It's discomfort I can't handle.
Maria Semple
#12. 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
#13. I think that everyone in Seattle, their daily existence, is enriched by all the charitable giving that is courtesy of Microsoft.
Maria Semple
#14. 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
#15. Was it happiness I'd found in my long marriage? Or capitulation? Or is that all happiness is, capitulation?
Maria Semple
#16. There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.
Maria Semple
#17. 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
#18. On my walks, that's when the good ideas come. The kind of hard, gritty work is when you're sitting at the computer and it's kind of intense and you're kind of in super control of it - the walks are when you let go. That's when the really big breakthroughs come in, and it's very strange.
Maria Semple
#19. I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.
Maria Semple
#20. I can only do really serious writing for a couple of hours. And then I always go on a walk. I do a one-to-two-hour walk; I don't go running or hard hiking.
Maria Semple
#21. My favorite kind of book is a domestic drama that's grounded in reality yet slightly unhinged.
Maria Semple
#22. Left to their own devices, women would stop having sex after they have children. There's no evolutionary need for it. Our brains know it, our body knows it. Who feels sexy during the slog of motherhood, the middle-aged fat roll and the flattening butt?
Maria Semple
#23. An artist must create. If she doesn't, she will become a menace to society.
Maria Semple
#24. Hovering over me was the Chihuly chandelier. Chihulys are the pigeons of Seattle. They're everywhere and even if they don't get in your way, you can't help but build up a kind of antipathy toward them.
Maria Semple
#25. 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
#26. Awake! thou that sleepest, arise from the dead! The Lord still lives today. His power has never abated. His Word has never changed. The things He did in Bible days, He still lives to do today. Not a burden is there He cannot bear nor a fetter He cannot break.
Aimee Semple McPherson
#27. 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
#28. As everybody knows, being raised Catholic with half a brain means becoming an atheist.
Maria Semple
#29. With God, I can do all things! But with God and you, and the people who you can interest, by the grace of God, we're gonna cover the world!
Aimee Semple McPherson
#30. You've traded vocabulary, lucidity, and memory for motherhood.
Maria Semple
#31. 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
#32. Smell the soup, cool the soup," Timby said. "Huh?" "It's what they teach us in school when we're upset. Smell the soup." He took a deep breath in. "Cool the soup." He blew out.
Maria Semple
#33. 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
#34. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said, You wouldn't care about what other people thought about you if you realized how seldom they actually did.
Maria Semple
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. I'm not the comedy police, but you watch a movie, and everyone's laughing, and then you shake it out, and you realize, 'There's no joke there!'
Maria Semple
#38. The sky in Seattle is so low, it felt like God had lowered a silk parachute over us.
Maria Semple
#39. She's wearing this backpack with yarn coming out of it, so she can knit while she's standing.
Maria Semple
#41. When people die, their handwriting dies too. You don't think about that.
Maria Semple
#43. 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
#44. Maggie Shipstead's prose is so graceful and muscular, so dazzling, so sure-handed and fearless, that at times I had to remind myself to breathe. Astonish Me is a treasure of small surprises.
Maria Semple
#45. Breezy, sophisticated, hilarious, rude and aching with sweetness: LOVE, NINA might be the most charming book I've ever read.
Maria Semple
#46. In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.
Maria Semple
#47. People like you must create. If you don't create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.
Maria Semple
#48. Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.
Maria Semple
#49. My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television.
Maria Semple
#50. don't care where you live, but here in Seattle, our restaurants are better than your restaurants. "Hmmm,
Maria Semple
#51. I can pinpoint that as the single happiest moment of my life, because I realized then that Mom would always have my back. It made me feel giant. I raced back down the concrete ramp, faster than I ever had before, so fast I should have fallen, but I didn't fall, because Mom was in the world.
Maria Semple
#52. 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
#53. 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
#55. I guess that's what art is: Turning something painful into something people can relate to.
