“I’m the guy who goes out in a rowboat after Moby Dick and brings along the tartar sauce.”
J.C. Watts of the Ottawa Rough Riders before the 1981 Grey Cup, quoted in Ottawa Citizen Dec. 20, 1998
“A cannibal is someone who gets fed up with people.”
#9 in “Gilbert’s Top 10 More Bad Puns” in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #7 (June 2003)
“Remember: blue side up.”
Some “earthy words of wisdom” from a group of amateur pilots quoted by Michael Leo Donovan in Reader’s Digest Canadian Edition September 2005.
“Please leave your values at the front desk.”
A sign in a Paris hotel elevator, part of a collection of accidental mistranslations into English, quoted by Frances Farrell in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 # 3 (Dec. 2001)
Re a scene in Romeo and Juliet “That’s not ‘realistic,’ of course: in whatever real life may be, lovers don’t start cooing in sonnet form.”
Northrop Frye (I think in a book Frye on Shakespeare but my note to myself on the subject was cryptic)
“a man whose affection for the arts knows all bounds…”
Scott Feschuk in Maclean’s May 14, 2007 (the actual target was Stephen Harper)
“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”
James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion (this quotation, verbatim or slightly modified, has been misattributed to others including Robert Oppenheimer)
“I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.”
Franklin Roosevelt, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail October 3, 2008