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Identity Quotes
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Cary Grant
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 "Everybody wants to be Cary
Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant."
— One of those great instances where
timing and scale are exactly right. Grant said this after his own
retirement from film, in his later years, and, appreciating that he,
himself, was now among those who envied the Cary Grant iconic persona of
His Girl Friday, now someone that even the man himself could no
longer be.
(Can't resist adding one more layer
of irony here: Do you realize that by saying this, and the way he says
it, he demonstrates that he still is Cary Grant? I mean, isn't this just
a classic Cary Grant line in and of itself?)
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Benjamin Franklin
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"Men take more pains to mask than
mend."
— My son's mother was always a great
fan of Benjamin Franklin; said his visage used to ride co-pilot in her Volkswagon Beetle, advising her as she drove.
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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The
Sirens of Titan
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"'Don't truth me,' said Boaz in his
thoughts, 'and I won't truth you.'"
— Perhaps the summary line of this
fantastic novel. It speaks to the heart of intimacy, in that we all know
the deepest truths about those to whom we are closest; it can't be
otherwise. Yet (thank you), we are obligated to keep those truths to
ourselves — as a favor in return for the truths they refrain from
uttering about us.
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Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,
Leonard Nimoy
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"You're not exactly catching us at
our best," Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner).
"That much is certain," Captain Spock
(Leonard Nimoy).
— Even if you're not a Star Trek
fan, there is an epic nature to this series that makes for poetic
juxtaposition to this bit of dialogue where Kirk and Spock are forced to
hitchhike back to their crippled space ship in a San Francisco park in
the 1980s. How many of us wouldn't like for some "real" audience to know
that what we're being seen as in any given moment isn't a fair
representation our real value, greatness?
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Walter Lippmann
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"Many a time I have wanted to stop
talking and find out what I really believed."
— A cautionary note for those
predisposed to believe their own PR.
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Nora Ephron
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"Insane people are always sure that
they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that
they are crazy."
—
Same holds true in divorce court, I
find.
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