Erich Segal Quotations

I wrote 'Yellow Submarine' for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for 'The Games,' about the Olympic Games. I wrote 'Love Story,' both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote 'RPM' for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson!

Love means not ever having to say you're sorry.

True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.

I went into Harvard one way and came out a different person... It's the air at Harvard; it's like a Renaissance court.

Professors of classics - not even a professor of English - professors of classics, they're something sacred; it's almost like being a priest.

Love means never having to say you're sorry.

Sometimes I ask myself what would I be if Jenny were alive. And then I answer : I would also be alive." - Oliver.

This isn't a watercolor, it's a mural.

We have turned doctors into gods and worship their deity by offering up our bodies and our souls - not to mention our worldly goods. And yet paradoxically, they are the most vulnerable of human beings. Their suicide rate is eight times the national average. Their percentage of drug addiction is one hundred times higher And because they are painfully aware that they cannot live up to our expectations, their anguish is unquantifiably intense. They have aptly been called 'wounded healers.' " ~ Barney Livingston, M.D. (Doctors, 1989)

Jenny, if you're so con­vinced I'm a loser, why did you bull­doze me into buy­ing you cof­fee?' She looked me straight in the eye and smiled. 'I like your body,' she said.

What term do you employ when you speak of your progenitor?" I answered with the term I'd always wanted to employ. "Sonovabitch." "To his face?" she asked. "I never see his face." "He wears a mask?" "In a way, yes. Of stone. Of absolute stone.

He had then warned his daughter not to violate the Eleventh Commandment. "Which one is that?" I asked her. "Do not bullshit thy father," she said.

There was a brief silence. I think I heard snow falling.

What can you say about a twenty-five year old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. The Beatles. And me.

But what does he do to qualify as a sonovabitch?” Jenny asked. “Make me”, I replied. “Beg pardon?” “Make me”, I repeated. Her eyes widened like saucers. “You mean like incest?” she asked. “Don’t give me your family problems, Jen. I have enough of my own.” “Like what, Oliver?” she asked, “like just what is it he makes you do?” “The ‘right things’”, I said. “What’s wrong with the ‘right things’?” she asked, delighting in the apparent paradox.

The explanations for the things we do in life are many and complex. Supposedly mature adults should live by logic, listen to their reason. Think things out before they act. But maybe they never heard what Dr. London told me one, Freud said that for the little things in life we should react according to our reason. But for really big decisions, we should heed what our unconscious tells us.

Something may have been lost in translation, but it certainly wasn't love

Please, if one of us cries, let both of us cry. But preferably neither of us.

The ‘equilibrium’ that people see in me is really an illusion. I am as flawed as anyone. It’s only that I seem to have the knack of hiding.

Sometimes I amaze even myself.

It takes someone very special to help you forget someone very special.

What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?

Her handwriting was curious — small sharp little letters with no capitals (who did she think she was, e. e. cummings?).

although science could pinpoint the exact spot in the brain that ignites rage, they had yet to identify the location that produces love.

I think the Peace Corps is a fine thing, don't you?" he said. "Well," I replied, "it's certainly better than War Corps.

Quiet heroism or youthful idealism, or both? What do we know? That life without heroism and idealism is not worth living - or that either can be fatal?

Part of being a big winner is the ability to be a big loser. There is no paradox involved. It is a distinctly Harvard thing to be able to turn any defeat into victory

The pain of not knowing what to do was exceeded only by that of knowing what I had done.

I was afraid of being rejected, yes. I was also afraid of being accepted for the wrong reasons.

And then I did what I had never done in his presence, much less in his arms. I cried.

Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madness