36 quotes
Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth-breather there is.
It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.
Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1988)
Lake Wobegon, where smart doesn't count for so much. A minister has to be able to read a clock. At noon, it's time to go home and turn up the pot roast and get the peas out of the freezer.
Lake Wobegon Days (1985)
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.
Homegrown Democrat : A Few Plain Thoughts From the Heart of America (2004)
The reason to retire is to try to avoid embarrassment; you ought to do it before people are dropping big hints. You want to be the first to come up with the idea. You don't want to wait until you trip and fall off the stage.
Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for the rain. And for the chance to wake up in three hours and go fishing: I thank you for that now, because I won't feel so thankful then.
Leaving Home (1987)
It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town, out on the edge of the prairie...
Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.
Leaving Home (1987)
The living wander away, we don't hear from them for months, years—but the dead move in with us to stay. They exhort us to greater faithfulness, forgive us our inertia, comfort us in our agitation.
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.
One day Donald Trump discovers that he is owned, lock, stock, and roulette wheel, by Lutheran Brotherhood, and must renegotiate his debt load with a committee of silent Norwegians who don't understand why anyone would pay more than $120 for a suit.
To many Americans, whose only knowledge of the North Star State is that it is intensely cold and populated by Swedes and Holsteins, it will come as a surprise to wake up one morning in 2004 and read in the newspaper, "Half of U.S. Economy Now in Hands of Minnesota".
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.
Minnesota is a state of public-spirited and polite people, where you can get a good cappucino and eat Thai food and find any book you want and yet live on a quiet tree-lined street with a backyard and send your kids to public school. When a state this good hits the jackpot, it can only be an inspiration to everybody.
Going to church no more makes you a Christian than standing in a garage makes you a car.
Disputed
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
Disputed to Keillor in The Miracle of Language (1999)