What can you say about 2008? Plenty.

The past year provided no shortage of notable quotes, fueled by the struggles and successes that made headlines week by week in Mountain Xpress and every day at mountainx.com. Consider just a smattering of the hot topics that filled our Web and print pages: the 30th annual Bele Chere festival, the 20th Warren Haynes Christmas Jam, the economic crisis, local and national elections, the gas crunch, the embattled magnolia tree, the trial of Bobby Medford and associates, Carl Mumpower’s quixotic congressional run, visits by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, the continuing Parkside controversy etc.

We could go on—and we did. Below, the year in quotes and pictures.

“There needs to be some type of ambassador, some type of monitor in that area. The police can’t be everywhere all the time.”

“If my son can’t come in the lab when I’m making it, I won’t make it.”

“No one ever thought we’d find one that tall. The tree is just amazingly charismatic. People see videos of it and say, ‘Damn! That’s a hemlock?’ It’s got limbs on it that are as big as whole hemlock trees get in Vermont.”

“Turns out that beer is the popcorn of beverages: economical, healthy, and an excellent mealtime complement, particularly when small children are underfoot.”

“Allegedly Pete Seeger had insisted that Cookie do this folk-music record, and once he heard it, he was worried that all the other emerging folk musicians at the time would just be overshadowed. So he stopped production, and it got thrown in the vault.”

“In essence, Cloverfield is a pretty stock rampaging-giant-monster movie focused on a no-name cast of vaguely pretty 20-somethings with zero personality and limitless money who set out to rescue an equally personality-challenged friend from certain death. Apparently, one is supposed to care what happens to these self-absorbed, shallow noncharacters. After a few minutes of their loft farewell party for the more-or-less main character, Rob (Michael Stahl-David), I was on the side of the monster—and it hadn’t even shown up yet.”

“Is there much of a demand for your services?

“God, there are just so many dogs around here. And the way people’s lifestyles are now, the last thing they want to do is go out at the end of the day and clean up poo.”

“Another customer came to the store five weeks before she got her dog, just like an expectant mom.”

“We embrace weird as part of how wonderful this event is.”

“We have to break people in to the idea that even if they’re not familiar with a band’s name and they haven’t heard it a thousand times, it’s still worth seeing.”

“This is something I wanted to do when I was 18, and I finally got a chance at 33. I’ll be lucky to get another year of doing it, but if I end up in a wheelchair in six months, at least I got to live out my dream.”

“It’s just horrific.”

“I just got to the point of, ‘If you don’t think it’s funny, don’t come see me.’ If it’s a liberal town and liberals don’t like it, fine. I don’t do my shows for people who don’t like me; I do it for the people buying the tickets.”

“We had a natural funk that the average person can’t be taught. You either got it or you ain’t got it.”

“You don’t have to methodically traverse the style or historic periods. You can head straight for what you like, and your vistas will broaden rather quickly.”

“We’ve got clients who are spending over $100,000 just to go get their trophies, and another $100,000 to get them mounted. It’s amazing. But whether it’s that guy or the guy next door who just ran over his first squirrel, it’s all the same to us. We mount ‘em and make ‘em happy.”

“If you were a business owner and someone came and tagged your business, how would you react? I would start thinking of painting over it as soon as possible.”

“People who love music videos but wish they were 20 times longer finally have a movie to get behind.”

“We don’t want to create an attitude of fear where Joe Blow has to put a bazooka in his car to go to the mall. We’re not there yet.”

“Gondry [uses] the plot to celebrate community, friendship, love, creativity, making something out of nothing, and the power of myth to sometimes be greater than truth. Maybe most of all, he’s out to celebrate the magic of movies—and the ability of movies to bond us. And he does so with the enthusiasm of every backyard filmmaker who ever existed, charting the growth from childish imitations of other people’s movies to the creation of one’s own art.”

“I vehemently disagree that V-Day, and specifically performances of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, makes a ‘mockery’ of feminism, women, sexuality, issues, change.”

“I’m a first-time filmmaker. I had no clue what it took to make a film; I committed every error on earth. Thankfully, I understand this and don’t intend to commit the same ones again. I am wiser from the experience. On the other hand, it was ignorance that made this film so unique.”

“You go up the vagina about a third of the way up and point to the belly and then massage it with your finger. It can be very erotic for women to have G-spot stimulation, because most women [achieve] orgasm from clitoral stimulation, so this is a different sensation.”

