Suzanne: “Rob, don’t talk to me when I’m at my wits’ end."
Rob (to Tina): "… Is Suzanne ever at her wits’ beginning?”
Tina: “It’s a very narrow window of opportunity…"
“Tina’s Groove” comic strip in Ottawa Citizen March 9, 2004
“She could sing like a Florence nightingale.”
Samuel Goldwyn, according to Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #2 (Oct.-Nov. 2002) [I can’t find any independent confirmation that he ever said it but if not he missed an opportunity… to crib from Peter Pan creator James M. Barrie, who said: “I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not, it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.” (See https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_m_barrie_131580)]
In the National Post I describe the new experience of trying to bowl after watching an instructional video, which turned out to be sort of like golf in its comic disaster.
“It ain’t what a man don’t know as makes him a fool, but what he does know that ain’t so.”
The “homely wisdom of Josh Billings (1818-1885)” quoted in Daniel Boorstin Cleopatra’s Nose
“If at first you don’t succeed, hide the evidence.”
My sister
“that was like trying to teach a goldfish how to play basketball over the phone.”
Somebody posting as “TouchOGray” June 25 2008 (in an online thread about whether it’s OK to leave a bicycle in an unheated shed for the winter)
“It takes the nerve of a robber’s horse, as a Newfoundlander might say…”
Maclean’s Nov. 9, 1998 [I did not record the author’s name]
“Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.”
W.C. Fields (I have encountered other variants but this one is the earliest I’ve seen)