The Gravy Train Quotes

1. "No politician or party favours waste and inefficiency, and every government tries to reduce both--but tax cuts on the promise of ending the gravy train almost never find enough gravy. Of course efficiency matters, waste must be attacked, and of course it matters how both taxes and spending are organized, but despite the highly publicized incidents of misspending that seem to dominate the pages of our mainstream media and disproportionately shape our perceptions, the numbers about waste never add up, and the consequences of tax cuts on public goods and services are always worse than promised."
Author: Alex Himelfarb

2. "Good parenting is about being confident that you have a far higher calling than to just be a friend or dish out punishment. It is about being an authority who loves always and takes the time to guide and train a child to grow into an independent person. It is about being the one who plants love, truth, and hope into the mind of a child."
Author: Andy Kerckhoff

3. "But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?" You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on the computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind -- a scene, a locale, a character, whatever -- and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind."
Author: Anne Lamott

4. "I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of 'The Train Driver' because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant."
Author: Athol Fugard

5. "Alana Marks had always known she was different. From her gypsy childhood, to the way she now made her living in the movies, she'd always lived on the edge. She'd been paid to leap from a sixteenth story window, roll a car to a cliff edge, get thrown off a speeding train and dragged into a river by a runaway horse. At the moment, she was about to set herself on fire and jump out of a burning barn."
Author: Barbara Kyle

6. "By being a celebrity, you lose your anonymity. It short-circuits your creative powers when people come up and interrupt your train of thought. They consider you completely approachable. And you can't be rude to people, so basically you shut yourself down. I know I do. I shut myself down when people come up and want to shake my hand or want to talk. That's just dead time."
Author: Bob Dylan

7. "I was on a train of lies. I couldn't jump off."
Author: Clifford Irving

8. "Here's a great home workout that allows you to train and work on the usual issues I find ailing most people: • Right-leg Bulgarian Split Squats with the dumbbell in the suitcase position, 10 reps • Left-leg Bulgarian Split Squats with the dumbbell in the suitcase position, 10 reps • Goblet Squats with the dumbbell cradled on the chest, 10 reps • Deep Push-ups, chest touching the floor, with the push-up handles, 10 reps • Doorway Chin-ups or Pull-ups, 10 reps • Ab Wheel, 10 reps Try to do these six exercises one after another straight through without resting much between movements. Repeat this sequence, after a minute or two of rest, three to five times."
Author: Dan John

9. "Moving had no season, was all seasons, crossed time like a train with no schedule. We moved so often our mail never caught up with us, moved sometimes before we'd even gotten properly unpacked or I'd learned the names of all the teachers at my new school. Moving gave me a sense of time passing and everything sliding, as if nothing could be held on to anyway. It made me feel ghostly, unreal and unimportant, like a box that goes missing and then turns up but then you realize you never needed anything in it anyway."
Author: Dorothy Allison

10. "The train goes slowly. From time to time it stops, so that the dead can be taken off. It stops a lot."
Author: Erich Maria Remarque

11. "Schools were started to train human talents... The Guild... emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs... politics. The original Bene Gesserit school was directed by those who saw the need of a thread of continuity in human affairs. They saw there count be no such continuity without separating human stock from animal stock - for breeding purposes."
Author: Frank Herbert

12. "One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry."
Author: James Fenton

13. "When you train six to seven hours a day to be the best in your sport, you don't want that to be overlooked. I don't train for my looks."
Author: Jennie Finch

14. "If you train people properly, they won't be able to tell a drill from the real thing. If anything, the real thing will be easier."
Author: Jessamyn West

15. "Why do you have to correct everything I say?" Julie glanced at his FTW! shirt. "Out of the two of us, I don't think I'm the one that deviates from the norm." The train slammed to a stop. "You're the one who seems to get off arguing." "You sound exactly like Finn. We're exchanging ideas. Debating." Matt looked down at his shorts. "And so far I haven't gotten off."
Author: Jessica Park