“Simply put, they want those of us who are not right-wing extremists to understand that when the major figures behind our modern Western philosophy said and wrote what the rest of us think were pretty clearly enunciated ideas, in all cases they really meant exactly the opposite of what they were saying.”

“January was very frigid many nights; we had lost people to the cold. If there were friends on the streets that would die, we would let them in. If we were any kind of Christians, we had to keep people alive.”

“People look at the furniture thing as unique. Most of it is one-of-a-kind. People like the individuality, having a houseful of things their neighbors don’t have.”

“I was completely starstruck. And my respect for him has only increased throughout this whole thing, in every aspect of the way the label is run. You get worried, because I’m basically meeting one of my idols, and it’s like, what if they’re an a**hole or something?”

“There was no call for this. ... How would you feel if you woke up and your bed was surrounded by these people dressed from head to toe in black?”

“Asheville in the 1920s was an interesting place. It was a very sophisticated place in many ways, but it was also right in the middle of the mountains. There was industry there and opportunity, but very soon after you got out of the city limits, you were in the heart of the mountains and there was a lot of music to be had.”

“As soon as we left Hannah Flanagan’s, we all took our high heels off, put on some flip-flops and hiked it all the way to the Whiskey Tavern. And I said: ‘This is ridiculous.’”

“I certainly would choose the recent sculpture in Pritchard Park over many of the facile pieces scattered about downtown.”

“You’re saying that kids need to see more of the world to know what’s possible for their own lives?

Dude, it’s environmental. Our kids aren’t going to go over to A-B Tech and explore culinary arts or any type of med tech. You know what I’m saying? They don’t understand that, because their environment is Hillcrest, Pisgah View Apartments and the mall. Period.”

“I consider this my legacy project.”

“Since it reopened five years ago, Bob Dylan and Smashing Pumpkins (who picked the spot for their nine-show reunion run last year) have gone out of the way to play the Peel—drawn by Asheville’s bohemian vibe and attentive crowds.”

“If it’s slander to confront Council and other elected officials about their inability to say no to any developer who brings a proposal for consideration; if it’s slander to be passionate about not destroying one of the few places like Asheville left in our country, not just our state—then yes, I’m guilty.”

“Just watch [Ronit Elkabetz’s] body language in the scene where she bids Tewfiq goodbye. Notice how she starts to embrace him, then stops herself, and finally stands holding her arms behind her in order not to be tempted to cross that line again. She wants to. Tewfiq wants her to. We want her to. But the message of the movie is that we all stand that way to some degree, and that’s the tragedy of all humankind.”

“When viewing modern or contemporary dance, people often try to find the ‘meaning’ of the work. In some cases, the choreographer does intend for a meaning or concept to come across to the audience, while others want their work to exist as movement for the sake of the moment. Ultimately, an audience of 500 will have 500 different interpretations of what a piece meant. Each one is valid.”

“Let me be clear as a pristine mountain stream: There is no consideration being given to monitoring or metering private wells.”

“Whoever showed up was in the band.”

“Honestly, I think I’ve come out of it OK. Not too many drug addictions or illegitimate children or anything like that.”

“There’s going to be a whole new work force centered around the new technologies developed around the green economy.”

“A lot of people will come up to me and ask how I got the frame to look like bamboo.”

“Let me be clear: Hip-hop does not cause gangs. Gangs have always been around; they arise when you have a lot of inequality.”

“Of course, there are worse things than What Happens in Vegas…. Unfortunately—as in the case of the dreadful synth-pop cover of Huey Lewis’ “I Want a New Drug” that’s featured in the film for about 15 seconds—the things that are worse than this movie are actually in the movie. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a Roach Motel: terrible, unoriginal ideas check in, but they don’t check out.”

“I’d bet you none of those people I heard bitching about it are really natives either—just transplants like me who moved here and then wanted to slam the door on everyone else.”

“To believe the argument that nothing was going on—or that [former Buncombe County Sheriff Bobby Medford] didn’t know about it—you’d first have to drink from the decanter of insanity.”

“I don’t think any of us care about that rock-star thing. We’re not 22.”

“I guess this guy’s a police officer, but he’s just making threats and cussing at people. He’s physically fighting my bouncer right now. We suspect he may or may not be intoxicated.”

“Green building is a great way to feel better about yourself and at the same time do absolutely nothing positive for the environment.”

“The performances that have impacted me most strongly have everything to do with the sheer courage of the actor—overcoming the fear of performing, without all the bells and whistles.”

