“When the locusts come, they devour everything.”

Bob Uecker and Mickey Herskowitz. Catcher in the Wry

“the immortal phrase ‘a comprehensive background of ignorance,’ a condition I suppose I exemplified at the time.”

This quotation comes from somebody named Zimmerman and the quoted phrase is from George Edison, his tutor at Trinity College, University of Toronto; alas my note to myself on its origin is otherwise incomplete.

In my latest National Post column I say the WE scandal must not put us to sleep with its characteristically Canadian dull murkiness.

“Marvellous, old cock! I never realized Malvolio could be played as a bore.”

“what Lawrence Olivier once wickedly said to Alec Guinness” according to Tom Carson in The Atlantic Monthly September 2004

"That is the worst idea... since Abraham Lincoln said, ‘I'm sick of kicking around the house all day, let's go take in a show.’"

Edmund Blackadder in Black Adder Goes Forth [it turns out he actually called it “the worst idea in the history of entertainment” according to https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0526713/characters/nm0000100 - such are the perils of checking quotations].

“I no longer think of it as [writer’s] block. I think that is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. If your wife locks you out of the house, you don’t have a problem with your door.”

Anne Lamott Some Instructions on Writing and Life (her point being that you’re not blocked from getting something out that is inside you, you’re empty)

“All in all, I cannot say enough good things about this candidate or recommend him too highly.”

Another in the “He's an extraordinary man” series of double-edged letter of recommendation phrases that is found in multiple places on the Internet; I do not know the origin.

Something has been “making you behave as if we were distant acquaintances and you were trying to increase the distance.”
One of the characters in P.G. Wodehouse Do Butlers Burgle Banks?