X File Quotes

“Create your own permission slip for joy. Write three words: Accept. Adapt. Depend. Carry this permission slip with you. Tell your friends you're working on becoming more content, more joyful. Take a nap. Live with a messy house for a time. Order takeout. File an extension on your taxes. Stare out the window. Linger in the company of a friend. Breathe in the fullness of life. Use those words to fight back with joy.”

— Margaret Feinberg

“So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare?”

— Ralph Ellison

“Kingbitter, as he did frequently nowadays, was standing at his window and looking out onto the street below. This street offered the most mundane and ordinary sights of Budapest's mundane and ordinary streets. The muck-, oil-, and dog-dirt-spattered sidewalk was lined with parked cars, and in the one-yard gaps between the cars and the leprotically peeling house walls the most mundane and ordinary passersby were attempting to go about their business, their hostile features an outward clue to their dark thoughts. Every now and then, perhaps in a hurry to overtake the single file inching along the front, one of them would step off the sidewalk, only for an entire chorus of rancorous car horns to give the lie to any groundless hope of breaking free from the line.”

— Imre Kertész

“So who was she? (Vane)
Why do you assume it was a female? (Fang)
Didn't know you were fond of men. I'll file that under my special Fang folder. (Vane)”

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

“The children of the Fulcrum are all different: different ages, different colors, different shapes. Some speak Sanze-mat with different accents, having originated from different parts of the world. One girl has sharp teeth because it is her race's custom to file them; another boy has no penis, though he stuffs a sock into his underwear after every shower; another girl has rarely had regular meals and wolfs down every one like she's still starving. (The instructors keep finding food hidden in and around her bed. They make her eat it, all of it, in front of them, even if it makes her sick.) One cannot reasonably expect sameness out of so much difference, and it makes no sense for Damaya to be judged by the behavior of children who share nothing save the curse of orogeny with her.”

— N.K. Jemisin

“For your file ... in case you decide to be angry with me.”

— Ray Bradbury

“But it had still made him feel vulnerable, yet another piece of evidence added to the overstuffed file testifying to his pinched prissiness, his fundamental and irreparable inability to be the sort of person he tried to make people believe he was.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

“I always knew you had good taste, Mia. You should go talk to him." "I should go talk to him. I should also file my taxes on time, remember to floss regularly, and inherit seven million dollars. But I won't. Ever.”

— Sara Wolf

“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.”

— Doug Larson

“I read round the subject, I make a skeleton outline, and then I start work in the relevant archives. During the marshaling of the material, I copy the material from each archive file across to the relevant chapter in the skeleton outline.”

— Antony Beevor

“Away, down below now, single file on the path, comes a woman with four girls in tow, all of them in shirtwaist dresses. Seen from above this way they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you'll have to decide what sympathy they deserve.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

“People aren't going to support an artist just because they have an audio file. They have to feel a real connection.”

— Chuck D

“It was my turn to be silent while a small family of moments crossed my path, single file, from the left, sticking their tongues out at me.”

— Roger Zelazny

“When the phonies are expelled from their leadership roles and the Republican Party backs a moderate gubernatorial candidate acceptable to the rank and file with proper financing and the intestinal fortitude to fight the good fight, the rank and file will rejoin the fold.”

— Carl Paladino

“To my way of thinking, passive management of file assets is okay for screwing around with iPads, where we're mainly watching TV on Netflix or obsessive-compulsively checking the popularity of our Instagram uploads.”

— Jeffrey Zeldman

“O. J. Simpson drew bigger crowds, but most of his admirers were around 12 years old. Two-thirds of them were black and many looked like fugitives from the Credit Bureau's garnishee file.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

“In the army of indigence the uniform is rags; they serve to distinguish the rank and file from the recruiting officers.”

— Ambrose Bierce

“CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE DAN KIRKSEN OPENED THE WASHINGTON POST AND started to take a sip of his orange juice. It never reached his mouth. Gavin had managed to file a story on the Sullivan case consisting chiefly of the information that Jack Graham, newly ordained partner at Patton,”

— David Baldacci

“I think that prosecuting some college kid because she shared a file is a lot like sending somebody to Australia 200 years ago for poaching his lordship's rabbit. That's how it must seem to poor people who just want to watch a crappy movie for free after they've been working themselves to death all day at Tesco or whatever, you know.”

— Iggy Pop

“All nations are degrading and consuming their environment to a point beyond capacity. In the past 15 years in the U.S. we have added 1300 cities with populations over 100,000. When the environment is forced to file Chapter 11, the ecology collapses. Nations recover from war but not from a failed eco-system. The status of our environment is more threatening than all wars. It is forever.”

— Gaylord Nelson

“I read the paper every day. There are certain subjects that will catch my attention. I have an entire file of articles. Of course I make up the story, especially since most criminals are not very smart and fictional crime must be clever. I have to make sure the story I am telling is interesting and realistic. In this book I went on line and found out the manners of codes. I thought it interesting to use them as a jumping off point.”

— Sue Grafton

“Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, 'memex' will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

— Vannevar Bush

“Before negotiating a raise, start collecting a file of evidence showing how you've impacted the bottom line ... Don't believe there's no money in the budget. Don't assume your boss knows how great you've been doing. Don't threaten to leave
you may be given the opportunity.”

— Pat Heim

“We are going to file a suit to the Hague tribunal, which must investigate into these crimes against humanity, it is a test for humanity and moral dignity. Because turning a blind eye to such horrible and shameful crimes means indulging terrorists and aggressors and violating high European values for which Ukrainians are suffering and dying.”

— Petro Poroshenko

“It's like I'm married to the silencer,
Until I file for divorce and release my ex-calibers.
Do art with your arteries, place that for my adversaries,
Put your snap back cap back, cap your capillaries.”

— Pharoahe Monch

“A prosecutor's job is to file the evidence wherever it takes us.”

— Kevin Steele

“When we're not a party, we sometimes file as amicus, as friend of the court, 25, 30 times a term, sometimes more. And in each of those cases, we've got to decide what position the government's going to take. And that is the solicitor general's job to make that decision.”

— Donald Verrilli Jr.

“It's more likely in America that your parents will file for bankruptcy than divorce. We think of divorce as so prevalent, but we all know that happens because somebody moves out of the house.”

— Elizabeth Edwards

“I'm Jewish, but my mom's Catholic, so the guilt area is covered. I have the highest expectations, along with the lowest. I tried to put as much of myself as possible in Reality Bites, but in terms of my humor, I'm still trying to figure out what my sensibility is. It's a process, really. I don't feel like I have a very clear idea of what I'm supposed to be, or even of how people perceive me, except that I got put into this Generation X file.”

— Ben Stiller

“Though our private desires are ever so confused, though our private requests are ever so broken, and though our private groanings are ever so hidden from men, yet God eyes them, records them, and puts them upon the file of heaven, and will one day crown them with glorious answers and returns.”

— Thomas Brooks

“The truth that I am seeking is in your missing file.”

— Bob Dylan

“What if we have more of the rough file, if we have less rust! Afflictions carry away nothing but the dross of sin.”

— Thomas Watson

“"[Lawyers who file class-action securities suits] is not a group you would want to marry into your family. "That said, more than half the time the people being sued by the Lerach firm are guilty of outrageous conduct. The problem is, they don't mind (suing) the other half. They are an equal opportunity litigator."”

— Charlie Munger