"I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh, not deprived but rather underprivileged). Then they told me that underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary."
Jules Feiffer
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped."
Elbert Hubbard
"If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia."
Thomas Szasz
"Amuse your friends and annoy your enemies."
anonymous
"Your ego will destroy you."
The Ataris
"It's better to know useless things than to know nothing."
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
"Forbede us thyng,
and that desiren we."
Chaucer, "The Wife of Bath's Tale"
"If I can think of it, it isn't what I want."
Randall Jarrell, "Sick Child"
"We exaggerate the sexual appetite in ourselves to take the place of the love we inadequately feel."
Graham Greene, Notes on Turgenev
"I hate that fatuousness of a mind that excuses what it explains... and that analyzes itself instead of repenting."
Benjamin Constant
'Arthur and Morgause [sic] had Mordred after the hideous mistake of a night together without making some of those important checks like, "Who did you say your mother was?"'
Dr. Larrington (stolen from someone’s plan file)
"Channel 4 in merry old England is about to launch a series on the Kama Sutra, but, get this, the emphasis is on revealing how it is NOT just about sex. Uh-huh. But we adore the name of the three-part special - 'Position Impossible.'"
brazenhussies.com
"Wow, you're the reason they invented words like 'postal,' aren't you?"
Perryn, about a new, high-strung computer center employee
"A life devoted to science has become as much a stewardship as holy orders or knighthood or public office or medicine."
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"Contemporary historians... record that Archimedes boasted to King Hieron II of his native Syracuse, 'Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth.' For a moment, let us treat this sentence not only as unbeatable advertising copy for the principle of the lever but also as the earliest recorded grant application in physics."
Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge
"Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of of fiction; but though my father was an avid reader, he knew that writing requires those tedious virtues, patience and application, that it is a solitary occupation with a public which exists only in the writer's imagination. On the other hand the theatre brought a ready-made solution to his problems. The actor is spared the horrors of creation: he his handed an imaginary universe in which a special has been created for him; he occupies that place in the flesh, before an audience of flesh and blood."
Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
"Friends are the rare people who ask how you are and then wait to hear the answer."
Ed Cunningham
"There is a crack in everything - but that's how the light gets in."
Leonard Cohen, courtesy of Kalman
"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous."
Ingrid Bergman
On making slurpees from concentrate juice cans:
"They're good but they're kind of strong, so you have to dilute them with a lot of alcohol."
’Nia
"I'm in favor of love as long as it doesn't happen when 'The Simpsons' is on television."
Anita, age 6
"Ho-kemon. So, is that fashionable with all the prostitutes these days?"
Keith
"...[R]evolutionary achievements in the arts, in the sciences, and in moral and political thought typically occur when somebody realizes that two or more of our vocabularies are interfering with each other... [Y]oung German theology students of the late eighteenth century - like Hegel and Holderlin - found that the vocabulary in which they worshiped Jesus was getting in the way of the vocabulary in which they worshiped the Greeks."
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On changing entire paradigms in thought a la the French Revolution:
"[This philosophy] says things like 'try thinking of it this way' - or more specifically, 'try to ignore the apparently futile traditional questions by substituting these following new and possibly interesting questions.'"
Richard Rorty, The Contingency of Language
On Jeannette's ex-boyfriend:
Jeannette: I'm stupid because I still wanna sleep with him.
Eve: There's always necrophilia. Kill him for being stupid, and then keep him around for a while.
Jeannette: Ewwww. He'll smell.
Eve: You need a big fridge.
"Critics, in their secret hearts, love continuities, but he who lives with continuity alone cannot be a poet."
Harold Bloom
"Our room is just a cesspool of porn."
Jennifer
From theonion.com:
Headline: "Apathy Outpacing Lust As Leading U.S. State Of Mind"
from the "Savage Love" column
"I have been into guys in drag since I was 9. (Damn you, Bugs Bunny!)"
"Love myself better than you--
I know it's wrong, but what should I do?...
It is now time to make it unclear,
To write off lines that don't make sense."
Nirvana