Quotations

Why is this here? Well, as Michel de Montaigne said, "I quote others only to better express myself."

I'd like to acknowledge the tremendous debt I owe Jeff (Moriarty) Meyer's quotes list. A significant number of these were lifted directly from him. That was back when USENET was a smaller, friendlier place; like so many others, Moriarty doesn't seem to be on USENET (Home of Spam!) any more.

I miss them all.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.

[Blaise Pascal]

"...our happiness hinges not on good luck; it hinges on peace of heart."

[David Steindl-Rast]

"You'd have to ask Mr. Truman, but I seriously doubt that he has ever found it necessary to place a modifying adjective in front of the word `ethics'."

[Dean Acheson re: Harry Truman]

"The secret of my success is that at a very early age I discovered that I'm not God."

[Oliver Wendell Holmes]

"If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself."

[Annie Dillard, Living By Fiction]

"If a book is worth reading at all it is worth reading more than once ... Suspense drags you on; appreciation causes you to linger."

[William Gerhardie]

"I believe in the soul. The cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are overindulgent, overrated crap... I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone! I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.
"Good night."

[Bull Durham, written by Ron Shelton]

"Paul Louis Courier...when assailed by a French professor, quietly remarked: `I fancy he must be vexed. He calls me jacobin, rebel, plagiarist, thief, poisoner, forger, leper, madman, imposter, calumniator, libeller, a horrible, filthy, grimacing rag-picker. I gather what he wants to say: he means that he and I are not of the same opinion.'"

[Louis Kronenberger]

"Homer! There's a man here who thinks he can help you!"
"Batman?"
"No, he's a scientist!"
"Batman's a scientist."
"It's not Batman!"

[The Simpsons]

"Swank! Ten times more addictive than marijuana!"

[The Simpsons]

"You're going to love It's A Wonderful Life -- it's a great movie!"
"It's not relentlessly cheerful, is it?"

[Robin tries to bring a little Christmas spirit in Batman: The Animated Series]

"On the strength of his literary output alone... any woman of sense would decline to tackle D.H. Lawrence at 1,000 pounds a night."

[Dorothy L. Sayers]

Money talks and often just says "Good-Bye."

[Possibly from a poem in TIME magazine.]

"Wow, I haven't seen [The Family Circus comic strip] in years. I found it incredibly disturbing. Naked kids with swollen eyes and no genitals... the stuff of nightmares."

[Matt McIrvin]

"In a survey of Florida insurance commissioners in the mid 1980's, the commisioners ranked fraternities as the sixth worst insurance risk in the country. The fifth was nuclear waste."

[Daily Vidette]

"It is up to us to produce better-quality movies."

[Lloyd Kaufman, producer of Stuff Stephanie In The Incinerator]

U.C. Davis graduate student Anne Perkins on her study of sexuality in sheep:
"It is very difficult to look at the possibility of lesbian sheep because if you are a female sheep, what you do to solicit ex is to stand still. Maybe there is a female sheep out there really wanting another female, but there's just no way for us to know it."

[Quoted in the New Scientist]

"I want to find a voracious, small-minded predator and name it after the IRS."

[Robert Bakker, paleontologist]

"Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and blows up the bonfire."

[La Rochefoucauld]

"The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing."

[Gamel Abdel Nasser]

"When you run a picture of a nice, clean all-American girl like this, get her tits above the fold."

[Al Neuharth, publisher of USA Today]

"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea."

[Robert Anton Wilson]

"I can say with confidence I know a fair bit about LSD."

[Dan Rather]

"My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated, but never signed."

[Christopher Morley]

"One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being."

[May Sarton]

"Thus I send you back to your mortal realms! And you don't even have to put your eyes out for having gazed on us!"
"Gosh, thanks."

[From Bill Loebs' Epicurus The Sage]

"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated."

[Voltaire]

"My only aversion to vice, is the price."

[Victor Buono]

"So [Thomas Pynchon] wants a private life and no photographs and nobody to know his home address. I can dig it, I can relate to that (but, like, he should try it when it's compulsory instead of a free-choice option)."

[Salman Rushdie]

"Inconceivable!"
"You use that word a lot. I don't think it means what you think it does."

[The Princess Bride, screenplay by William Goldman from his novel]

"First rule in murder, old love: never ask the customer if they did it, in case they tell you."

[Horace Rumpole]

"I'm not in the mood for jokes."
"How about sight gags?!"

[Doctor, Doctor]

"It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and shameful."

[Jean Jacques Rousseau]

"Good conversation is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after."

[Anne Morrow Lindbergh]

"I like men to behave like men [strong and] childish."

[Francoise Sagan]

"The greatest cunning is to have none at all."

[Carl Sandburg]

"We're very kinky, in a Republican sort of way."

[Sue Pauloz]

"I am never more serious than when I am joking."

[From the PBS series Campion]

"Michael Palin was on 'Carson' last night... and he talked a little about Graham Chapman and the memorial service they held for him. Ten or so people got up and gave tributes to Graham, and then it fell to John Cleese. He said, 'Graham Chapman, co-writer of the 'Dead Parrot' sketch, is no more. He has ceased to be. He's expired and gone to meet his maker...' and ran the whole gamut of his parrot speech, winding up with 'He is an EX-Chapman.' Cleese went on to add that some people might find that tribute offensive, which was exactly why he did it: Graham loved to offend people."

[Barb Prillaman]

"I was married to a musician named Fred C. Dodd, and the guy's got a hold on my heart so tight that sometimes I think I'm never going to breathe again."

[Days and Nights of Molly Dodd]

"Fleet Street finally signed off. The Daily Express was printed in its Black Lubianka building for the last time on November 17th, the last national newspaper to quit the street."

[The Economist, 11/25/89]

"There is nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight."

[Lon Chaney Sr.]

"The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them."

[Simone de Beauvoir]

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone."

[Bill Cosby]

"A bad review is like baking a cake with all the best ingredients and having someone sit on it."

[Danielle Steel]

"Where love rules, there is no rule to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other."

[C. G. Jung]

"Every man is a damn fool at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit."

[Elbert Hubbard]

"He's an honest man [you can shoot craps with him] over the telephone."

[Earl Wilson]

"I write to understand as much as to be understood."

[Elie Wiesel]

"All I know of love is that Love is all there is."

[Emily Dickinson]

"Somebody's boring me... I think it's me."

[Dylan Thomas]

"It is easier to love humanity than to love your neighbor."

[Eric Hoffer]

"I place my faith in fools. Self confidence, my friends call it."

[Edgar Allen Poe]

"My indifference to that comment can only be described as sexual in intensity."

[Martin Terman]

"So you're saying a man can only have a non-sexual relationship with an unattractive woman."
"No, you pretty much want to nail them too."

[When Harry Met Sally...]

"Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none."

[Jules Renard]

"I'm sorry, I thought you were alone." "I tried it that way. It wasn't as much fun."

[The Cheap Detective]

"If I had my life to live again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner."

[Tallulah Bankhead]

"Diet Mountain Dew has the same pH and density of urine."

[Newsweek, 31-Jul-89]

"How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved."

[Sigmund Freud]

"Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box."

[Italian proverb]

"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of."

[Blaise Pascal]

"Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this: that you are dreadfully like other people."

[James Russell Lowell]

"The price of liberty is eternal videotaping."

[From a Mr. X story in A1]

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."

[Bertrand de Jouvenel]

"Love... is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."

[Iris Murdoch]

"Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth."

[Tennessee Williams]

"Marriage is part of a sort of '50s revival package that's back in vogue along with neckties and naked ambition."

[Calvin Trillin]

"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."

[Anais Nin]

"Russ [Meyer] is a man who believes in 'spirited, horizontal togetherness.' He tends to smile a lot. Can you blame him?"

[Prof. Fred Hopkins]

"Batman is the hero any of us could be, given determination, exercise, and deep psychological trauma."

[Chris Jarocha-Ernst]

If it's intellectual atrocities you're after, turn off your TV set and open a copy of The New Yorker. As primitive as the stories in "Gomer Pyle" and "The Beverly Hillbillies" are, they do have vitality and comprehensibility -- two qualities The New Yorker clearly regards as intellectually atrocious. But possibly I'm not being fair; The New Yorker has risen to a level above that of mere disposable reading matter. A copy of The New Yorker is now furniture, a quietly elegant piece which when placed on a coffee table is the sign of an aware, liberal and genteelly gay home.

[Al Capp, Playboy Interview, 1966]

Everybody picks on "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Gomer Pyle", but you realize what immense quality the worst of commercial television has when you look at the best of educational television. Then you find out that even the most paralyzing "entertainment" shows are works of art by comparison. Commercial television is bad because it has to be; if it isn't, the sponsors won't pay for it. But educational television is bad because it chooses to be. It could be original, intelligent, startling, informative, courageous, muscular. Instead, it prefers to be tiresome and timid, flabby and faggy.

[Al Capp, Playboy Interview, 1966]

It's an exhausting profession, being a girl. For instance, from the age of 12, no really nice girl admits she has bowel movements. Well, maybe it's come time for girls to drop the simpering, complicated, degrading Girl Act, and to enjoy being human beings for a few centuries -- and for men to take over the role of peacock. But as for boys and girls becoming indistinguishable, our exploding population figures are proof that they can still tell which is which.

[Al Capp, Playboy Interview, 1966]

"Art is the manipulation of someone else's imagination."

[Sol Saks in Funny Business]

"We are basically storytellers, descendants of the old men who sat around the fire and told us legends, fairytales, exploits, or maybe just how funny Og looked when he fell into the tar pit."

[Sol Saks in Funny Business]

"Fuck them. Let's go do it."

[John Frankenheimer, to his cast before a show]

"[The audience] are your adversaries. They dare you to entertain them. Fuck them. If you fail, you go down the tubes. So of you succeed, make them pay. Make them buy you the Mercedes, beg for your autograph, thank you for your kindness, and make up for all past hurts. You've earned it."

[Sol Saks in Funny Business]

"The worst thing you write is better than the best thing you didn't write."

[Unknown]

"The bonds of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two to carry them. Sometimes three."

[Alexandre Dumas]

Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.sf.science
Subject: Re: Simple-minded Darwinism
From: mdw@ccu1.auckland.ac.nz (Woodhams)
Date: 21 Dec 1995 02:08:09 GMT

burns@latcs2.lat.oz.au (Jonathan Burns) writes:
[Re: positive evolutionary selection:]

Well, nothing is stopping us. We try to choose healthy, articulate, liveable-with people as mates

[...]

But this is only evolutionarily useful if you have lots of kids. If you intend to have few or no kids, it is your social duty to choose an obnoxious, diseased, puny dolt as a mate.
Watt-Evans's Law of Background Research:
The depth of background research should be proportional to: 1/2(Importance to tale, as a percentage + the percentage of the reading population who have been involved in the area of concern)
Which is to say, if it is important to the tale, study it! If lots of people do it, study it!

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

Watt-Evans' Law:
There is no idea so stupid or absurd that a sufficiently-talented writer can't base a decent story on it.

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

Feist's Corollary to Watt-Evans' Law:
There is no idea so brilliant that a sufficiently-untalented writer can't fuck it up.

[Raymond Feist]

I think that Elf stated the problem perfectly when he wrote that the first- and third-person voices are narrative, but second-person is coercive. Making a second-person voice come off convincingly is not a task for people who still don't know the difference between "your" and "you're."

[Tim Pierce (twpierce@unix.amherst.edu)]

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

[Mark Twain]

Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen, and not a shadow of an idea of what you're going to say.

[Francoise Sagan]

I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.

[Barbara Tuchman]

I never write metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop.

[Mark Twain]

[On authors who never rewrite, particularly the beats:]

What they do isn't writing at all--it's typing.

[Truman Capote]

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing the typewriter ribbon.

[Robert Benchley]

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

[Georges Simenon]

That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

[Joan Didion]

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature; only then can he see clearly.

[Julian Barnes]

I like to write when I feel spiteful; it's like having a good sneeze.

[D.H. Lawrence]

Do not on any account attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.

[W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman]

A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good book; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

[Aldous Huxley]

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: `His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'

[Hilaire Belloc]

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

[Jean Cocteau]

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

[E.M. Forster]

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

[Anthony Burgess]

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

[W.H. Auden]

From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend to read it.

[Groucho Marx]

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

[Groucho Marx]

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

[Marshall McLuhan]

Books think for me.

[Charles Lamb]

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

[H.G. Wells]

People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

[Ralph Waldo Emerson]

We like that a sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

[Henry David Thoreau]

The first draft of anything is shit.

[Ernest Hemingway]

I publish a piece in order to kill it, so that I won't have to fool around with it any longer.

[William Gass]

Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

[Ernest Hemingway]

I know everything. One has to, to write decently.

[Henry James]

I think the writer ought to help the reader as much as he can do without damaging what he wants to say; and I don't think it ever hurts the writer to sort of stand back now and then and look at his stuff as if he were reading it instead of writing it.

[James Jones]

Easy reading is damned hard writing.

[Nathaniel Hawthorne]

All morning I worked on the proof of one of my poems, and I took out a comma; in the afternoon I put it back.

[Oscar Wilde]

A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

[John Steinbeck]

When the writer becomes the center of his attention, he becomes a nudnik. And a nudnik who believes he's profound is even worse than just a plain nudnik.

[Isaac Bashevis Singer]

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

[Albert Einstein]

She understood, as he did, that all writing was infernally boring and futile, but that it had to be done out of respect for tradition.

[Stanislaw Lem (according to Steve Fouts)]

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

[E.F. Schumacher]

Most writers try to economize the mental effort of the writer, not the reader.

[T.A. Rickard, A Guide to Technical Writing, 2nd ed., 1910.]

"...Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded..."

[Plato, Phaedrus]

Writing releases me by naming names; it is the necessary part of me that identifies objects encountered in the dark.

[Shaaron Samuels]

The FLOGGINGS will continue until morale IMPROVES!

[Seen in a .sig]

For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.

[W.H. Auden, A CERTAIN WORLD]

When Coca-Cola first shipped to China, they named the product something that when pronounced sounded like `Coca-Cola.' The only problem was that the characters used meant `Bite the wax tadpole.'

[American Demographics magazine]

"Much though I love the Archie books, there is no better way to find out when a `hip' trend is dead than when it shows up in Archie."

[Dan Parmenter in rec.arts.comics]

Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.

[Mort Sahl]

Tenet insanabile multos Scribendi cacoethes et aeggro in corde senescit. (Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing, and it becomes chronic in their sick minds.)

[Juvenal --- Satires vii.51]

Documentation is like sex. When it's good, it's REALLY good, but when it's bad... it's better than nothing.

[Gabe Helou]

Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.

[Dick Brandon]

It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs.

[Oxford University Press, Edpress News]

The only possible interpretation of research in the social `sciences' is: some do, some don't.

[Ernest Rutherford]

My idea is to have the hours altered so that public houses will be permitted to open only between two and five in the morning. This means that if you are a drinking man you'll have to be in earnest about it.

[Flann O'Brien]

When you said you wanted to live in sin, I didn't know you meant `sloth.'

[David Oster]

f y cn rd ths, y cn wrk s a tchncl wrtr!

[John McMullen]

The experiments of Skinner and other operant researchers did far more than teach us how to pull habits out of a rat.

[Gideon Glass (gglass07@calvin.edu)]

You can't fix stupidity with software.

[notebooks of a heretic]

Our plans to design a thought-controlled computer were scrapped recently when we realized that the government would be unable to use them.

[Gary A. Field, Wang Labs]

If HP had invented sushi, it would be now marketing it as: "cold, raw, dead fish."

[Alex Martelli]

Once you realize that "Tuesday, November Third" <-> "Many voted, Bush retired", the search for all future anagrams is rendered uninteresting.

[David Fry]

Software Paradigms, I: The Tracy Test: "It works for me."
USEFUL WORDS: gataofn: (adj.)
Gives all the appearance of function normally; as in, "After fixing all the bugs I could find, the software is GATAOFN."
Software Paradigms, II:
Ant's Law:
"If I can fix more bugs than I create during a rewrite, it's worth it."
Software Paradigms, III:
Church's Lemma:
"It's easy when you know how it's done."
Funkenhauser's Rebuttal:
"No, it's not."
A Canadian is just an unarmed American with health insurance.

[Comic John Wing Jr.]

But remember ... I'm a sensuous modern woman, and while I don't think the size of a man's orgasm is important, I do insist on multiple penises.

[? - Seen in a .sig]

It is of course a given that society only gets the pornography it deserves.

[Neil Gaiman]

I feel cities are like whores. You may see them in the daytime, but you only truly comprehend them at night.

[? - Seen in a .sig]

I write because I am personally amused by what I do, and if other people are amused by it, then it's fine. If they're not, then that's also fine.

[Frank Zappa]

"First of all we see that love comes to an end if one of the lovers breaks faith or tries to break faith with the other, or if he is found to go astray from the Catholic religion."

[The Art of Courtly Love, Andreas Capellanus]

"The commitment problem has caused many women to mistakenly conclude that men, as a group, have the emotional maturity of hamsters. This is not the case. A hamster is much more capable of making a lasting commitment to a woman, expecially if she gives it those little food pellets. Whereas a guy, in a relationship, will consume the pellets of companionship, and he will run on the exercise wheel of lust, but as soon as he senses that the door of commitment is about to close and trap him in the wire cage of true intimacy, he'll squirm out, scamper across the kitchen floor of uncertainty and hide under the refrigerator of non-Readiness."

[Dave Barry]

"I didn't resolve the questions... and I find that entertaining. And if my life were to end tomorrow, it would be fulfilled in that manner. I would say, 'The questions have been terrific.'"

[Jack Kirby, on his work]

"I am grim... and harsh... and ripe with fury! I fight and kill and howl and get all bloody! I go bowling whenever I want!"

[Flaming Carrot]

McMullen's Law of Models: Any sufficiently-complicated abstraction can be easily confused with something real.
"At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so if that comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted."

[Eric Idle, on censorship]

"So this judge in Virginia rules that a lesbian wasn't fit to raise her own daughter because she might grow up to be a lesbian, and gives custody to the lesbian's mother. And I'm thinking, 'She's already raised one lesbian.'"

[Chris Cannon]

"There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone."

[B. Stroustrup (Inventor of C++)]

"From experience and observation, I have found that the field of technical communication is often a dead-end career with a low probability that writers, supervisors, or managers will rise up through the ranks. Too often, companies use the technical publications group for management promotion slots when nothing else is available or when they need a place to stash an ineffective manager."

[Jan Scholz, Technical Writing Consultant]

"Justice is incidental to law and order."

[J. Edgar Hoover]

Carson's Law: Never ask a question if you don't want to hear the answer.

[Linda Carson]

McMullen's Law: People who boast of being 'weird' don't know what weird is.

[John McMullen]

We tend to meet any new situation by reorganising and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, ineffiency and demoralisation.

[Petronius Arbiter, 210BC]

"Just because I can't think doesn't mean I can't act."

[Actor at audition]

Martin Buber, German Jewish Philosopher, in response to Mahatma Gandhi's suggestion that passive resistance be used to combat the Nazi government in Germany, as was used against the British in India: "I'm not sure I can take your advice. You are dealing with English Gentlemen. We are dealing with monsters."
"PS: Just a random thought, but considering that UPS didn't want to issue Newtons to their delivery people because they said their input devices must be capable of withstanding repeated drops onto concrete from 9 feet, why are we trusting our packages to these people?"

[Kevin Fox ]

"I used to make Death out to be a man. Poppa Time, ragged beard, bad sandals, sickle, attitude problem. But now Death means Female. And that's what shook me so. Death can screw us pretty much any time she chooses. Astride, she can bear down on us, hard, and that, I reckon, I've long known. But now I had to consider a new possibility. You know, screwing her back."

[Deputy Sheriff Wade Watson Cutcheon, Jr. in unedited tape-recorded testimony taken four hours after apprehending John Bill Whitehead for having sex with a corpse.]

Q: What goes Clup Clup Clup Clup BANG BANG BANG Clup Clup Clup Clup? A: A drive-by shooting in Amish country.
When I was on the cover of Vogue, my older brother went in to buy it. The girl at the counter said, "Oh, Winona Ryder had a boob job," and he was like, "No, she didn't," and the girl goes, "Yes she did, look at her tits." My brother got in this fight with this girl. It got really ugly. You know, I have a chest and people assume it's not real because I'm small. People who are catty think that if someone has an attractive feature, it can't be real. I look at older women and it's like every line tells a story and that can be beautiful.

[Winona Ryder, voice of Generation X, Entertainment Weekly 2/11/94]

"There are no typing, spelling, or grammatical errors in my posts. What you are seeing is the evolution of the English language in action."--E.S.

[Seen in a .sig]

...and always remember the last words of my grandfather, who said, "A truck!"

[Emo Phillips]

I got in a fight one time with a really big guy, and he said, "I'm going to mop the floor with your face." I said, "You'll be sorry." He said, "Oh, yeah? Why?" I said, "Well, you won't be able to get into the corners very well."

[Emo Phillips]

The toughest time...in anyone's life...is when you have to kill a loved one just because they're the devil.

[Emo Phillips]

I'm a great lover, I'll bet.

[Emo Phillips]

Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.

[Emo Phillips]

I was at a bar nursing a beer. My nipple was getting quite soggy.

[Emo Phillips]

The other day a woman came up to me and said, "Didn't I see you on television?" I said, "I don't know. You can't see out the other way."

[Emo Phillips]

I discovered my wife in bed with another man, and I was crushed. So I said, "Get off me, you two!"

[Emo Phillips]

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said, "Stop! don't do it!"
"Why shouldn't I?" he said.
I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"
He said, "Like what?"
I said, "Well... are you religious or atheist?"
He said, "Religious."
I said, "Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?"
He said, "Christian."
I said, "Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?"
He said, "Protestant."
I said, "Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?"
He said, "Baptist!"
I said, "Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?"
He said, "Baptist Church of God!"
I said, "Me too! Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you reformed Baptist Church of God?"
He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God!"
I said, "Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?"
He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915!"
I said, "Die, heretic scum," and pushed him off.

[Emo Phillips]

A friend of mine gave me a Philip Glass record. I listened to it for five hours before I realized it had a scratch on it.

[Emo Phillips]

William Faulkner's daughter Jill bitterly recalls trying to stop the great writer/tiresome drunk from proceeding on one of his jags:
It was just before my birthday and I knew that Pappy was getting ready to start on one of these boots. I went to him -- the only time I ever did -- and said, "Please don't start drinking." And he was already well on his way, and he turned to me and said, "You know, no one remembers Shakespeare's child."
... Lisa Palac, editor of Future Sex, a magazine about high-tech sex, defends finding pleasure in new machines. "Some of the best sex I've ever had has been with myself," she says. "We have to break out of this idea that having sex alone makes you a loser."

[From an article about pornographic CD-ROMs in Newsweek (3/14/94).]

The Air Force's ICBMs will soon be fitted with new cooling systems to eliminate their use of CFCs, which deplete the Earth's ozone layer and contribute to global warming. The ICBMs, however, will continue to carry up to 10 nuclear bombs, each capable of wiping out an entire city.

[The ZPG Reporter, February 1994]

We're not a cult. We're not running around with our heads shaved or wearing orange robes, and we're not behaving in bizarre ways, other than freezing people.

[Steve Bridge, President of Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world's leading cryonics company.]

Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.

[Fran Lebowitz]

Although plastic was brought into industrial use in 1909 by L.H. Baekeland of Yonkers, it was not until after World War II that the modern miracle substance was used in a wide variety of consumer goods, among them speedboats, dentures and flamingos. Previously flamingos were made of cement. Before that they were made by other flamingos.

[William E. Geist, The New York Times]

Mind you, if I were the fellow she made fun of, I'd be thinking thoughts of stretch-wrap, and butane torches, or perhaps cheese graters. Not, of course, that one should act on such impulses, but the desire to see a taunter socially humilated, their friendships destroyed, their families impoverished, their cultures undermined, their continent despoiled and their homeworld baked clean of all life, is only natural.

[James Nicoll]

You know, sometimes a magazine can change your life, like MAD Magazine, or Rolling Stone before the cigarette ads, or the Co-Evolution Quarterly, or Scientific American, or for God's sake, even the New Yorker, but so far, MONDO 2000 and WIRED just make me want to keep mine the way it is...

[ericl@miles.esd.sgi.com (Eric Linstadt)]

The watcher and the watched, the potter and the pot, the cook and her chowder, the artist and the work--are one, as my mother told me, when I caught her spitting into the soup.

[Eric Kraft, "What a Piece of Work I Am"]

Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggy," until you can find a rock.
There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?

[Dick Cavett, mocking the TV-violence debate]

The average age of soldiers in most ancient armies was under twenty years. It's still a young man's game. Beware teenagers with heavy weapons.

[How to Stop a War, Dunnigan & Martel]

How do you make a cat go moo? Ask it, "Does a dog have Buddha nature?"

[Seen in .sig of Andy Dingley (dingbat@codesmth.demon.co.uk)]

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

[Abraham Lincoln]

I've eaten over a hundred species of invertebrates. Of course, there's only a dozen I'd be willing to eat again.

[A biologist in an article in The Globe & Mail]

Usenet is like Tetris for people who still remember how to read.

[Joshua Heller]

America: where "git" is a verb, and "bugger" is a noun.

[Seen in a .sig]

Great men, like nature, use simple language.

[Luc de Clapiers Vauvenargues]

The majority of people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, terribly objective sometimes, but the real task is, in fact, to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.

[Soeren Kierkegaard]

I confess that I used the word "weasel" a number of times during that very last conversation, but at least it was always as a verb, and not as a noun.

[Steve Jackson]

We will conserve only what we love;
we will love only what we understand;
we will understand only what we are taught.

[Senegal proverb]

The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.

[Casey Stengel]

After SCTV and my wife, nothing Canada produces surprises me any more.

[Blair P. Houghton]

USEFUL WORDS: to graunch (vt.)
to make to fit by the use of excessive force.

[Old R.A.F. slang]

USEFUL WORDS: velleity (n.)
an inclination to do something, but not so great as to actually do it.

[Obsolete English]

USEFUL WORDS: swive: (vi.,vt.)
to fornicate (formerly obscene)
The juvenile seasquirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure.

[Warren C. Lathe III (trey@thelab.biology.rochester.edu)]

[Describing rec.arts.comics -- and most other newsgroups:]
We are a simple people. We sing. We dance. We shoot on sight.

[seen in a .sig]

Trifles make perfection and perfection is no trifle.

[Michaelangelo -- the painter, not the turtle.]

Self-respect: The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

[H. L. Mencken]

There could hardly be a more unbearable -- and more irrational -- world than one in which the most eminent specialists in each field were allowed to proceed unchecked with the realization of their ideals.

[F. A. Hayek, "The Road To Serfdom"]

The superfluous is very necessary.

[Voltaire]

Never express yourself more clearly than you think.

[Niels Bohr]

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

[Winston Churchill (1874-1965)]

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

[Goethe (1749-1832)]

Brevis esse laboro obscurus fio (I try to be brief, but only become obscure).

[Ovid]

In Canada, we had the opportunity to have American technology, British politics, and French culture. But what we got was British technology, French politics, and American culture.

[Seen in soc.culture.canada]

"You enter a public toilet. It does not contain an instructional video."

[Context is everything in role-playing games.]

"Interstellar diplomacy? Isn't that a little out of our line?"
"Hence the nuclear weapons."

[Yeoman Willard explains life to Midshipman Maroun]

Times are bad. Children do not listen to their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

[Junius]

"The earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer mind their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching."

[Assyrian Tablet, c.2800BC]

If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing poorly.

[G. K. Chesterton]

Have you never thought as you read that months may lie between any pair of words?

[Gene Wolfe]

The philosophical commitment to brutality and unpredictability is one of his greatest clubs in a more consistently human universe.

[Stanley Bing, on the crazy boss]

"We often speak of a team and of teamplay, but this does not only mean that the staff is made up of people who are compatible and prepared to work together; it also means that the staff is composed of people whose abilities fit together, employees who complement each other. Without this `fit,' exhortations to be a `team' or a `family' can warm the hearts of those involved but will not necessarily result in better service."

[Martin, Lowell. 1984. Internal organization in libraries. Ch. 7 of Organizational structure of libraries. pp 171--205.]

Time flies when you're young and jerking off.

[Jim Carroll]

Let's hang ten for Justice!

[Who else but the Tick?]

Technical Writer's Dictionary: intuitive (adj.)
1. Directly apprehended. 2. (User Interfaces) What the user is used to; e.g., "Windows is intuitive." 3. counter-~; what the user is not used to; e.g., "Windows is counter-intuitive."

[John McMullen]

I look upon the judgement of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon, and the rise and fall of beliefs as but traces left by four seasons.

[Siddharta Gautama Buddha]

He who does not punish evil commands it to be done.

[Leonardo da Vinci]

Hell, I often think that what scientists really ought to do is start working to destroy the Earth. I say, let's give the proles a reason to fear the cold, uncaring hand of science.

[Mike Kelly, mkelly@ovid.helios.nd.edu]

"My inner child can beat up your inner child."

[Seen on a button]

Some magics are distinguishable from any advanced technology.

[Richard Treitel treitel@bones.intellicorp.com]

"The BBC's trailer department keeps calling the O. J. Simpson case 'the trial of the century.' Sure, OJ's a big name, but I still think the title belongs, narrowly, to Nuremberg."

[Jack Hughes, "The Independent on Sunday"]

"Spacetime below the Planck scale is like what Gertrude Stein said about Oakland: 'There's no there, there.'"

[Seen in a .sig]

"I am one for whom dangers are playthings! The charms you use I chop up for relish in my porridge. Beware! I am a deadly mamba, a wrestler of leopards, a hive of hornets."

[Shona War Song]

"Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought."

[Sir William Osler, 1905]

"The real adventure in Moby Dick is the one that happens inside Captain Ahab. The rest is a fishing trip."

[Salman Rushdie]

"Who's on stage?"
"Yes."
"Yes is on stage?"
"No, Yes isn't at this concert, Who's on stage!"
"Who?"
"Yes!"
"Yes is the name of the group on stage?"
"No, silly, Yes isn't here, Who's on stage."
"Look, what's their name?"
"Who!"
"The band, the band on stage!"
"No, The Band's coming on later, Who's on stage!"
"I'm asking you!""

[The Animaniacs tribute to Bud & Lou]

"Doing nothing is very tough to do because you never know when you're finished. The upside is that from the moment you wake up in the morning, you're on the job."

