“Hurry! I never hurry. I have no time to hurry.”
“Igor Stravinsky, responding to his publisher’s request that he hurry his completion of a composition” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail August 6, 2004
“Thanks a lot, gentlemen, and don’t let the doorknob hit you in the butt.”
Tom Wolfe The Right Stuff (I don't claim he invented this wonderful expression but it's where I first encountered it)
“Watching [Nick] Faldo and [Curtis] Strange is like watching two glaciers at work.”
TV announcer re the Ryder Cup on Sunday July 24, 1995, 17th hole
“’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.