16. "I could train myself out of all this. Like a smoker, I could cut down. Like a drinker, I could kick the bottle. Like someone in love, I could learn to redesign the route to my heart so someone else stood a chance in hell of navigating it. I could do this."
Author: Jessica Thompson

17. "Butters," rumbled Skaldi Hair Ball. If he really had broken fingers, it didn't look like they were bothering him much. "When are you going to get in this ring and train like a man?""About five minutes after I get a functional lightsaber," Butters replied easily, much to Hair Ball's amusement."
Author: Jim Butcher

18. "A state that does not educate and train women is like a man who only trains his right arm."
Author: Jostein Gaarder

19. "If my gravy train stops at SAG, honey, it's been a great ride."
Author: Patricia Clarkson

20. "But if I wasn't playing, I would drink Saturdays, then Sunday, then Monday. Then I would try and train and it was no good, then have another drink just to pass the day away."
Author: Paul Gascoigne

21. "All we know about the new economic world tells us that nations which train engineers will prevail over those which train lawyers. No nation has ever sued its way to greatness."
Author: Richard Lamm

22. "Bien que Terron fût un homme qu'apparemment je ne pouvais appeler autrement qu'un fanatique religieux ; bien qu'il menât sa vie d'une manière qui m'était encore plus étrangère que celle de M. Mann ; et bien que souvent je fusse arrivé à conclure, presque contre ma volonté, qu'il n'était qu'un arnaqueur rusé de campagne en train d'exploiter mon curieux mélange de culpabilité (le raciste américain en moi) et d'amour pour l'ésotérique (l'intellectuel branché en moi), il semblait malgré tout capable de me prévoir, de connaître bien plus précisément que le vieil homme mes besoins, mes questions et mes inquiétudes. De fait, c'était cette capacité d'anticiper sur moi et le bien-être qu'elle me procurait qui me ramenaient sans cesse à croire qu'il était en train de me rouler. En tant que vieux puritain, je me devais de me méfier de tout ce qui m'apportait du bien-être. (p. 201)"
Author: Russell Banks

23. "When you're in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who's decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home."
Author: Ryū Murakami

24. "These golf people seem unnaturally obsessed. They dress kind of funny too, and it's become a running joke for Gretchen and I to e-mail the most ridiculous golfing pictures back and forth to each other. Sometimes she adds hysterical captions. She never puts them on PitchBitch, though. We can't threaten the gravy train."
Author: Shawn Klomparens

25. "How can you defy fear? Fear is a human instinct, just like hunger. Whether you like it or not, you become hungry. Similarly with fear. But I have learned to train myself to live with this fear."
Author: Shirin Ebadi

26. "Last reason for reading horror: it's a rehearsal for death. It's a way to get ready. People say there's nothing sure but death and taxes. But that's not really true. There's really only death, you know. Death is the biggie. Two hundred years from now, none of us are going to be here. We're all going to be someplace else. Maybe a better place, maybe a worse place; it may be sort of like New Jersey, but someplace else. The same thing can be said of rabbits and mice and dogs, but we're in a very uncomfortable position: we're the only creatures—at least as far as we know, though it may be true of dolphins and whales and a few other mammals that have very big brains—who are able to contemplate our own end. We know it's going to happen. The electric train goes around and around and it goes under and around the tunnels and over the scenic mountains, but in the end it always goes off the end of the table. Crash."
Author: Stephen King

27. "When we were five, they asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. Our answers were thing like astronaut, president, or in my case… princess.When we were ten, they asked again and we answered - rock star, cowboy, or in my case, gold medalist. But now that we've grown up, they want a serious answer. Well, how 'bout this: who the hell knows?!This isn't the time to make hard and fast decisions, its time to make mistakes. Take the wrong train and get stuck somewhere chill. Fall in love - a lot. Major in philosophy 'cause there's no way to make a career out of that. Change your mind. Then change it again, because nothing is permanent.So make as many mistakes as you can. That way, someday, when they ask again what we want to be… we won't have to guess. We'll know.[from the movie]"
Author: Stephenie Meyer

28. "Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60's. Or maybe I was just a girl... interrupted."
Author: Susanna Kaysen

The Gravy Train Quotes Pictures