Garrison Keillor Quotes

73 Sourced Quotes

Ha! Easy for nuns to talk about giving up things. That's what they do for a living.

Garrison Keillor
Love has the power to rescue us and not let go, otherwise it isn't love

Garrison Keillor
I remember when I switched from Christmas to sex as the secret of happiness...

Garrison Keillor
I am a cheerful man, even in the dark, and it's all thanks to a good Lutheran mother.... Mother was well composed, a true Lutheran, and taught me to Cheer up, Make yourself useful, Mind your manners, and above all, Don't feel sorry for yourself.

Garrison Keillor
Humor needs to come in under cover of darkness, in disguise, and surprise people.

Garrison Keillor
Well, they're taking kids out of the country and sending them over there, National Guard kids and Army Reserve. They're sending kids who are barely prepared for this, and they're sending them over there to kill people, which is a serious thing. And to kill not terrorists, but to kill insurgents. I sort of find myself in agreement, uncomfortably, with Patrick Buchanan, who writes about this in his book, Where The Right Went Wrong. And writes that great powers, the way they skidded off the road, was getting involved in wars. That it's the role of great powers to stay out of wars.

Garrison Keillor
Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.

Garrison Keillor
Journalism is a good place for any writer to start — the retailing of fact is always a useful trade and can it help you learn to appreciate the declarative sentence. A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

Garrison Keillor
Being Lutheran, Mother believed that self-pity is a deadly sin and so is nostalgia, and she had no time for either

Garrison Keillor
None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea.

Garrison Keillor
Children can find other children to be pals. Children need fathers to be fathers.

Garrison Keillor
Where I'm from we don't trust paper. Wealth is what's here on the premises. If I open a cupboard and see, say, thirty cans of tomato sauce and a five-pound bag of rice, I get a little thrill of well-being — much more so than if I take a look at the quarterly dividend report from my mutual fund.

Garrison Keillor
You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.

Garrison Keillor
Evelyn was an insomniac so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that.

Garrison Keillor
To the cheater, there is no such thing as honesty, and to Republicans the idea of serving the public good is counterfeit on the face of it — they never felt such an urge, and therefore it must not exist.

Garrison Keillor
It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town, out on the edge of the prairie...

Garrison Keillor
Vacation cruises are advertised as luxurious journeys to exotic places, but a chief pleasure is the reading of books.... On steamer chairs topside or poolside, in the lounges, everywhere you see men and women with their noses in books, devouring them for hours.

Garrison Keillor
Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music and books, raising kids — all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through.

Garrison Keillor
People meet writers and are bowled over when the writer is friendly to them and invites them to his house for a glass of wine or to shoot up heroin or whatever they do, and they talk their heads off, and a year later it comes out in a book, and there follow years of bitter and fruitless litigation, and that is why you should always keep a writer at arm's length.

Garrison Keillor
If you can't trust a Methodist with absolute power to arrest people and not have to say why, then whom can you trust?

Garrison Keillor
They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.

Garrison Keillor
I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.

Garrison Keillor
Some people have a love of their fellow man in their hearts, and others require a light anesthetic.

Garrison Keillor
A good newspaper is never quite good enough but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.

Garrison Keillor
I was afraid you had deceased,' he said. 'Or gotten engrossed in a long book.

Garrison Keillor
Writers are vacuum cleaners who suck up other people's lives and weave them into stories like a sparrow builds a nest from scraps.

Garrison Keillor
Life is unjust and this is what makes it so beautiful. Every day is a gift. Be brave and take hold of it.

Garrison Keillor
Jesus said the meek would inherit the earth, but so far all we've gotten is Minnesota and North Dakota.

Garrison Keillor
I think if the church put in half the time on covetousness that it does on lust, this would be a better world for all of us.

Garrison Keillor
He was admired for never being at a loss for words and never wasting any either.

Garrison Keillor