Andrew Schneider (b. 2000)

Quotes

• Sometimes the mind, for reasons we don't necessarily understand, just decides to go to the store for a quart of milk.

• Marriage. It's like a cultural hand-rail. It links folks to the past and guides them to the future.

• One person can have a profound effect on another. And two people...well, two people can work miracles. They can change a whole town. They can change the world.

• People are simply incapable of prolonged, sustained goodness.

• There can be no spirituality, no sanctity, no truth without the female sex.

• As a scientist, I am not sure anymore that life can be reduced to a class struggle, to dialectical materialism, or any set of formulas. Life is spontaneous and it is unpredictable, it is magical. I think that we have struggled so hard with the tangible that we have forgotten the intangible.

• I used to think of all the billions of people in the world, and of all those people, how was I going to meet the right ones? The right ones to be my friends, the right one to be my husband. Now I just believe you meet the people you're supposed to meet.

• By mid-November I always like to have an extra 15 pounds on me.

• There's a lot to be said for self-delusionment when it comes to matters of the heart.

• Death is the enemy. I spent 10 years of my life singlemindedly studying, practicing, fighting hand to hand in close quarters to defeat the enemy, to send him back bloodied and humble and I am not going to roll over and surrender.

• It's just human. We all have the jungle inside of us. We all have wants and needs and desires, strange as they may seem. If you stop to think about it, we're all pretty creative, cooking up all these fantasies. it's like a kind of poetry.

• But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

• There were always people like the pope. They serve a certain function, of course. They subsidize us. But, they don't create anything and they must never be allowed to stop the artist from creating.

• A man should not leave this earth with unfinished business. He should live each day as if it was a pre-flight check. He should ask each morning, am I prepared to lift-off?

• Well, you're either lovers or you're wanting to be lovers or you're trying not to be lovers so you can be friends, but any way you look at it, sex is always looming in the picture like a shadow, like an undertow.

• I always admired atheists. I think it takes a lot of faith.

• Time for the weather report. It's cold out folks. Bonecrushing cold. The kind of cold which will wrench the spirit out of a young man, or forge it into steel.

• It's no accident that the church and the graveyard stand side by side. The city of the dead sleeps encircled by the city of the living.

• Listen, can you hear it? Spring's sweet cantata. The strains of grass pushing through the snow. The song of buds swelling on the vine. The tender timpani of a baby robin's heart. Spring.

• Let's not kid ourselves. Whatever we diagnose, most patients, if they don't die, get well by themselves. Our job is mainly to try to make them feel better; do no harm.