“For us, the issue of public space is kind of—I don’t mean to be dramatic about it, but it’s kind of an emergency. Sociologists have established a connection between the absence of gathering spaces in the United States and our high crime rates. ... It’s all connected to isolation.”

“We try not to be crude for crude’s sake but crude for art’s sake.”

“What I love about this project is that it’s so collaborative, and it’s reflecting experiences that we have had in Asheville. A lot of public art doesn’t say anything, but this is full of ideas and sentiment.”

“I’ve talked to a lot of people who have never seen a Council rise up in this way.”

“We were always one step away from happiness.”

“All decisions affecting the community are made by the community. Each child, each adult, has an equal voice. Summerlane is a working democracy. ... There is no censorship of any kind. There are no rules for purely private behavior.”

“I don’t know what their affiliation was, but people thought they were living in sin or something, and that was not considered the thing to do.”

“I like men who look like men onstage.”

“We were told quite strongly by the County Clerk and Austin Hogsed, the Mayor of Rosman, that it was strongly against local custom for Negroes to even be in the area and that it would be an extremely dangerous situation for both us and the children.”

“I’ve often said that if you could point a camera just at people’s faces, that would tell the whole story. These are people of all backgrounds, from all over. They’re strangers in many cases. And there they are, making those figures go and making those circles go. And you don’t see any frowns—just smiles. That, to me, is the beautiful thing about Shindig on the Green.”

“Judging by the reviews of Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E, it’s probably time the folks at Pixar designated themselves as a church and claimed tax-exempt status.”

“I’m a day person now, but I still miss the twilit world of downtown Asheville sometimes, those late-evening hours when the sidewalks soften, the candles flicker and the world turns upside down in the face of a spoon.”

“I never actually said that Asheville was the happiest place, but it seems that people have latched onto that. I said it’s a place people go to because they think they will be happy. But it’s a nice place.”

“This was all about self-defense.”

“If they want to play, they play. If they want to swim, they swim. If they like to play volley ball, they do so. It is basically a free-love operation.”

“We just poured a little gas in there ... and then we struck a match to it. Well, it lit that whole lake up, and it scared ‘em. ... We didn’t want to hurt them, we just wanted them to get the hell out of here.”

“I was absolutely committed to the [civil rights] cause, and especially after the experience in North Carolina, I thought that the nonviolent-resistance tools were appropriate in this situation—and probably the only ones that could be successful.”

“This festival rocks harder than any other festival in Asheville because it’s got a ‘Frenchier’ name!”

“When I moved to east Asheville 12 years ago, I could look up at night and see the Milky Way. Now I can see it only occasionally—and then only because I know where to look.”

“There’s no law that they can ban me from that place—that means my rights were taken away. I just wish people would be more open-minded about everybody’s constitutional rights.”

“They’re in a climate-controlled, secure, undisclosed location. ... They’re in there with Dick Cheney.”

“It is hard to imagine the Asheville arts scene without Payne’s outrageous sense of humor and his uncanny ability to figure out how to get things done. Not just in his work, but in things that have had a tremendous impact on the lives of so many other artists.”

“I think the city was primed and ready for an explosion in tourism in the late 1970s, and Bele Chere was a component of it.”

“There’s a crisis looming—we’re getting more requests for food and clothing every day.”

“I wonder if people are going to rein in right now, because energy is so expensive, and come back to the small communities, growing our own food. I’d love that. I’d like to learn to make my own clothing. I’d love to buy my food from a farm. That would be great.”

“I feel like the mole on Cindy Crawford’s face: just happy to be here.”

“This group of peaceful tree-huggers is trying to convince City Council to take his land ... through eminent domain—land previously purchased by him in one of two ways:
• “Hi, I’m Stewart Coleman. Here’s a check to buy a piece of property beside City Hall valued at $600,000 for $322,000. Thank you.
• “Hi. Here’s the check we talked about for a piece of public property that would otherwise never be sold.”

“And as more veterans return to WNC ... we can expect to see: increased child abuse and domestic violence, substance abuse and homelessness. ... We may leave the war, but the war doesn’t leave us.”

“I gave [demonstrator Steve Rasmussen] my word that I would give him no less than 35 days’ notice. I’m honoring my word.”

“You’re offending our intelligence to make us feel we’re going to get a piece of this pie: I don’t see a crumb coming this way. This is already a done deal. You just want to pretend we had a voice in this.”

“Sex permeates a relationship more when you’re not having it.”

