48 Quotes I Enjoyed From 2023

Below are my favorite quotes from 2023. Though most occurred throughout the year, some took place before but were encountered during.

Bobby Loesch

Dec 19, 2023

Previously: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014

Only IN Hollywood] Love for Paul Reubens aka Pee-wee Herman – who proved it's okay to be weird

“If you’ve got the time, I’ve got the dime.” - Dave Hernandez
“Politeness is a concept created by those who want to avoid the unpleasantness of the consequences of their actions.” - Stacy Massey
“The early bird gets the worm, but the second person to eat the purple berries has significantly better chance of survival.” - Bryan MacKenzie
“Anything I tell you, including that ‘I’m so sorry,’ is bound to sound hollow in the midst of your grief. That’s how heartbreak works. It’s indomitable. It feels like it’s never going to go away, and that you are the only person in the world forced to carry it with you. No one else understands this pain. Not the way you do. And it’s morbidly addictive, in a way. You don’t wanna do anything else but wallow in the pain, because the pain is all you have left of what you’ve lost. Within that pain lies all of your memories of your dog: the day you got him, the nights you spent with him, every funny thing he did, and the bitter three days leading up to his death. It’s hard to let that pain go because it means letting HIM go, and why would you want to do that so soon? It’s only human to keep that pain alive, because it’s a macabre way of keeping your dog alive.

You are hardly alone in suffering this way. Again, perhaps that rings hollow right now. Perhaps you want to be alone in this moment. But as the days pass... you’ll loosen your grip on the pain ever so slightly, you’ll hear from friends and strangers who have experienced similar losses... and you’ll appreciate the time you had with your dog more than you’ll lament all of the potential extra time you could have had with him. A smile to your face before a tear to your eye, etc. In time, you’ll gradually become more open to what’s in front of you than what you’ve left behind. It’s such a reliable process that you can practically chart it.

But I can’t guarantee it’ll be a smooth process. No recovery, be it physical or mental, ever is. You’re gonna have hard days, but you won’t be alone in having them. More important, you’ll remember that love is always, ALWAYS, worth it. It always beats living in a vacuum, and it’s always there for the taking. When you get a pet, you know that you will likely outlive that pet. When you get married, you explicitly say, ‘til death do us part,’ knowing that one of you will be left heartbroken when the other goes first. When you’re very young, you realize that your parents will die one day, and you wonder how that can even be possible. All of those losses are inevitable, and yet people choose to fall in love anyway, because they know that love is the only sure thing in this world: the only thing guaranteed to make people happy, no matter its ultimate cost..” - Drew Magary
“Too soon or too real?”
“The only way it makes sense to endure a job you hate is if you get to live twice.” - Paul Shirley
“Never assume competency from someone in a leadership position. If they demonstrate it, fine. If they do not demonstrate it, do not assume it.” - Brian Cook
“Out – or out of reach?”
“Everybody under 6’10’’ looks exactly the same” - Bill Walton
“If I’mma get blown out, I’mma get thrown out.” - Tate Frazier
“Mock, block and roll.” - David Simon
“How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” - Desmond Tutu, paraphrased
“Jealousy's a kickstart to an evening” - ‘Big Songbirds Don’t Cry’ by Superviolet
“The weather feels like I lost you again.” - ‘I Want To Start A Religion With You’ by Fireworks
“Whenever something is so universally praised, I think it's helpful to interrogate it a little bit.” - Sean Fennessy, on the Succession Season 3 finale
"I love introducing people to new bands. I love when people introduce me to new bands. This is how things work. It's awesome." - Em Moore
“I’m twin track. I’m dead but I’m alive.” - Kendall Roy, Succession
“Yeah, you’re definitely not the best teacher in Philadelphia. Or this school. Or this grade. Or this classroom. But I’ve seen you stick it out and improve week after week. You work really hard to get better, and you care. So maybe someday you’ll grow into deserving this award. But you know what? They’re not going to give it to you then, because you can’t choose when people acknowledge you.” - Melissa, Abbott Elementary, on the timing of accolades
“Nothing surprises you… therefore nothing about you is surprising.” - Thaddeus Stevens, Lincoln
“Loyalty one way is stupidity.” - Derek Jeter
“I sometimes look like February.” - Sugar, The Bear
“Sometimes people think you don’t love them because you won’t suffer with them.” - Van Lathan
“I know you think I’m a 9 at everything.”
“I don’t think you’re anything.”
“It's humbling to learn that existence doesn't revolve around us; worse to learn it revolves around nothing.” - Roger Ebert
“You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself... the height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment… And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.” - Leonardo da Vinci, via MegFil
“Let’s revolt. Life’s been a little too boring lately.” - Julie Loesch
“But Reubens never went on the defensive, making the media rounds with talking points about his innocence. He didn’t let an early precursor to cancellation send him on the path to bitterness trod by so many afterward. It could’ve just been savvy PR management, but I suspect he withdrew from public life for months after the ’91 arrest for much the same reason that he kept the past six years of cancer to himself. A man so singly dedicated to spreading joy couldn’t bear the thought that he’d leave anyone feeling bad.” - Charles Bramesco, on Paul Reubens a.k.a Pee-wee Herman
"The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young." - Oscar Wilde, via Stanley Kubrick
“You’ll never get the truly great meals of your life if you don’t leave yourself open to the bad ones.” - Anthony Bourdain
“You don’t want the people you love to leave you, and they don’t.” - Drew Magary, on grief
“First of all, I get election fatigue just like you do. It gets REALLY fucking old. But if we didn’t have elections all the time, that would mean we’re living in a dictatorship, which is worse. So I can deal.

