Anything but Quotidian: Quotes, phrases, and one poem
“To love means this:
to run
into the depths of a yard and,
till the rook-black night,
chop wood with a shining axe,
giving full play to one’s strength.” (Mayakovsky)
“We’ve died on the fields of the everyday’ – an echo of Mayakovsky’s suicide note of 1930 (‘The boat of love ran aground on the everyday’).” Daniil Kharms LRB
‘What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything.’ Philip Roth (Human Stain)
On the House of Lords: “…a body of five hundred men chosen at random from amongst the unemployed” – David Llyod George, British PM from 1916 to 1922
“We seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” (Sir John Seeley on Britain’s conquests)
‘The Ka‘bah is a cube because the world is a sphere’ – Islamica Magazine
Nation – “A group of people united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors” – J.E. Brown
Cracked pistachio green walls.. (Urvashi Butalia – describing her uncle’s house in Lahore in the story, Ranamama)
No stone unthrown, Encyclopedic viciousness (Joe Queenan accuses Kitty Kelley of those sins in his review of Kelley’s book on Nancy Reagan)
Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies? (Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing)
“If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys,” said Jim Dunn. (NY Times article on Hedge Fund Managers or the new Robber Barons) Likewise – if you pay a lot, you pay a lot.
About as original as a Xerox machine (Hindustan Times)
John Stuart Mill to John Stewart; Madison to Madison Avenue (James Fishkin, on democracy)
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing poorly. (D.K. Chesterton)
It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics. (George Bernard Shaw)
…the primary risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease is age. (NY Times, Wikipedia)
“The American people live in a country where they can have almost anything they want. And my regret is that it seems that they don’t want much of anything at all.” (Nader quoting Eugene Debs in a conversation with Jeffrey Rosen)
“All models are wrong. Some models are useful.” George Box
“We might call this the information age but I consider that complete bullshit. What is the information?” Keith Jarrett. (Full quote – Of what value is it if it doesn’t attach itself to something? In the future, I can foresee an audience that literally thinks all music is equal, and there’s no such things as good or bad.)
‘Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad’.
