Archive

Quotes

When I do a show, the whole show revolves around me, and if I don’t show up, they can just forget it.

—Ethel Merman, c. 1955

Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

—Marcel Proust, c. 1922

Life is no way to treat an animal.

—Kurt Vonnegut, 2005

New things are always ugly.

—Willa Cather, 1921

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

Democracy cannot be static. Whatever is static is dead.

—Eleanor Roosevelt, 1942

When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.

—St. Jerome, 395

Once a woman has lost her chastity she will shrink from nothing.

—Tacitus, c. 100

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

—Frank Zappa, 1989

Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

—H.L. Mencken, 1919

A woman’s greatest glory is to be little talked about by men, whether for good or ill.

—Pericles, c. 450 BC