The Quotable Murr

I'm tired of Fran Lebowitz having all the good quotes.

"Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying."

"My favorite animal is steak."

"Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep."

I could have said that stuff.

"Everybody wants to be famous. Haven't they noticed? Not even famous people are famous. I read the New York Times obits to meet new people." —David Murray

"If we aren't magnanimous in our judgement of our young selves, how can we expect our young selves to be magnanimous with us?" —David Murray

"Our essential responsibility as personal and organizational communicators is not to spoon out information slowly to babies with weak digestion systems. Rather, it’s to try desperately to keep up, verbally, with the massive flow of unvarnished truth that our behavior is sending, and that our family, friends and colleagues are receiving every day." —David Murray

"Share your emotions only with those with whom you'd willingly share your money—and then, only in the same amounts." —David Murray

I'm so humble that those four are all I can think of! Can you believe that? Come on. Who else can remember some great quotes of mine?

Or, if you absolutely cannot think of any Quotable Me, how about Quotable You?

Comments

[Tom Keefe]

David, let's go with a snippet of your previous post:

"I spent a lot of time in the mid-1990s noisily doubting the importance of the Internet. But I was 25 years old, an impossibly young curmudgeon in desperate need of something new and mainstream to dismiss."--David Murray.

In a few years, we'll be able to examine how an impossibly middle-aged curmudgeon named David Murray continued to find new and mainsteam ideas and trends to dismiss.

Nominees might include: Social media, social responsibility, social drinking.

[Peter Faur]

My mission in life: To be a friend of the friendless and a foe of the foeless.

[Pie]

This, from an email to your struggling sister, sent exactly one year ago:

***

Fuck shame.

(It’s boring, irrelevant and as untenable as worry, which I wrote about recently:

I don't begrudge religious people their praying. Far from it. They're often my only hope.

Them: "I'll be praying for you."

Me: "Good!"

Praying people pray.

We agnostics don't pray, of course. Nor do the atheists.

No, instead, we worry.

Worrying, though, is also a kind of prayer, a sneaky little childish superstitious prayer. A step-on-a-crack-and-break-your-mother's-back kind of prayer.

Worry is a prayer that says, "God, I doubt you're up there, but in case you are, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't take away the one thing I worry about all day long. (read: child getting leukemia, losing job, getting caught for tax evasion.) Right, God?"

Worry is a piss-poor prayer.

Which is why we don't say, "I'll keep you in my worries."

If you pray, pray.

If you don't pray, don't worry.

***

I love you, bro.

[David Murray]

That was a damned good e-mail, wasn't it, Sis? For The Quotable Murr, I think I'll boil the whole thing down to, "Worry is a piss-poor prayer." Or does "fuck shame" cover it even more succinctly?

[Rueben]

I think my favourite Murr quote is now "I'm tired of Fran Lebowitz having all the good quotes."