Whitney Archibald > Whitney's Quotes

“...the divided world of Aspen, where locals with a sense of entitlement were pitted against developers with a sense of condominiums.”
― Steve Martin

“The little girls were wearing black party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were. ”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“We each carry our own designated end within us, our very own death ripening at its own rate inside of us. There are insignificant people who are harboring unawares the grandeur of large deaths. We carry it in us like a darkening fruit. It opens and spills out. That is death.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics

“It was a pointed sigh, as sighs sometimes are, not one cast into the air to evaporate, but one calculated to descend, precisely and with great effect, on a target.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love Over Scotland

“I can't sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature. I can't help it.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

“Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was not a lazy man, but it was remarkable to reflect how most men imagined that things like tea and food would simply appear if they waited long enough. There would always be a woman in the background--a mother, a girlfriend, a wife--who would ensure that those needs would be met.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

“Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it's been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week--a miracle, people say, as if they've been educated from greeting cards.”
― Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

“Dewey Hall was the only building on campus not made of brick, and the tornado came for it in absolute maturity, no umbilical growth now but a strong slender lady hip-walking through campus--past the science hall, past English, jumping Old Main and the library with deliberate grace and lighting on the shallow rookf of Dewey, where Dad toiled alone.”
― Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

“They never say to you, 'What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?' Instead, they demand 'How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much money does his father make?' Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry / آنتوان دوسنت اگزوپري

“When we slid the body into the grave, we both were shaken to the core. The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig.”
― E. B. White

“One solution ... for the house of the future is to have a place called a ‘dirty room.’ This would be equipped with appliances for all cleaning problems, and into it would be dumped everything dirty. But in most American homes the way to have a dirty room is to have a small boy; that’s the way we worked it for a number of happy years.”
― E. B. White

“I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.”
― E.B. White

“I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead--and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and then they would be honest so much earlier.”
― Mark Twain

“The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. (Written in 1949, 22 years before the World Trade Center was completed.)”
― E.B. White, Essays of E.B. White

“Money isn't always the best motivator. If you leave a $50 check after dinner with friends, you don't increase the probability of being invited back. ”
― Yochai Benkler

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“A good cook can produce a good dish from any old scrawnbag of a chook.”
― Simon Hopkinson

“...when a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor.”
― William Strunk/E.B. White

“Instead of announcing what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so.”
― William Strunk/E.B. White

“We all know that it is women who make the decisions, but we have to let men think that the decisions are theirs. It is an act of kindness on the part of women.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Full Cupboard of Life

“She had a taste for sugar, however, and this meant that a doughnut or a cake might follow the sandwich. She was a traditionally built lady, after all, and she did not have to worry about dress size, unlike those poor, neurotic people who were always looking in mirrors and thinking that they were too big. What was too big, anyway? Who was to tell another person what size they should be? It was a form of dictatorship, by the thin, and she was not having any of it. If these thin people became any more insistent, then the more generously sized people would just have to sit on them. Yes, that would teach them! Hah!”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Morality for Beautiful Girls

“Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.”
― William Strunk/E.B. White

“Rather, very, little, pretty -- these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. The constant use of the adjective little (except to indicate size) is particularly debilitating; we should all try to do a little better, we should all be very watchful of this rule, for it is a rather important one, and we are pretty sure to violate it now and then. ”
― William Strunk/E.B. White

“Avoid fancy words....If you admire fancy words, if every sky is beauteous, every blonde curvaceous, every intelligent child prodigious, if you are tickled by discombobulate, you will have a bad time. Reminder 14.”
― William Strunk

“Never call a stomach a tummy without good reason.”
― William Strunk/E.B. White, The Elements of Style

“The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”
― T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent: An Essay

“I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“Feeling that Peter was on his way back, the Neverland had again woke into life. We ought to use the pluperfect and say wakened, but woke is better and was always used by Peter.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina