Mark Dery > Quotes

“I wanted to have my own bookstore until I worked in one," [Edward Gorey] reflected in 1998. "Then I thought I'd be a librarian until I met some crazy ones.”
― Mark Dery, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

“Every Anglophile has his own private England which is, of course, unrecognizable to the English.”
― Mark Dery, England My England: Anglophilia Explained

“His day-to-day life was fairly frivolous and lazy and laid-back. It was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a bunch of cats hanging on his shoulders and maybe reading a book at the same time or doing a crossword puzzle." - Ken Morton, Edward Gorey's first cousin once removed, on Gorey's daily routines.”
― Mark Dery, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

“Of course, from an absurdist perspective, all deaths are a punch line: the good news is, you're born; the bad news is, you die. Life is a death sentence.”
― Mark Dery, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

“... children, in Gorey stories, are an endangered species.”
― Mark Dery, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

“If religion is the opiate of the masses and Marxism the opiate of the intellectual, then cyberspace is the opiate of the twenty-first-century schizoid man, polarized between mind and body.”
― Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century

“Only now are art critics, scholars of children’s literature, historians of book-cover design and commercial illustration, and chroniclers of the gay experience in postwar America waking up to the fact that Gorey is a critically neglected genius. His consummately original vision--expressed in virtuosic illustrations and poetic texts but articulated with equal verve in book-jacket design, verse plays, puppet shows, and costumes and sets for ballets and Broadway productions--has earned him a place in the history of American art and letters.”
― Mark Dery , Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

“…the army, again demonstrating the discernment for which it is universally admired, put PFC Gorey’s record-breaking IQ to good use: he was dispatched to Dugway Proving Ground, an army base in the Great Salt Lake Desert, to sit out the rest of the war as a company clerk.”
― Mark Dery, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

“With Gorey, never getting there is half the fun.”
― Mark Dery, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey