Odessa Quotes

“Desire is the seed of potential.”

“CAN is the enemy of DO.”

“Little Odessa. Of all my movies, it's the one that I still really love when I watch it and I'm pretty happy with what I didn in that.”

“Odessa sighed. 'When I said you were one of the smartest people in the company, I was referring solely to your technical abilities. Now get to work.”

“He shook his head. “Did you tell him he should expand the Odessa-Brody oil pipeline up to Poland?”I smiled. “Yes. Yes, I did. You should definitely expand the pipeline. Think of all the money you could make if you sold your oil to the EU. You could build a whole new children’s hospital and a research center. You’d have enough money to buy real toilets for the university so women don’t have to crouch over those holes in the floor.” I shook my head. “I’d like to see you try that in five inch heels!”

“He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.”

“Author's PrayerIf I speak for the dead, I mustleave this animal of my body,I must write the same poem over and overfor the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.If I speak of them, I must walkon the edge of myself, I must live as a blind manwho runs through the rooms withouttouching the furniture.Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What yearis it?"I can dance in my sleep and laughin front of the mirror.Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,I will praise your madness, andin a language not mine, speakof music that wakes us, musicin which we move. For whatever I sayis a kind of petition and the darkest daysmust I praise.”

“My job is to scream cockle-doodle-doo. Don't blame me if the sun doesn't rise.”

“Odessans' worst fear is change, because what if we make a change and our situation gets worse?”