1. Top Famous Quotes
    2. /
  2. Maria Semple Quotes

Top Maria Semple Quotes

Browse top 66 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Maria Semple.

Favorite Maria Semple Quotes

1. "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
2. "Every single iceberg filled me with feelings of sadness and wonder. Not thoughts of sadness and wonder, mind you, because thoughts require a thinker, and my head was a balloon, incapable of thoughts. I didn't think about Dad, I didn't think about you, and, the big one, I didn't think about myself. The effect was like heroin (I think), and I wanted to stretch it out as long as possible.Even the simplest human interaction would send me crashing back to earthly thoughts. So I was the first one out in the morning, and the last one back. I only went kayaking, never stepped foot on the White Continent proper. I kept my head down, stayed in my room, and slept, but, mainly, I was. No racing heart, no flying thoughts." ~ Maria Semple
3. "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
4. "When "Here Comes the Sun" started, what happened? No, the sun didn't come out, but Mom opened up like the sun breaking through the clouds. You know how in the first few notes of that song, there's something about George's guitar that's just so hopeful? It was like when Mom sang, she was full of hope, too. She even got the irregular clapping right during the guitar solo. When the song was over, she paused."Oh Bee," she said. "This song reminds me of you." She had tears in her eyes." ~ Maria Semple
5. "When your eyes are softly focused on the horizon for sustained periods, your brain releases endorphins. It's the same as a runner's high. These days, we spend our lives staring at screens twelve inches in front of us." ~ Maria Semple
6. "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
7. "Life is a stew, and pot is poop.If someone stirred even a teeny-bit of poop in the stew, would you really want to eat it?" ~ Maria Semple
8. "Those East Coast rich kids are a different breed, on a fast track to nowhere. Your friends in Seattle are downright Canadian in their niceness. None of you has a cell phone. The girls wear hoodies and big cotton underpants and walk around with tangled hair and smiling, adorned backpacks. Do you know how absolutely exotic it is that you haven't been corrupted by fashion and pop culture? A month ago I mentioned Ben Stiller, and do you remember how you responded? ‘Who's that?' I loved you all over again." ~ Maria Semple
9. "You bet your bindi that's how big I want it." ~ Maria Semple
10. "We were quiet for a while, and then I said, "I think my favorite part of Antarctica is just looking out." You know why?" Dad asked. "When your eyes are softly focused on the horizon for sustained periods, your brain releases endorphins. It's the same as a runner's high." ~ Maria Semple
11. "The first stop on this crazy train is Kindergarten Junction, and nobody gets off until it pulls into Harvard Station." ~ Maria Semple
12. "The sky in Seattle is so low, it felt like God had lowered a silk parachute over us." ~ Maria Semple
13. "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
14. "All those ninnies have it wrong. The best thing about Seattle is the weather. The world over, people have ocean views. But across our ocean is Bainbridge Island, an evergreen curb, and over it the exploding, craggy, snow-scraped Olympics. I guess what I'm saying: I miss it, the mountains and the water." ~ Maria Semple
15. "Every feeling I ever knew was up in that sky: Twinkling joyous sunlight; airy, giggling cloud wisps; blinding columns of sun. Orbs of gold, pink, flesh, utterly cheesy in their luminosity. Gigantic puffy clouds, welcoming, forgiving, repeating infinitely across the horizon as if between mirrors; and slices of rain, pounding wet misery in the distance now, but soon on us, and in another part of the sky, a black stain, rainless." ~ Maria Semple
16. "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
17. "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
18. "I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing." ~ Maria Semple
19. "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
20. "In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing." ~ Maria Semple
21. "'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
22. "My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me." ~ Maria Semple
23. "My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television." ~ Maria Semple
24. "My talent isn't so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions." ~ Maria Semple
25. "Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television." ~ Maria Semple
26. "There's a happiness that comes from writing that I won't live without." ~ Maria Semple
27. "I keep an elaborate calendar for my characters detailing on which dates everything happens. I'm constantly revising this as I go along. It gives me the freedom to intricately plot my story, knowing it will at least hold up on a timeline." ~ Maria Semple
28. "I think a novel has to be about where you are at a given moment in time. I think it really needs to represent some specific pain you're going through. it's not just a story." ~ Maria Semple
29. "This is why you must love life: one day you're offering up your social security number to the Russian Mafia; two weeks later you're using the word calve as a verb." ~ Maria Semple
30. "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
31. "How do Mercedes Parents think? My research indicates the following:1. The choice of private schools is both fear-based and aspirational. Mercedes Parents are afraid their children won't "the best education possible," Which has nothing to do with actual education and everything to do with the number of other Mercedes Parents at a school." ~ Maria Semple
