“I won’t say ours was a tough high school, but we had our own coroner.”
-Lenny Bruce
I love quotations, and I found the perfect book. It’s called “Garner’s Quotations: A Modern Miscellany,” by Dwight Garner, and it’s a hoot. It’s a lot more fun than the old “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.”
Here are some of my favorite quotes from Garner’s Quotations:
1) “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”
-Dorothy Parker
2) “Fox News did to our parents what they thought video games would do to us.”
-Ryan Scott on Twitter
3) “Perhaps it would be a good idea for public statues to be made with disposable heads that can be changed with every change of popular fashion.”
-Auberon Waugh, “The Diaries of Auberon Waugh”
4) “I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.”
-Nancy Mitford, “Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford”
5) “I like children–fried.”
-W.C. Fields
6) “If you can’t annoy somebody…there’s little point in writing.”
-Kingsley Amis
7) “My dad was the town drunk. Usually that’s not so bad, but New York City?”
-Henny Youngman
8) “An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.”
-Dylan Thomas
9) “Thank you for your invitation to host a fundraising dinner in the private room of a top London restaurant. I would rather die.”
-Harold Pinter
10) “You know massa, Bugs Bunny wasn’t nothing but Br’er Rabbit with a better agent.”
-Paul Beatty, “The Sellout”
11) “After four movies, three concerts and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events.”
-Lorrie Moore, “How To Be the Other Woman”
12) “That was some weird shit.”
-George W. Bush on Donald Trump’s inauguration speech
13) “Elvis may have been the King of rock ‘n’ roll, but I am the Queen.”
-Little Richard
14) “Why do born-again people make you wish they’d never been born the first time?”
-Katharine Whitehorn
15) “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”
-Gore Vidal
16) “It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.”
-Dorothy Parker
17) “One square foot less and it would be adulterous.”
-Robert Benchley on the tiny office he shared with Dorothy Parker
18) “Show me a woman who cries when trees lose their leaves in autumn and I’ll show you a real asshole.”
-Nora Ephron
19) “He’s so dumb he thinks cunnilingus is an Irish airline.”
-Arno Schmidt
20) “Say what you will about Charles Manson; he really empowered women to pursue excellence in traditionally male-dominated fields.”
-Caitlin Flanagan in “The Atlantic”
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