Sharing quotes

Some things that were said to me, passed on to me or overheard by me that made me proud, sad, happy or …….. Some taking place many years ago, some more recent.

A few months before my dad died, I was passing through the dining room where he was sitting, “Come here boy and sit on my lap.” I was nearly 40.

At a restaurant after a rather large group of mostly strangers had been on a rather brisk ride through the twisties. I had been riding a DRZ 400 a couple of bikes behind the leader. I was about 60 and had a full head of extremely grey hair. A friend said, while pointing across the room, “That guy wanted to know who the old guy on the dirt bike was.”

My favorite 1 word and 2 word quotes: 45 years ago, “yes,” and 44 years ago, “I do.” My wife.

At my very healthy mom’s 80th birthday party. “Mom, do you want to live to be 100?”
Mom, after a short pause, “I want to wait until I’m 99 to decide.”

I raced mountain bikes for several years and hated nearly every minute of it. In order to allow all 800+ racers to ride in a day, different age and skill classes were started every few minutes and there would generally be many races going on at the same time. In my first year as a beginner, I won a race at Huntsville state park. After washing my face, I walked back down the course where two of my buddies were watching the beginners struggle up the hill to the finish line. I asked who came in second in my race and one of my friends said, “Nobody, yet.” I won that 10 mile race by nearly 8 minutes.

At another mountain bike race in Warda, Tx. My group started 5 minutes behind a group of much younger riders. I was in my 50s. About ¾ of the way through the race, I was leading my race and caught one of the younger riders. I had already passed several other racers in his class. In mountain bike racing, it’s considered good manners to ask permission to pass and the slower rider is supposed to allow a clean pass regardless of whether or not you are in his class. The rider asked my class and I told him whatever the name was for my 50+ year old class. He told me to pass left, and when I got beside him, he said, “Way to go Old Dude.” Emphasis on “Old.”

I worked at a welding supply store. In order to get a new car, the owner’s 16 year old grandson, Blake, was required to work the sales counter for the school summer break and he hated every minute of it. He hated it almost as much as I hated bicycle racing. One day, the store was empty of customers, the owner was off playing golf, I was in charge of the sales force and Blake was leaning on the counter and said, “I hate this XXXxx@@* place.”
I was tired of his constant complaining and I said, “Well why don’t you just leave?” Without saying another word, he walked out the door. The next morning I was called into the owner’s office and asked to explain what had happened. After telling him what had transpired the previous day, he said, “I’d rather you didn’t give my grandson any more career advice.”

I took a metal shop class in high school. It was 4 hours long and taught by a wonderful teacher named Mr. Tolson. There was usually an hour of classroom and then 3 hours of welding, machine shop or other metal work. One of our classmates was very disruptive, constantly making snide remarks, playing pranks on people and generally being a nuisance. I sat next to him, not by choice, but because we were assigned seats. One day Mr. Tolson asked him a question and in some way, he worked a derogatory remark about my girlfriend into his answer. Mr. Tolson drug me off of him after I had knocked him to the floor and pounded his face with several punches. I was suspended for 3 days, but on the way to the principal’s office, Mr. Tolson leaned over close to me and whispered, “Thanks Dennie.”

I had been in the Marine Corps for slightly over 2 years when Major Leach, my XO said, “Corporal Spears, It looks like you are up for meritorious promotion to Sergeant”

I work in the rather technical, and sometimes perplexing world of reviewing construction plans for an engineering firm. We are hired by municipal clients and I perform the duties of the Building Official. During one meeting with an architect and building owner, my co-worker John Pierce, made this comment after some disconcerting remarks the architect made in reference to our role and his inability to convey on paper the project he was charged with designing: "Sir, we don't complicate solved problems, we solve complicated problems." And with that the owner looked the architect in the eye and said "I better not get a bill for them fixing problems you created!" That architect turned cherry red! I did get a call from that architect thanking us, but it was after he digested a good bit of humble pie.


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Ravi Zacharias - "Jesus Christ did not come to make bad people good, but to make dead people alive."

From the Irish COO of one of my favorite vendors; We were arguing with an increasingly irate & vocal video director who had shot his "masterpiece" at 24p (cinema frame rate) but we had to up-convert to 30fps to switch it through the system to our LED screens. This director had done the show the previous year and claimed that a different vendor had shown his work at 24p at that time.

"Why would they tell me this if it wasn't true?"

"Because they didn't want to have THIS conversation!"

"Gosh darn it, I'd urinate on a spark plug if I thought it'd do any good!" - War Games

I obviously cleaned that one up for this forum, but it's one of my favorite quotes. Having accidentally touched a live spark plug on our edger, I know this man was most desperate.

We weren't well to do by any stretch of the imagination, but my dad used to say "son,you can always go first class, just not all the time" at about the same time he said something like having "champagne taste and a beer budget"

My paternal grandfather was born into a family of sharecroppers along the Ohio River in Kentucky in 1905, with minimal education he joined the 1st Calvary and was a quartermaster at Fort Bliss in the 1920's. The quotes passed down from him include:

A lock is merely something to keep a honest man from doing something he shouldn't in a moment of weakness.

That person is like a bulldog on a haystack: Won't eat the hay, but won't let the cows have it either.

And passed down to my father, and often heard by my brother and I in our growing up years:
Those that can do and won't do oughta be beat and made do.

"This is going to hurt me more than you."

Often said by one of my parents before I got a well deserved punishment.

As a parent now, I finally get it...

I think I am allergic to wedding cake. Next time I get married, it's wedding pie.

Dad had lots of them-
You never know how high you can climb 'till your butt hits the bottom of the well.
You NEVER win an argument with a fool! (This one I remember whenever I think I'm winning an argument, and ask myself if I am the fool.)
And all things come to he who waits if he works his tail off while he's waiting.

"If there's time to do it twice, there's time to do it once right, the same goes with money"

From the memories of an old mechanic to a customer, "I don't get paid to make financial decisions, I get paid to make repair decisions."

My Grandmother who we all called "Grandmother" because she earned the title and it may have had something to do with being half Indian, whenever she had a coughing spell in her later years and someone would ask "are you okay?" she would say "yeah I'm just trying to get attention".