witty

Trying to be witty leads to lying, more or less.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)

quotations

He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.

Rudyard Kipling, “The Finest Story in the World” (1893)

peel

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

Clifton Fadiman, Reader’s Digest (1956)

go

Go, and never darken my towels again.

Groucho Marx, Duck Soup (1933)

so dull

Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.

Clive James, “Brezhnev: A State of Boredom” (1978)

nagging

Nagging is the repetition of unpalatable truths.

Edith Summerskill, speech to the Married Women’s Association (1960)

hyphen

One must regard the hyphen as a blemish to be avoided wherever possible.

Winston Churchill, in a letter to Eddie Marsh (1934)

fatherhood

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

Note: I’m sorry I don’t have the source for this quote yet—as a rule, I try not to post quotes without the full and correct info, but I wanted to post this one in time for Father’s Day. I read it as a kid, and had to get my dad to explain it to me. I’ll  keep looking and add the citation as soon as I can!

tradition

The youth of America is their oldest tradition.

Oscar Wilde, “A Woman of No Importance” (1893)

super dumb

Make no mistake about it, you are dumb. You’re a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people. I was there. We all were there. You’re barely functional. There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups, but the screw-ups, they’re a-coming for ya. It’s a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.

Aaron Sorkin, Syracuse Commencement Address (2012)

exquisite

…the exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.

Oscar Wilde, “Primavera,” Pall Mall Gazette (1890)

commas

From one casual of mine he picked this sentence. ‘After dinner, the men moved into the living room.’ I explained to the professor that this was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. There must, as we know, be a comma after every move, made by men, on this earth.

James Thurber, memo to The New Yorker (1959);

Note: This is a variant of a similar quote Thurber used in The Years with Ross (1957). Harold Ross was the editor of The New Yorker at the time and well-known for his overuse of commas.

exaggeration

Trenton was often referred to as a pretty village, which was an exaggeration.

David McCullough, 1776 (2005)

Note: I’m pretty sure McCullough didn’t mean this to be as funny as I found it.

great gray beast

The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.

Clive Barker, The Thief of Always (1992)