Ed > Ed's Quotes

“Books have been vastly important in my life - as both a reader and a writer. I've learned that the great gift of literature is that someone else's tale becomes a chapter of your story. And I still feel books are the best art form for making contact with another consciousness, which is why reading a good book by yourself never feels lonely.”
― Bob Smith, Treehab: Tales from My Natural, Wild Life

“Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“What we, the audience, bring when we come to the theater - what we might be feeling that day. What might have happened to us. That is a big part of what a play is.”
― Richard Nelson, Sweet and Sad

“It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.”
― Mark Twain

“It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.”
― Stephen Fry, The Liar

“I disappeared in her and she, wondering where I went, left.”
― Will Eno, Thom Pain

“What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"Ask a glass of water!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“My experience of men had long ago taught me that one of the surest ways of begetting an enemy was to do some stranger an act of kindness which should lay upon him the irritating sense of an obligation.”
― Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition

“A man who goes around with a prophecy-gun ought never to get discouraged: if he will keep up his heart and fire at everything he sees, he is bound to hit something by and by.”
― Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition

“There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.”
― Mark Twain

“I could not really complain, because he had only given me his word of honor as security; I ought to have required of him something substantial.”
― Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition

“The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

“It is comfortable to live in the belief that you are great, though your greatness is latent. ”
― Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience

“His hair was short and parted accurately in the middle, and he had all the look of an American person who would be likely to begin his signature with an initial, and spell his middle name out.”
― Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad

“We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.”
― Mark Twain

“We have reached a little altitude where we may look down upon the Indian Thugs with a complacent shudder; and we may even hope for a day, many centuries hence, when our posterity will look down upon us in the same way.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get almost all our wonders at second hand.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.”
― Mark Twain

“If a man has no vices, he's in great danger of making vices out of his virtues, and there's a spectacle. We've all seen them: men who were monsters of philanthropy and women who were dragons of purity. ... No, no - nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modesly around it.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Matchmaker

“Premonitions of becomings, of joy and apotheosis bore me laughing through my days.”
― Edgar Oliver

“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really unbiassed opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always valueless.”
― Oscar Wilde, Criticism and Reviews

“I must confess that most modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless knowledge in a form that no one can understand”
― Oscar Wilde, Criticism and Reviews

“If you can pick the baby up without him squirting our of your hands like a bar of soap in the shower, he's not oiled up enough.”
― James Lileks, Mommy Knows Worst: Highlights from the Golden Age of Bad Parenting Advice

“If Mother had to be told not to shove the entire brick of Ivory up Junior's hindquarters, constipation is the least of his problems.”
― James Lileks, Mommy Knows Worst: Highlights from the Golden Age of Bad Parenting Advice

“Look. Folks. It's simple. If you have poor taste in decorating, don't go nuts in the entryway. Wait until your guests are inside before you spring something unusual on them.”
― James Lileks, Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s

“In the early '70s, the nation was afflicted with incurable pattern viruses - small microbes that reproduced and multiplied from a single swatch left on a sofa, and soon covered an entire room.”
― James Lileks, Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s

“What's the deal with putting animal feet on tubs? It's like insisting that all pianos should have tails, or dinner tables should have scrotal sacs. One of the things we like about tubs is their immobility, their general disinclination to bolt out of the room, scramble down the stairs, and make for the woods in a blind feral panic.”
― James Lileks, Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s

“There are readings—of the same text—that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are—believe it—impersonal readings—where the mind's eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind's ear hears them sing and sing.

Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark—readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“It wasn't that I was tired of life, really - just my own. Other people's lives seemed perfectly worthwhile, and only the logistical difficultly of assuming them and the likelihood of being caught kept me from concocting some sort of swap.”
― James Lileks, Falling Up the Stairs