“In the summer of 1928, Aleck Woollcott invited Harpo Marx to spend the summer with him on the French Riviera. Harpo refused, protesting, ‘I can think of forty better places to spend the summer, all of them on Long Island in a hammock.’
(An interesting postscript: On Saturday, May 19, Aleck Woollcott, Beatrice Kaufman, novelist Alice Duer Miller, and Harpo sailed for Europe.)”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”
Robert Benchley
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
“In 1935 Broun made this statement: ‘Nobody need worry any more that Washington is going left. Indeed, nobody need worry that the Washington of today is going anywhere.'”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor
“Speaking about reviewers who seemed unable to render honest, objective critiques on the works of such writers as had won the Nobel Prize, Miss Ferber described them as ‘awestruck by the Nobelity.'”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“Descent, n. Going lower. Popularly used to indicated the existing generation is a peg worse that than which fathered it. Thus one Darwin justly discourses upon the superiority of the ancestral baboon in a melancholy essay, called ‘The Descent of Man.’”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
“A prose satire by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), written in 1697 and published in 1704. The complete title, A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought Last Friday, between the Ancient and Modern Books in St. James’s Library, more or less explains the gist of the piece. Swift was disinterestedly mocking the contemporary debate as to the relative merits of the ancient and modern authors. In Swift’s fantasy, Plato, Homer, Euclid, and Virgil are ranged against moderns such as Dryden, Hobbes, Milton, and Descartes. The work ends while the outcome is still uncertain.
‘Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders
do generally discover everybody’s face but their own’”
Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, preface
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“Telescope, n. A device having a relation to the eye similar to that of the telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a multitude of needless details. Luckily it is unprovided with a bell summoning us to the sacrifice.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
“It is becoming painfully evident that Mr. James has written himself out as far as the international novel is concerned, and probably as far as any kind of novel-writing is concerned.”
William Morton Payne, The Dial, 1884
“James’ denatured people are only the equivalent in fiction of those egg-faced, black-haired ladies who sit and sit in the Japanese colour-prints…. These people cleared for artistic treatment never make lusty love, never go to angry war, never shout at an election or perspire at poker.”
H.G. Wells, Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Ants of the Devil, and the Last Trump 1915
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
“Pantheism: The doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to the doctrine that God is everything.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
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