For a nation which has an almost evil reputation for bustle, bustle, bustle, and rush, rush, rush, we spend an enormous amount of time standing around in line in front of windows, just waiting.
Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.
Anyone will be glad to admit that he knows nothing about beagling, or the Chinese stock market, or ballistics, but there is not a man or woman alive who does not claim to know how to cure hiccoughs.
My first big mistake was made when, in a moment of weakness, I consented to learn the game; for a man who can frankly say "I do not play bridge" is allowed to go over in the corner and run the pianola by himself, while the poor neophyte, no matter how much he may protest that he isn't "at all a good player, in fact I'm perfectly rotten," is never believed, but dragged into a game where it is discovered, too late, that he spoke the truth.
My only solution for the problem of habitual accidents is to stay in bed all day. Even then, there is always the chance that you will fall out.
In preparing the soil for planting, you will need several tools. Dynamite would be a beautiful thing to use, but it would have a tendency to get the dirt into the front-hall and track up the stairs.
Even nowadays a man can't step up and kill a woman without feeling just a bit unchivalrous.
A child of three cannot raise its chubby fist to its mouth to remove a piece of carpet which it is through eating, without being made the subject of a psychological seminar of child-welfare experts, and written up, along with five hundred other children of three who have put their hands to their mouths for the same reason.
We are constantly being surprised that people did things well before we were born. We are constantly remarking on the fact that things are done well by people other than ourselves. "The Japanese are a remarkable little people," we say, as if we were doing them a favor. "He is an Arab, but you ought to hear him play the zither." Why "but"?
There are several ways to apportion the family income, all of them unsatisfactory.
I never knew anyone yet who got up at six who did anything more useful between that time and breakfast than banging a tennis ballup against the side of the house, waiting for the more civilized members of the party to get up.
If you think that you have caught a cold, call in a good doctor. Call in three good doctors and play bridge.
If only those old walls could talk...how boring they would be.
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
There is no doubt that every healthy, normal boy...should own a dog at some time in his life, preferably between the ages of forty-five and fifty.
I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author.
I can't bring myself to say, 'Well, I guess I'll be toddling along.' It isn't that I can't toddle. It's just that I can't guess I'll toddle.
Every boy should have two things: a dog and a mother who lets him have one
It is rather to be chosen than great riches, unless I have omitted something from the quotation.
When we think back to our forefathers, with their sedentary lives of forest-chopping, railroad-building, fortune-founding, their fox-hunting and Indian taming, their prancing about in the mazurka and the polka, with their coattails flying and their bustles bouncing, to say nothing of their all-day sessions with the port and straight bourbon,... we must realize that we are a nation, not of neurasthenics, but of sissies and slow-motion sports.
One cubic foot less of space and it would have constituted adultery.
Work is a form of nervousness.
I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school was taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen--but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!
Sunday morning may be cheery enough, with its extra cup of coffee and litter of Sunday newspapers, but there is always hanging over it the ominous threat of 3 P.M., when the sun gets around to the back windows and life stops dead in its tracks.
Birds which are the same color as the foliage in which they nest are less likely to be disturbed by other birds who want to drop in and chat, and therefore last longer.
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