[Leslie Nielsen, though it may be a Drebbin line]

In strategy when both parties abhor collision the advantage goes often to the one who arranges the status quo in his favor and leaves to the other the "last clear chance" to stop or turn aside.

[Thomas C. Schelling]

"If you can't spot the sucker in the game in the first 10 minutes, then it must be you."

[Poker saying, from Globe & Mail, May 25, 1994]

The most popular [alternate history] in French was 'What if Napoleon had not been defeated?' which Keller said usually resulted in a better world than we have, while most American alternate histories show things as being worse. When someone in the audience asked why, Mark Olson replied, "We look at this as the best of all possible worlds, but the French know it isn't, because most people speak English."

[From the soc.history.what-if FAQ]

For a writer, "l'esprit d'escalier" translates to "second draft."
"There's only one good plot, and that's a delayed fuck."

[Louis B. Mayer]

Does anyone have a Pamprin period? I have a Chef Boy-ar-dee period. There's nothing neat about it.

[Sandra Shamus]

# From an article in rec.arts.sf.written "Unless you're writing for a humorous effect, elves or space aliens and all creatures who aren't human should at least be as strange as, oh, the French."

[Will Shetterly]

People who censor books are usually illiterate.

[John D. MacDonald, A Purple Place for Dying, 1964]

I know just enough about myself to know I cannot settle for one of those simplifications which indignant people seize upon to make understandable a world too complex for their comprehension. Astrology, health food, flag waving, bible thumping, Zen, nudism, nihilism -- all of these are grotesque simplifications which small dreary people adopt in the hope of thereby finding The Answer, because the very concept that maybe there is no answer, never has been, never will be, terrifies them.

[John D. MacDonald, A Deadly Shade of Gold, 1965]

The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.

[John D. MacDonald, A Deadly Shade of Gold, 1965]

A man should have one chance to bring something down. He should have his shot at something, a shining running something, and see it come a-tumbling down, all mucus and steaming blood stench and gouted excrement, the eyes going dull during the final muscle spasms. And if he is, in all parts and purposes, a man, he will file that away as a part of his process of growth and life and eventual death. And if he is perpetually, hopelessly a boy, he will lust to go do it again, with a bigger beast.

[John D. MacDonald, A Deadly Shade of Gold, 1965]

... the hard thing to do is the right thing to do.

[John D. MacDonald, Lonely Silver Rain, 1985]

To accept a mediocre form and make something like literature out of it is in itself rather an accomplishment.

[Raymond Chandler]

Fantasy is literature for teenagers.

[Brian Aldiss]

A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened without its science content.

[Theodore Sturgeon]

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.

[Hilaire Belloc]

Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.

[Anthony Hope Hawkins]

It is the sexless novel that should be distinguished: the sex novel is now normal.

[Who else but George Bernard Shaw?]

Things Editors Say: "Confusing" The reader is in doubt as to what is going on, where it is going on, why it is going on (motivation), and so on. More severe forms are "murky" and "opaque".

[Paraphrased from Barry B. Longyear]

Things Editors Say: "Lack of Content" Either the story idea or the underlying message is trivial, the story has no point, it's not about anything, or it doesn't do anything.

[Paraphrased from Barry B. Longyear]

Things Editors Say: "Cutesy, the Cutes"
The story seems written more to four-year-old children than adults. The characters are sugary, goody-goody, syrupy and/or "just too dear for words." Extremely difficult to self-diagnose. Watch out for the cutes when the characters in your story are children, R2D2-type robots, or fuzzy little aliens.

[Paraphrased from Barry B. Longyear]

Things Editors Say: "Fluff"
Bad meaning: story of little content. Good meaning: light entertaining humor.

[Paraphrased from Barry B. Longyear]

Things Editors Say: "Fleshing Out"
Adding words to a story to make it more effective, such as by continuing themes, adding needed description, tying up loose ends, etc. Not to be confused with padding.

[Barry B. Longyear, Science Fiction Writer's Workshop Volume 1]

Things Editors Say: "Slow"
The number of words in the story per significant event taking place is too high.

[Barry B. Longyear, Science Fiction Writer's Workshop Volume 1]

YOUNG POETS

Write as you will
In whatever style you like.
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.

In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition, of course:
You have to improve on the blank page.

[Nicanor Parra, Poems and Antipoems, New Directions, 1966]

I'm getting the impression Sesame Street is the methadone of TV. It isn't really good for you, but heck, at least it isn't heroin.

[James Nicoll, in uw.general]

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

[George Santayana]

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

[Theodore Roosevelt]

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil

[Niccolo Machiavelli]

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not certain about the universe.

[William Churchill]

Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies.

[Adrienne Gusoff]

Email in a corporate setting is essentially public. If a large group such as "marketing" or "software" gets a piece of email, the press will get it too (if it's juicy enough). The link may not be direct. Tasty email is first shared with other co-workers, then former co-workers at other companies, and finally the entire world.

[UNIX System Administration Handbook, Nemeth, Snyder, Seebass, Hein]

Testing is boring, but a busy administrator can often cut productivity in half by skipping it.

[UNIX System Administration Handbook, Nemeth, Snyder, Seebass, Hein]

The fact that medieval England referred to buggery as "the foul and disgusting crime against nature" shows a sadly deficient knowledge of the foul and disgusting, not to mention of crimes against nature.

