“’Your chief trouble,’ he [a mid-rank gangster to the narrator, Archie Goodwin] said, not offensively, ‘is that you think you’ve got a sense of humor. It confuses people, and you ought to get over it. Things strike you as funny.... but someday something that you think is funny will blow your g****m head right off your shoulders.’ Only after he had gone did it occur to me that that wouldn’t prove it wasn’t funny.”
Rex Stout In the Best Families
“One can always tell when one is getting old and serious by the way that holidays seem to interfere with one’s work.”
“Bob Edwards in the Calgary Eye Opener, 1913” quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail August 5, 2002
“They were like cockroaches. It wasn’t what they ate or carried off, it was what they fell into and ruined.”
Bob Uecker and Mickey Herskowitz Catcher in the Wry (re losing to the hapless New York Mets in 1964)
“Rome is burning, Mr. Minister. Could we at least hear a sympathetic tune on the fiddle?”
A Financial Post editorial involving a forgotten B.C. minister and a forgotten issue, quoted in British Columbia Report November 10, 1997
In my latest Nstional Post column I say the meaning of life is not to be found in the latest gadget even if it is a watch that can tell you your blood oxygen level every three seconds.
“The headwaiter of an elegant restaurant recoiled in disgust as a man in boots, torn jeans and a leather jacket approached him. ‘Hey, man,’ he said, ‘where’s the bathroom?’ ‘Go down the hall and turn left,’ replied the headwaiter. ‘When you see the sign marked “Gentlemen,” pay no attention to it and go right on in.’”
From the Jokesmith, cited in Reader’s Digest, April 1997, quoted in “Quotes, Notes and Anecdotes (The Write File Quarterly)” Spring 1997
“In opposition to his enervated gang of outcast wrecks you are able to marshal the flower and strength of all Italy.”
Cicero Selected Political Speeches [referring on the one hand to Catalina and on the other to the people of Rome]
“King of Swamp Castle: When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built one all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.”
Monty Python and the Holy Grail quoted on www.imdb.com