“I am not opposed to redeveloping the Broadway corridor. I think there is a lot of need for some new faces and activity along Broadway. I am just sad that the Pink House had to go the way of the backhoe.”

“We don’t necessarily need Budweiser kegs to have a good time anymore.”

”[The Goombay! Festival] brings recognition to the community spirit that was so prevalent in this area before urban renewal. We want to make sure the African-Americans factor into the progression that’s happening, that they’re not excluded from the conversation or from the improvements.”

“People say, ‘It’s not just about the tree.’ Well, it is for some of us, because the tree is a living being that holds a sense of our community here.”

“Meanwhile, the embattled magnolia hollers from its verdant treetop, ‘Run for office!’”

“Immigration issues are not going to be resolved by local law enforcement or the right.”

”[This is] legal gymnastics, telling your honor to ignore this or that part of the deed. This was clearly meant for a courthouse, for county offices, or for public use such as a park—and it has remained so from then until the present day.”

“After catching two or three bluegill, Alyssa turns to me and says, ‘Papa, I’ve got to go to the bathroom. Hold my fishing rod.’ A few minutes later, the float went under and I saw the water start boiling up. I knew right then that I had my hands full with that fishing rod.”

“Deb Hagan’s College is ... so awful that everyone involved—even the caterers and the key grips—should be blacklisted from even the worst pictures, so as not to accidentally taint the comparative artistic integrity of the next National Lampoon flick. And every print of the film should be dropped into some New Mexico landfill next to old Atari E.T. video games.”

“Art is something we all need.”

“I think that the Pack Square Conservancy is at a real turning point, because it’s not going to be a construction-focused organization anymore. It’s going to be a park-planning organization.”

“I think that the whole thing is a little ridiculous, and my reputation as a volunteer stands because there are so many people who support me.”

“Peace can seem so esoteric, as if it’s floating above us, completely unreachable. But in reality, peace is created by people doing things to make connections.”

“If I gave over to my dark side, I’d be living in Las Vegas working as a dealer, spending my salary playing blackjack.”

“I get on him all the time. ... I always tease him, ‘Where are you at in your cycle? You’re like a woman some days.’”

“We’re ready. We’re like a German shepherd waiting for you to throw the Frisbee: Where’s it going to go?”

“If we’re going to make decisions about long-term trends, we have to get to the point where my grandmother could understand what we’re trying to say.”

“I think that when people sit down [at the shows], they relax a little bit—and that’s when you can laugh at yourself. The best jokes that I’ve delivered have been making fun of, like, Amazing Savings and Florida people. But even topics that people hold really close to home, they can loosen up.”

“If our temperature was like Atlanta, we would be building houses differently, we would be growing different trees here, there would be different trees in the forest, there would be different crops.”

“I mean, I don’t really need a $100 blouse, but being able to walk out my door and buy a Cosmopolitan and some tampons each month? That’d be great.”

“Shakespeare does not write wimpy women.”

“It was a great credit to the Asheville community that they didn’t get upset about me being there. They didn’t bother that I was there. And they knew I was there. The musical events were open to the public, and I definitely stood out. But no one said or did anything. A few people were aloof, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t afraid. It was part of the diversity of that summer and part of Black Mountain. People let the school alone.”

“It’s like drivers’ ed on Red Bull. It’s awesome. It’s phenomenal.”

“I want to go to bookstores where they really know and get my work, and their customers are passionate readers and part of that thinking-and-feeling culture. I remember Asheville having a very cool vibe to it. It’s a reader’s town.”

“It’s interesting playing a less common instrument. We don’t try to define ourselves as a ukulele band. The way that I play it isn’t even the way most ukulele players would. It’s almost like I’m the snare drum.”

“We’re in this together. We don’t want to be on CNN because our citizens are fighting each other.”

“The public does have every right to be angry. If the big oil companies can’t do a better job of managing their supply, then they are begging us to regulate them.”

“It’s just disappointing in a day and time like this to see that we all have to bond together to make sure Raleigh knows we exist.”

“‘Half of all personal bankruptcies are [caused] in part by medical bills,’ Obama said. ‘That’s not who we are, and it’s not who we have to be. Asheville, enough is enough.’”

”[It] was so fascinating: the fog, the snow, the cold, the wind. Especially in the mountains, it just controls everything you do. I’ve called it our most valuable natural resource up here, and I think that’s true.”

“I don’t consider myself a survivor with a capital S. I call my modus operandi ‘applied belligerence.’ With applied belligerence, I have gained compassion, understanding and resilience. The experiences I had strengthened my sense of the ridiculous.”

