Al Lerner Quotes

There is little in the architecture of a city that is more beautifully designed than a tree.

A car is like a mother-in-law - if you let it, it will rule your life.

Every city has to deal with the problem of cars and public transport.

Lots of cosy sky That God and I can share. I need air. I need air.

All to often, however, what she [the woman] does want is the man she hopes she will make out of the man she already has.

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

Fear is a message - sometimes helpful, sometimes not - but often conveying critical information about our beliefs, our needs, and our relationship to the world around us.

Feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard of motherhood.

The more we seek exclusivity in friendship, the more it becomes obligatory and the less likely it is to fulfill the wonderful vision of what true friendship can be.

Brazil will change when its cities change.

I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations and I have not provided false information to this or any other committee.

A people's speech is the skin of its culture.

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

I have a simple principle for the conduct of life- never to resist an adequate temptation.

The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.

To reject the word is to reject the human search.

We met at nine We met at eight I was on time No, you were late Ah yes! I remember it well.

There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

Feeling essentially superior to other people is as sure a sign of poor self-esteem as feeling essentially inferior.

People marry with a deep longing that their partner will tend to their wounds, not throw salt in them. Honor your partner's vulnerability.

What initially attracts us and what later becomes 'the problem' are usually one and the same.

We all fear change, even as we seek it.

Intensity is not the same as intimacy, although we tend to confuse these two words.

If what we are doing with our anger is not achieving the desired result, it would seem logical to try something different.

To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.

The way to prevent war is to bend every energy toward preventing it, not to proceed by the dubious indirection of preparing for it.

Historically, if you look at people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, people with disposable incomes have always been agricultural innovators.

But I live very simply. I farm - there is something visceral about being attached to the land. I am a recording engineer. I do my own laundry most days and I get on with the business of living.

No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.

Mud can make you prisoner and the plains can make you dry. Snow can burn your eyes but only people make you cry.

Men die but an idea does not.

England still will be here without you.

Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

Indeed, the great paradox of the writer's life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people.

I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from?.

The biggest fatal flaw in most fictional portrayals of nanotech - what sends those books arcing across the room - is ignoring that the nanobots need energy to do... anything.

Your children are not little mirrors reflecting back the good or bad job you've done.

You can't evaluate a prospective partner if you insulate your relationship from your family and friends--and his.

The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don't want to.

The happiest people are focused on living their own life (not someone else's) as well as possible.

Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even or finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.

It is an act of courage to acknowledge our own uncertainty and sit with it for a while.

I have realized after all these years that a city that has a good quality of life attracts jobs. People don't want to invest in places if there is no quality of life.

A city is like a family portrait - you don't tear it up if you don't like your uncle's nose.

The city is not the problem; the city is the solution.

American capitalism has been both overpraised and overindicted. It is neither the Plumed Knight nor the monstrous Robber Baron.

Whether hunting is right or wrong, a spiritual experience, or an outlet for the killer instinct, one thing it is not is a sport.