Secondly, don’t get sucked into a negative feedback loop on this shit. Everything Is So Bad Now! is the lowest form of discourse, and it’s everywhere online. You’ve seen that centrist rally tweet out in the wild many times, but everyone who retweets that gag is projecting. They’re the ones who believe that better things aren’t possible, because of the centrists, and the electoral college, and the Senate, and the Supreme Court, and supposed late-stage capitalism.

If you believe that this is true, you’re failing to acknowledge what progress has already been made throughout human history, and you’re discounting the possibility that there can be more of that progress. You are taking the worst things happening right now as the only things happening. This is loser shit, and I won’t have it. Bring me solutions, not problems. Set goals, make a plan, and fight. That’s what our best and most effective progressive leaders are doing as we speak. They’re not fucking boohooing their way to the grave.

Now I’m gonna tell you the deal with next year, but I’m not gonna headline this column with it because then the Jinx Police will see it and flood me with their bullshit. If Donald Trump is the nominee in 2024, he will lose. I know I was wrong about that in 2016, but so was everyone else. If you’re still scarred by his victory, I understand. But we have more than flawed polls to go by this time around. Trump lost the 2020 election decisively, and the 2022 midterms were an even greater, nationwide rejection of his governing philosophy. No amount of election fuckery prevented it. And none of the other current GOP nominees, Ron DeSantis included, have been able to get that party’s base excited, which means they have even less crossover appeal for the general than Trump himself. Maybe Republicans win the Senate. Maybe SCOTUS does more awful shit to negate all of these electoral losses. In fact, the latter is a certainty. But in the aggregate, the country is growing more progressive, and that should hearten you. Don’t be afraid to be confident. The bad guys want you to be scared. To be fatalist. Don’t give them the pleasure. Picture yourself winning, without compromise, and see what happens.

And if you wanna BUT all of that—if you insist that everyone feel despondent about everything—then fuck off. Go waste someone else’s time.” - Drew Magary, on political burnout
“Who doesn’t like Oreos?” - Jan Loesch, on giving Oreos as a gift
“People would rather listen to ska than their coach.” - (dream) Ricky O’Donnell
“If I walked around this world avoiding everything racist, I would be naked and hungry.” - Kevin Chambers
“Placate the greats.”
“Parenting is only easy if you are bad at it.”
“I look up to a lot of people I don’t know.” - Sean Fennessy
"You're judged by the calendar you keep.”
“I think most Scottish cuisine’s based on a dare.” - So I Married an Axe Murderer
"The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." - Ward Cunningham
“Everybody’s got a bike rack they relate to.” - Sam Carroll
“God works in mysterious ways.”
“God works in my way.” - Stephen King
“There’s no better compliment than you can give to anybody — and any better compliment you can get — than to be trusted.” - Jim Harbaugh
"I'm like a Kerouac guy. Like, I think life is reckless and it should be insane. It all ends in agony. It's all about the outcome, so like, do it, you know? Do whatever it is." - Zach Bryan
“Are alarm clocks cancel culture for sleep?”
“Hollywood is the only place where you can starve from all of the compliments.”

The Bobby Drop

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