“The movement is not pretty, but it is expressive, it has meaning—and it’s connected with something in my soul.”

“The greatest danger in the woods is the same as in a city—it’s a person. Unfortunately, there’s no way to regulate who’s in the woods and who’s not.”

“This [sentence] must stand like a bright beacon, warning others that if they think of abusing their office for personal gain, that there will be serious consequences.”

“All the best tricks hurt.”

“We have to figure out what to do with your seat once you’ve left. If someone feels there is an easier, better way to get there, it won’t hurt ... our feelings.”

“On Nov. 4, it doesn’t sound like a whole lot of you are going to be supporting Barack the wealth-spreader.”

“I have had to rouse sleeping people from my front porch, clean diarrhea from the steps and install several thousand dollars’ worth of steel grate and fence. I have caught people having sex and completing drug deals in the parking lot.”

“I had one guy walk in and he was planning to go to a lot of different banks to distribute the money out, but he ended up handing me over $700,000.”

“This is a white male that did this. It’s legible, it’s in one color and therefore you can tell.”

“He’s completely alienated anybody who would vote for him.”

“It’s not that we’re jaded; it’s just that we’re used to this in Asheville.”

“I would pick up a piece and say, ‘It’s not my daughter’s hand that’s going to the landfill, it’s a piece of pottery.’”

“Intertwined ... [were] painful comments and outrageous questions: ‘Do you dream in black and white?’ ‘Do your people live in trees?’ ‘I am sure that in your country there is no need for clothes, right?’ ... All this and much more was part of my experience as an 18-year-old here.”

“I remember eating corn bread and milk every night for dinner.”

“This is a mandate: People want us to take care of the money, preserve the mountains and take care of people who don’t have as much as we do.”

“I didn’t anticipate this, but it’s like 1994 in reverse.”

“I think [Bob Dylan’s] voice is coming through a little bit. It is, in part, mimicry—especially if I’m not paying attention to what I’m doing, if I’m not really inside the song. But if I can focus not on whether or not somebody’s dropping a dollar in my guitar case and try to shape the words, then it’s like I transcend mimicry into almost like a rhapsody.”

“As we looked at pictures of Eagle and Valley streets as far back as the 1920s, people pointed out this person’s store or that person’s business, owned by individuals and families who helped provide community stability.”

“My client does not believe the project can be reasonably restructured to meet Council’s concerns that it is out of scale.”

“People are understanding they don’t have to give kids a bunch of wacked-out music to get to the good stuff.”

“At bottom, this may be the perfect film for this moment in history, since what it’s ultimately about isn’t Poppy’s seemingly unflagging cheerfulness, but about how she uses her cheerfulness to tenaciously cling to an increasingly precious commodity: hope. Poppy realizes that it takes a lot of work to retain hope in the face of so much evidence—real or forced on us—that there’s little reason for it. There’s something pretty fine about that as a theme.”

“When I think of all the songs I’ve written, and that’s the one I might be remembered for ... well, it’s a crazy world.”

“I always said we were like the seasons of the year. We were spring, growing and developing, blossoming out. Summer was playful and fun. Fall is when we mellowed and were beginning to change and mature ... and finding our degree of independence and individual ways. And winter is when I lost him.”

“People like sitting in their cubicles and looking at cute things online.”

“We believe in toasting the president ... but maybe in a different way than you would normally think.”

“I have butterflies in my stomach 24 hours before the show’s even started just knowing we’re going to play in Asheville. ... It feels really good to let go there.”

“There are a lot of festivals in Asheville, and they’re all wonderful, but this one is a great blend of the arts and of the economy. ... It’s not just about listening to music and having a good time. It’s about transferring knowledge and creating networks and building business.”

“Salsa teaches you how to present yourself, to stand straight with confidence; it becomes part of who you are.”

“It has been a long time coming, but the city has finally taken the bold, much-needed action of addressing the problem of those constant scofflaws ... the park benches.”

“It’s kind of hard, like a Milk Bone.”

“You’ve got to have a Web site like you’ve got to have clothes.”

“If universities continue down this path—allowing corporations and private donors to exert excessive influence—they will undermine [the] public trust and the very reason for their existence.”

“We have a strong team at Xpress, and I think this challenge is about to make us stronger. Because of our local focus, I believe we’re integral to the evolution and growth of the Asheville area. The plan is to stay that way - promoting the local dialogue and helping local merchants get the word out about the unique and creative things they’re doing.”