“An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he’d have someone to look up to.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he’d have someone to look up to.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“Never despise fashion. It’s what we have instead of God.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
“Godwin earnestly sticks by her characters… The only trouble is, like the people next door, they’re nice but not very interesting.”
Saturday Review
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“Award Show: Mechanism by which the members of a given profession attempt to give themselves the attributes of the pre-modern ruling classes—the military, aristocracy and priesthood—by assigning various orders, decorations, and medals to each other.
These shows are superficial expressions of corporatism. As with the pre-modern classes, their awards relate principally to relationships within the profession. Each time the words “I want to thank” are used by someone being decorated, they indicate a relationship based on power. The awards have little to do with the corporation’s relationship to the outside world—what you might call the public—or for that matter with quality.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion
“Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes
Tagged drama/theater, humor, literary oddities
“Demise for Death. Usually said of a person of note. Demise means the lapse, as by death, of some authority, distinction, or privilege, which passes to another than the one that held it; as the demise of the Crown.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion
“There are three reasons for becoming a writer. The first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; and the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings.”
Excerpted from: Sherrin, Ned, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations. New York: Oxford University Press. 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes
Tagged humor, lgbtq history, literary oddities
“Aspen Institute: A supermarket of conventional wisdom for middle-level executives. Corporate life, particularly for those not on the fast track, has all the bureaucratic pitfalls of directionless boredom. To distract these confused but loyal servants from what Thoreau called their ‘lives of quiet desperation,’ they are periodically shipped off to rest camps where, over the period of a few days, they are taught important things which can change their lives, their company, the world. Failing that, the experience may help them hold on a bit longer.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
Posted in Quotes, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion
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