Quotes from Robert Grudin

Every home should have a room, or at least a nook with two chairs, where it is a sin punishable by immediate expulsion to speak of money, business, politics or the state of one's teeth.

All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.

We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day.

Because we believe that one moment is more or less like the next, we lose touch with the essential urgency of the present, the fact that each passing moment is the one moment for the practice of freedom.

We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day.

Plans made swiftly and intuitively are likely to have flaws. Plans made carefully and comprehensively are sure to.

The goal of discoverers is not to outdistance their peers, but to transcend themselves.

Few fallacies are more dangerous or easier to fall into than that by which, having read a given book, we assume that we will continue to know its contents permanently, or having mastered a discipline in the past, we assume that we control it in the present. Philosophically speaking, "to learn" is a verb with not legitimate tense.

On this subject it is striking to note how many individuals pursue, outside of their own professions and with a kind of rebellious delight, hobbies that are no more than personalized forms of work. This suggests that one of the hidden desires of humanity, provoked by the inward clamor of unused potentialities, is the dream of work in freedom.

In old magazines and newspapers we find a number of uncomfortably revealing things: the aged as young, the dead as living, forgotten people as celebrities, an array of our own barbarous and long-discarded fads and postures, and worst, visible only in this removed perspective, our own sickening pretensions to meaning and permanence.

We wonder at good things, are appalled by evil. What's wondering got in common with being appalled? That strange combination, that surprise duet of disbelief and acknowledgement. You can't believe that any human being would open up with an assault gun in a trolley, but look over there--right there!--there's somebody doing it.

All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.

like gravity, beauty is a force whose existence is inferred from its apparent effects.

The reason so many promises are not kept is the same reason they are made in the first place.

Indeed, there are two times for most important statements or accusations: the expressive time, when we feel inwardly impelled to say or do them, and the impressive time, when they would be most helpful to their recipients. It is only in very mature and rightly beloved people that these two times regularly coincide.

Learn your own faults and vices; but do not assume that all of them should be eradicated. Sometimes, like beasts serving a greater master, they provide necessary balance and thus deserve indulgence; sometimes they are the indivisible shadows of virtues themselves.

We are wistful about the Golden days of the past and dream of a distant future unclouded by necessity. But I suspect that if our inner souls were asked what in life they really missed, the answer would be primal danger and stress.

For time, which can extend and magnify you, cannot liberate you from the confines of your skin or alter nature from its enduring shape.

The pain of growing old lies specifically in the fact that part of us does not grow old.

The years forget our errors and forgive our sins, but they punish our inaction with living death.

Laughable error and profound discovery are born of the same freedom.

Written truth is four-dimensional. If we consult it at the wrong time, or read it at the wrong pace, it is as empty and shapeless as a dress on a hook.

Young people err through ignorance; but older people err through oblivion to dramatic but simple truths, learned and forgotten a hundred times. The ignorance of the young has the inviting vacancy of the outdoors; but the oblivion of the old is a noxious void behind a sneer of wisdom.

Bacon says that to conquer nature, we must first obey it; but man, who has humbled himself toward space and matter, is still proud toward time.