32. "I conducted an off-site consisting of 25 parents in the Seattle area with an income of $200K+ and whose children are entering kindergarten. The headline is that Galer Street is considered a second-tier school, a fallback option for those who don't get accepted to their first-choice school. Our objective is to move the needle on Galer Street and kick it up into the First-Choice Cluster (FCC) for Seattle's elite. How do we achieve this? What is the secret sauce?" ~ Maria Semple
33. "She didn't care if other children grew up to the Wiggles or Dan Zanes. Hers would adore Sondheim." ~ Maria Semple
34. "Your mission statement says Galer Street is based on global "connectitude." (You people don't just think outside the box, you think outside the dictionary!)" ~ Maria Semple
35. "She didn't trust people who didn't like garlic, especially big fried pieces." ~ Maria Semple
36. "Now that Dad was crying, I was, like, both of us can't be sitting on rocks in Antarctica crying. "It's going to be OK, Dad." ~ Maria Semple
37. "It's for survival. You need to be prepared for novel experiences because often they signal danger. If you live in a jungle full of fragrant flowers, you have to stop being so overwhelmed by the lovely smell because otherwise you couldn't smell a predator. That's why your brain is considered a discounting mechanism. It's literally a matter of survival." "That's cool." ~ Maria Semple
38. "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
39. "Greetings from sunny Seattle, where women are "gals," people are "folks," a little bit is a "skosh," if you're tired you're "logy," if something is slightly off it's "hinky," you can't sit Indian-style but you can sit "crisscross applesauce," when the sun comes out it's never called "sun" but always "sunshine," boyfriends and girlfriends are "partners," nobody swears but someone occasionally might "drop the f-bomb," you're allowed to cough but only into your elbow, and any request, reasonable or unreasonable, is met with "no worries."Have I mentioned how much I hate it here?" ~ Maria Semple
40. "First we lay out plastic bags under the leaks and cover them with towels or moving blankets. Then we put a spaghetti pot in the middle to catch the water. The trash bags are necessary because it might leak for hours in one place, then move over two inches. Mom's pièce de résistance is putting an old T-shirt inside the spaghetti pot to muffle the drip-drip-drip. Because that can drive you crazy when you are trying to sleep." ~ Maria Semple
41. "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
42. "I tried to love Dad and not hate him for his fake cheer and the way he gets dressed. I tried to imagine what Mom saw in him back when she was an architect. I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who finds every little thing he does a total delight. It was sad, though, because the thought of him and all his accessories always made me sick. I wished I'd never made the connection about Dad being a gigantic girl, because once you realize something like that, it's hard to go back." ~ Maria Semple
43. "Side note: Down here, you're either an Amundsen guy, a Shackleton guy, or a Scott guy. Amundsen was the first to reach the Pole, but he did it by feeding dogs to dogs, which makes Amundsen the Michael Vick of polar explorers: you can like him, but keep it to yourself, or you'll end up getting into arguments with a bunch of fanatics. Shackleton is the Charles Barkley of the bunch: he's a legend, all-star personality, but there's the asterisk that he never reached the Pole, i.e. won a championship. How this turned into a sports analogy, I don't know. Finally, there's Captain Scott, canonized for his failure, and to this day never fully embraced because he was terrible with people. He has my vote, you understand." ~ Maria Semple
44. "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
45. "I can feel the irrationality and anxiety draining my store of energy like a battery-operated racecar grinding away in the corner. This is the energy I will need to get through the next day. But I just lie in bed and watch it burn, and with it any hope for a productive tomorrow. There go the dishes, there goes the grocery store, there goes exercise, there goes bringing in the garbage cans. There goes basic human kindness." ~ Maria Semple
46. "No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality." ~ Maria Semple
47. "It's what I imagined England would look like." ~ Maria Semple
48. "Bernadette,Are you done? You can't honestly believe any of this nonsense. People like you must create. If you don't create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.Paul" ~ Maria Semple
49. "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
50. "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
First«12»Last

Maria Semple Quotes Pictures

Maria Semple Quotes
Maria Semple Quotes
Maria Semple Quotes

Today's Quote

Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed; Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. But if horses or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works as men do, horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like lions, making the gods resemble themselves. Xenophanes"
Author: Christopher Hitchens

What Did Maria Semple Talk About?

Wit
Thin
Use
Ear
Here
Cause
Ring
Con
Hen
Lit
Ally
Sea
She
Off
End
Seattle
Per
Sit
Won
Rain
Side
Writing
Tan
Lie
King
Bee
Pen
Son
Low
Cat
Win
Self
Ten
Star
Ways
Ours
Race
Hit
Era
Might
Said
Owe
Novel
Sing
Thou
Does
Story
Hey
Able
Hour

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Copyright © 2023 Top Famous Quotes. All Rights Reserved. | New Quotes | Topic List | Author List | Privacy Policy | About Us | Contact Us |