[From "Buggery and the British Navy" by Arthur Gilbert]

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

[Thomas Mann]

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality, the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

[A. C. Benson]

I should get lots of fiction writing done today. I've got important things to avoid.

[John McMullen]

When I saw Unforgiven I called Clint Eastwood up. I sort of wanted to know how you make The Rookie one year and Unforgiven the next. I said, 'Did you take a lot of care with this film?' And he said, 'No, it was a good piece of material and I had a great cast and we just went out and did it.' And something clicked with me, I began to feel that the conscious pursuit of recognition was going to be a dead end.

[Ron Howard]

Home, in the twentieth century, is less where your heart is, than where you understand the sons-of-bitches.

[Dave Hickey, in The Texas Observer]

When she was three,
Her Barbies always did it on the first date

[Life, In a Nutshell, Barenaked Ladies Steven Page & Ed Robertson]

The average [computer software] interface has around 40 defects in need of repair; having two naive users evaluate it will find about half the flaws, and six evaluations will typically find about 90 percent.

[Phil Mitchell, reviewing Thomas K. Landauer's The Trouble with Computers]

It is well known in academic psychology that a pigeon -- or a person -- who is rewarded for some behavior according to a regular and predictable scheme will behave logically: If the rewards are frequent enough, the behavior is maintained; if they become too infrequent, the behavior stops. But if the rewards schedule becomes random and infrequent, the result is obsessive behavior that does not extinguish. See online Help.

[Phil Mitchell, reviewing Thomas K. Landauer's The Trouble with Computers]

On Being A Good Cultist, Rule #25:
Avoid stencilling True Names on underwear and personal effects.

[Michael A Porter, maporter@uoguelph.ca]

On Being A Good Cultist, Rule #13:
Investigators always arrive at the last moment to foil you. Start a half hour early. They hate that.

[Michael A Porter, maporter@uoguelph.ca]

On Being A Good Cultist, Rule #2:
Avoid needless embarrassment. Practice the correct pronounciation of your god's name in the privacy of your room before chanting it in public. Flash cards are often helpful.

[Michael A Porter, maporter@uoguelph.ca]

"No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned."

[Paul Valery]

"Esthetic luck is the major argument in favor of working through a process of revising a piece of writing through many drafts. If you're a supremely talented artist and you hit a very lucky day, then maybe you can write a poem or story or chapter of a novel that needs no revision. If you're a regular writer with your appointed portion of esthetic luck, you'll need to come at the piece again and again. I like to think of revision as a form of self-forgiveness; you can allow yourself mistakes and shortcomings in your writing because you know you're coming back later to improve it. Revision is the way you cope with the bad luck that made your writing less than brilliant this morning. Revision is the hope you hold out for yourself to make something beautiful tomorrow though you didn't quite manage it today."

[David Huddle]

When you are out of whack, the best thing to do is to order more whack.

[D. Jacquet]

In science, it doesn't matter if you're wrong, so long as you're not stupid. In business, it doesn't matter if you're stupid, so long as you're not wrong.

[Seen in Jeff Meyer's Quote List]

"The really nifty questions in aesthetics--like 'If a copy of Hamlet and a copy of a dreadful mystery novel are both on a desert island with no one to read them, is one still a better book than the other?' or James Joyce's 'If a man hacking in anger at a piece of wood by accident carves out the image of a cow, can it be a work of art?" --all such metaphysical questions ultimately relate to the effect on the appreciator or to the intention of the creator in regard to an object of art."

[Rust Hills, Writing in general and the short story in particular]

"Experimental fiction, let's face it, usually means fiction that really isn't fiction. [...] To say, 'Oh, boy, we've got a whole "new" kind of fiction, the idea of it is nothing happens,' is to deny fiction its own meaning. It's like saying, 'We've got this neat new shade of red--green!' Why call it fiction at all? Call it something else. 'Green writing,' say. Or 'FAIP,' short for Fooling Around In Prose."

[Rust Hills, Writing in general and the short story in particular]

"Well," Brahma said, "even after ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser, but an intelligent man requires only two thousand five hundred."

[The Mahabharata]

"I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose--even bad prose--that is eternal."

[Anthony Burgess, Playboy Interview, September 1974]

"Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place."

[Vladimir Nabokov, Playboy Interview, January 1964]

Eat, drink, dance, and lie,
Love the lusty midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do).

["The Flaw in Paganism", Dorothy Parker]

"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right."

[Donald Norman]

To keep silent and act wise
Still not as good as drinking sake
Getting drunk and weeping.

[Otomo no Tabito (665-731)]

Dave Barry's "1986 in Review" -- June 29th:
Eight concerned parents in rural Georgia sue the local school district for teaching their children the alphabet, which can be used to form dirty words.
witzelsucht (vit'sel-zoocht) [Ger.]
"A mental condition characteristic of frontal lobe lesions and marked by the making of poor jokes and puns and the telling of pointless stories, at which the patient himself is intensely amused."

[Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary, 26th ed.]

"Rely not on the teacher/person, but on the teaching. Rely not on the words of the teaching, but on the spirit of the words. Rely not on theory, but on experience.Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. Do not believe anything because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."

[Kalama Sutra, (6th cent BC)]

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