Where the other day's quotes came from

Casablanca

There are so many great movie quotes.

Most fans would recognize the true classics right away.

"Gonna make him an offer he can't refuse."

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

"Here's looking at you, kid."

Of course, there's always my personal favorite.

Animal House

"You f**ked up. You trusted us."

The 15 quotes I posted yesterday don't rise to that level of specialness, but they're all interesting and they all demonstrate what made their movies interesting.

Sometimes the great quotes aren't the famous ones

No. 14

It's always fun to remember the great quotes from our favorite movies. Some of those quotes become so well known to us that we throw them around a lot.

I picked these in response to a challenge on Facebook a few years back, and I took sort of a different twist. In most cases here, the quote I used is not the one everyone thinks of when they think of that particular movie.

It a secondary one that still resonates.

One great irony. One of the quotes -- No. 6, to be exact -- is one I can't remember the movie. Help me out of you can.

Anyway, here they are. I'll post the movies tomorrow.

1. I never did one thing right in my life, you know that? Not one. That takes skill.

2. Zero ... point ... zero.

'No responsibility' a far cry from 'buck stops here'

"The buck stops here ..."

"I take no responsibility at all ..."

Two presidents of the United States. The same country, but very different at different times.

Two years before either of them became president, very few people could have imagined either of them in the Oval Office.

Harry Truman was your average senator, product of the Pendergast political machine in Kansas City.  He became vice president as a compromise choice when FDR needed to dump Henry Wallace from the ticket.

Nobody expected much of him, but he combined intelligence, honesty and empathy and his eight years as president were successful enough that historians regard him as an outstanding president.

Even self-quarantining can have a good side to it

A hotbed of Coronavirus exposure

Seattle is a long way away from most parts of this country.

I have lived in 10 different states from coast to coast, and only once have I lived less than 1,100 miles from there.

I have been there three times, first in 1989 to cover a basketball game at UW, then for three weeks in 2009 for a summer vacation with Pauline and her family at Snoqualmie Pass and 10 days in December 2011 to meet our new grandson.


I also have a friend who lives there, although the only time we knew each other was in 1977, half a world away in Vienna, Austria. She had a summer internship at the American Embassy and I was over there for two years with my first wife.

Undignified result a lifesaver for my true love

Back in another lifetime, or at least it seems that way now, I was a regular reader of the National Lampoon.

The Lampoon knew no boundaries. They had 8-year-old Drew Barrymore calling "E.T." director Steven Spielberg "a lousy lay" and President Nixon playing gay games on his friend Bebe Rebozo's boat.

Margaret Rutherford

But the one that stuck with me was apparently a true story. Elderly British actress Dame Margaret Rutherford had undergone major surgery and had to wear a colostomy bag for the remainder of her life.

Once I learned what that was, I decided that a colostomy bag had to be one of the worst indignities of old age.

That was nearly 50 years ago, and until the last 11 days, I had never really heard anything more about colostomies.

Shocking death of a good friend a real heartbreaker

I didn't meet Brandt Heatherington until I was in my 60s.

We went to the same school at different times, but even more important, we were members of the same fraternity. Sigma Phi Epsilon was a big factor in both our lives and it brought us together in friendship.

In November 2010, I got together with people from my chapter for the first time in 25 years. It was the 30th anniversary of our chartering, and I saw folks from my own tenure that I hadn't seen since we all were young.

I don't recall meeting Brandt then.

We became friends through Facebook, keeping up with Sig Ep stuff and commenting on various things. I saw how much he loved our chapter, and how hard he and others were working to re-establish it as the best fraternity at George Mason University.

We actually met in October 2017 at the annual golf tournament held by our chapter. I played surprisingly well and won two prizes, only one of them relating to skill.