Mental Food [Meat My Millionaires]

You know I’ve always found them appealing myself. I browse through quotation anthologies. And so I ask that question, “Why do people like this so much?” If you go on the web just to look at Amazon, to look up quotation books, there are just endless thousands in print at any given time. I think it’s partly that we make a self, we make a culture, out of the words of others. We develop by learning what our parents have said, what our teachers have to say, and we repeat them. Gradually they become ourselves. Our self is the quotations we have learned and have made so much our own that we don’t recognize them as our own. The same thing happens with language. We no longer put quotation marks around say, foreign words, and neologisms that someone coined, because we don’t even feel they’re quotations anymore. A word like sociology, which somebody had to coin, it’s just part of our language. You could almost say that language is former quotations. And we all sense this, this is how, it’s our mental food. We assimilate it. We become it. It becomes endlessly fascinating to us.

-Gary Saul Morson, professor of arts and humanities at Northwestern University, speaking with Tom Ashbrook: On Point, How Great Quotes Shaped Our World

I think the men in L.A. are very rugged, good-looking. Men in New York look metro with their manis and pedis and their Bruno Magli loafers, but inside they’re very masculine — aside from the Meatpacking district. The problem is the men in New York are five to one: five women to one man. [New York] women are city snobs. They won’t go outside to the suburbs to find true love, even though in a down economy men buy real estate. They’re really stupid women in New York. I’m going to say they’re the stupidest women in the world. Here’s my quote: “Smart in business, dumb in love.” If I told you your husband lives in Lawrenceville or Connecticut or you had to go to Pennsylvannia, you’d get on a train tomorrow. No, they’re like, “No, I only want to be in my own zip code in the Upper West Side or downtown.” They’re dumb. They’re bright, they have an education and they have breeding and they went to Harvard and Yale, yet they can’t get around the block to find their love life. For the women in California, they’re just downtrodden because they’re so gorgeous here. Every hot cheerleader comes to California to make it. The men don’t want to get married, they’re lazy lions. Matthew McConaughey is their poster boy so they can procreate and live on the beach in the trailer and have kids and have money and be hedonistic.

-Patti Stanger, originally from New Jersey, speaking with the Huffington Post, on the differences between coastal types