Maria Semple Quotes

“That's right,' she told the girls. 'You are bored. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.”

— Maria Semple

“My heart started racing, not the bad kind of heart racing, like I'm going to die. But the good kind of heart racing, like, Hello, can I help you with something? If not, please step aside because I'm about to kick the shit out of life.”

— Maria Semple

“When "Here Comes the Sun" started, what happened? No, the sun didn't come out, but Mom opened up like the sun breaking through the clouds. You know how in the first few notes of that song, there's something about George's guitar that's just so hopeful? It was like when Mom sang, she was full of hope, too. She even got the irregular clapping right during the guitar solo. When the song was over, she paused.
"Oh Bee," she said. "This song reminds me of you." She had tears in her eyes.”

— Maria Semple

“Hovering over me was the Chihuly chandelier. Chihulys are the pigeons of Seattle. They're everywhere and even if they don't get in your way, you can't help but build up a kind of antipathy toward them.”

— Maria Semple

Your mission statement says Galer Street is based on global "connectitude." (You people don't just think outside the box, you think outside the dictionary!)

— Maria Semple

“You know what it's like when you go to IKEA and you can't believe how cheap everything is, and even though you may not need a hundred tea lights, my God, they're only ninety-nine cents for the whole bag? Or: Sure the throw are filled with a squishy ball of no-doubt toxic whatnot, but they're so bright and three-for-five-dollars that before you know it you've dropped five hundred bucks, not because you needed any of this crap, but because it was so damn cheap?”

— Maria Semple

The drivers here are horrible. And by horrible, I mean they don't realize I have someplace to be.

— Maria Semple

Bernadette,
Are you done? You can't honestly believe any of this nonsense. People like you must create. If you don't create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.
Paul

— Maria Semple

“To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality.”

— Maria Semple

“Ollie-O was in a semicatatonic state, uttering nonsensical phrases like "This is not biodegradable - the downstream implications are enormous - the optics make for rough sledding - going forward -" before getting stuck on the words "epic fail," which he kept repeating.”

— Maria Semple

You don't have to comment on every boring thing you do." I said. "This isn't Olympic curling. You're just unpacking a suitcase.

— Maria Semple

You want to know the coolest part?" Mom chimed in. "There isn't assigned seating at the dinning room, and they have tables for four. That means the three of us can sit down and if we pile the extra chair with our gloves and hats, nobody can sit with us!"
Dad and I looked a each other, like, Is she joking?
"And penguins," Mom quickly added. "I'm wildly excited about all those penguins.

— Maria Semple

“I hear you're going to boarding school," she said. "Whose idea was that?"
"Mine," I said.
"I could never send Kyle to boarding school," Audrey said.
"I guess you love Kyle more than my mom loves me," I said, and played my flute as I skipped down the hall.”

— Maria Semple

I stormed out and got ice cream and cried in my car

— Maria Semple

I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on YOU to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.""
Bernadette

— Maria Semple

“She's wearing this backpack with yarn coming out of it, so she can knit while she's standing.”

— Maria Semple

“Every feeling I ever knew was up in that sky: Twinkling joyous sunlight; airy, giggling cloud wisps; blinding columns of sun. Orbs of gold, pink, flesh, utterly cheesy in their luminosity. Gigantic puffy clouds, welcoming, forgiving, repeating infinitely across the horizon as if between mirrors; and slices of rain, pounding wet misery in the distance now, but soon on us, and in another part of the sky, a black stain, rainless.”

— Maria Semple

“Have you ever heard that the brain is a discounting mechanism?”

— Maria Semple

“Parking in Seattle is an eight-step process. Step one, find a place to park (gooood luuuuck!). Step two, back into the angled parking space (who ever innovated that should be sentenced to the chokey).”

— Maria Semple

“And then the two-second gaps started. If you don't understand how tragic and annoying this is, seriously, start singing along to "Sun King." Toward the end, you're singing all sleepy in Spanish, gearing up to start grooving to "Mean Mr. Mustard," because what makes the end of "Sun King" so great is you're drifting along, but at the same time you're anticipating Ringo's drums, which kick in on "Mean Mr. Mustard," and it turns funky. But if you don't uncheck the box on iTunes, you get to the end of "Sun King" and then
HARSH DIGITAL TWO-SECOND SILENCE.”