Maria Semple
#56. 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
#57. We need to preserve our neighborhoods, our small business, our local economy.
Maria Semple
#58. 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
#59. My talent isn't so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions.
Maria Semple
#60. What is my task? First of all, my task is to be pleasing to Christ. To be empty of self and be filled with Himself. To be filled with the Holy Spirit; to be led by the Holy Spirit.
Aimee Semple McPherson
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. I know it's a lot. But she can handle it. I'd rather ruin her with the truth than ruin her with lies.
Maria Semple
#64. Ollie-O was in a semicatatonic state, uttering nonsensical phrases like "This is not biodegradable - the downstream implications are enormous - the optics make for rough sledding - going forward -" before getting stuck on the words "epic fail," which he kept repeating.
Maria Semple
#65. The war in Congo rages on with no end in sight," the announcer said. "And now comes word of a new campaign by the soldiers, to find the women they have already raped and re-rape them." "Holy Christ on a cross!" Mom said. "I draw the line at re-raping." And she turned off NPR.
Maria Semple
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. I never understood the concept of a fluffy summer read. For me, summer reading means beaches, long train rides and layovers in foreign airports. All of which call for escaping into really long books.
Maria Semple
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Lift up your heads, ye people,
lift up your faces, too,
open your mouths to sing His praise,
and the rain will fall on you.
Aimee Semple McPherson
#72. There was no relief deeper than being loved by the person who'd known you the longest.
Maria Semple
#74. The first stop on this crazy train is Kindergarten Junction, and nobody gets off until it pulls into Harvard Station.
Maria Semple
#75. Because the other way wasn't working. The waking up just to get the day over with until it was time for bed. The grinding it out was a disgrace, an affront to the honor and long shot of being alive at all.
Maria Semple
#76. Here's something about Mom: she's bad with annoyances, but great in a crisis. If a waiter doesn't refill her water after she's asked three times, or she forgets her dark glasses when the sun comes out, look out! But when it comes to something truly bad happening, Mom plugs into this supreme calm.
Maria Semple
#77. 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
#79. If I had written something, and I had written myself into a corner, I didn't abandon it. Because I remembered: There's always more.
Maria Semple
#80. How's your day so far?"
"Oh, can't complain," he said. "You?"
"Can complain, but won't.
Maria Semple
#81. There's a happiness that comes from writing that I won't live without.
Maria Semple
#82. 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
#83. Seattle is the only city where you step in shit and you pray, Please God, let this be dog shit.
Maria Semple
#84. 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
#85. It's a quantum physics concept where everything that can happen, is happening, in an infinite number of parallel universes.
Maria Semple
#86. People say Seattle is one of the toughest cities in which to make friends. They even have a name for it, the 'Seattle freeze'.
Maria Semple
#87. If you're an artist and you're on Twitter, you are doomed to mediocrity.
Maria Semple
#88. Failure has got its teeth in me, and it won't stop shaking. Ask
Maria Semple
#89. '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
#90. The most random things get her way too full of love
Maria Semple
#91. My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world.
Maria Semple
#92. After decades spent in rewrite rooms surrounded by other shouting writers, I discovered that I work best alone. I like being in charge of my time, working out the problems according to my own rhythms and being able to nap. That's a big one, the napping on demand!
Maria Semple
#93. I don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.
Maria Semple
#94. Much of the time in the writer's room is spent working on story, and I was always challenging myself to make it more interesting, tighter and more surprising: to come at it sideways in a way that the audience wasn't expecting.
Maria Semple
#95. 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' was surprisingly easy and fun to write because I was feeling such strong emotions.
Maria Semple
#96. I love you, Bee," Mom said. "I'm Trying. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't.
Maria Semple
#97. I attended TED in 2007 and 2008, the last two years the conference was held in Monterey.
Maria Semple
#98. All you can do when it comes to ferries is get in line and hope.
Maria Semple
#99. In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.
Maria Semple
#100. 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
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