— Maria Semple

“I don't know if community is something you do or don't believe in,”

— Maria Semple

“Audrey Griffin's eyes were wild, and she had a big smile as usual, and she was shaking a piece of paper at us. Her gray hair was coming out of its ponytail, and she was wearing clogs, and under her down vest you could see the pleats on her jeans bulging out. It was hard not to watch.”

— Maria Semple

“It's what I imagined England would look like.”

— Maria Semple

“Stepping off the plane in Miami was like reentering the womb. Was it the welcoming voices of LeBron James and Gloria Estefan? No, it was the scent of Cinnabon.”

— Maria Semple

“Failure has got its teeth in me, and it won't stop shaking. Ask”

— Maria Semple

“Let's play a game. I'll say a word, and you say the first word that pops into your head. Ready? ME: Seattle. YOU: Rain. What you've heard about the rain: it's all true. So you'd think it would become part of the fabric, especially among the lifers. But every time it rains, and you have to interact with someone, here's what they'll say: "Can you believe the weather?" And you want to say, "Actually, I can believe the weather. What I can't believe is that I'm actually having a conversation about the weather." But I don't say that, you see, because that would be instigating a fight, something I try my best to avoid, with mixed results.”

— Maria Semple

“There's a story that during the filming of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola had a sign on his trailer: Fast, Cheap, Good: Pick Two.”

— Maria Semple

There's a saying,' Dad said. 'When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras ... ' 'YOU look for horses,' I said. 'While you spent your whole life at work, me and Mom were having the best, funnest time ever. Mom and I lived for each other. She wouldn't do anything CLOSE to getting drunk and walking next to a ship's balcony because it would mean she might never see me again. That you think she would shows how little you know her. YOU look for horses, Dad.

— Maria Semple

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said, You wouldn't care about what other people thought about you if you realized how seldom they actually did.

— Maria Semple

It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it's tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. (This is why you must love life: one day you're offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you're using the word calve as a verb.) I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world's fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman's shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit's cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black.

— Maria Semple

But fear not: I do underdog.

— Maria Semple

My problems are all problems I'm lucky to have. And I know it, so therein lies the rub.

— Maria Semple

“People who don't get seasick have no idea what it's like. It's not just nausea. It's nausea plus losing the will to live.”

— Maria Semple

“Haldol is an antipsychotic." He dropped his reading glasses into his shirt pocket. "It was used in the Soviet prison system to break prisoners' wills." "And I'm only discovering it now?" I said.”

— Maria Semple

“I was a ghost on a ghost ship in a ghost island”

— Maria Semple

“I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.”

— Maria Semple

I quickly realized that shopping on Amazon had made the idea of parking my car and going into a store feel like an outrageous imposition on my time and good nature.

— Maria Semple

“I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.”

— Maria Semple

“I learned that comedy is born out of strong characters. I won't begin writing a character until I have a clear take on them.”

— Maria Semple

I guess that's what art is: Turning something painful into something people can relate to.

— Maria Semple

“I know what it's like to feel snobby; I know what it's like to feel anxiety; I know what it's like to feel like busted because you're crazy.”

— Maria Semple

“In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.”

— Maria Semple

“In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.”

— Maria Semple

“My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world.”

— Maria Semple

“On Jan. 1, 2012, I resolved to not buy anything from Amazon for a year.”

— Maria Semple

“Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.”

— Maria Semple

“I always write authors after I read their books. I've been doing it for years. I write a formal letter and send it to them in care of their agent. My mother always taught us to write thank you notes, and if an author puts themselves out there, they like to hear that their book connected with someone.”

— Maria Semple

I think a novel has to be about where you are at a given moment in time. I think it really needs to represent some specific pain you're going through. it's not just a story.

— Maria Semple

“On my walks, that's when the good ideas come. The kind of hard, gritty work is when you're sitting at the computer and it's kind of intense and you're kind of in super control of it - the walks are when you let go. That's when the really big breakthroughs come in, and it's very strange.”

— Maria Semple

“One reason I find all this character growth and narrative swerving so exhilarating is because I never got to do it when I wrote for TV. Our characters needed to remain consistent from week to week.”

— Maria Semple