“What has happened to architecture since the Second World War that the only passers-by who can contemplate it without pain are those equipped with a white stick and a dog?”
Bernard Levin
The Times, 1983
“The most serious doubt that has been thrown on the authenticity of the biblical miracles is the fact that most of the witnesses in regard to them were fishermen.”
Arthur Binstead
Pitcher’s Proverbs, 1909
“If any reader of this book is in the grip of some habit of which he is deeply ashamed, I advise him not to give way to it in secret but to do it on television. No-one will pass him with averted gaze on the other side of the street. People will cross the road at the risk of losing their own lives in order to say, ‘We saw you on the telly.’”
Quentin Crisp
How to Become a Virgin, 1981
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
Attributed to Mark Twain
The Reader’s Digest, September 1939
“As fathers commonly go, it is seldom a misfortune to be fatherless; and considering the general run of sons, as seldom a misfortune to be childless.”
Lord Chesterfield
Letters, 1751
“Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.”
Oscar Wilde
An Ideal Husband, 1895
“A father is a banker provided by nature.”
Unknown
Quoted in The Oxford Book of Aphorisms, 1983
“What a dreadful thing it must be to have a dull father.”
Mary Mapes Dodge
Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates, 1865
The thing to remember about fathers is, they’re men.
A girl has to keep it in mind:
They are dragon-seekers, bent on improbable rescues.
Scratch any father, you find
Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors,
Believing change is a threat—
Like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle
It took such months to get.
Phyllis McGinley
Times Three, 1960
My brother-in-law, Sam, shared the following insight last night:
“PEZ is the Steven Seagal of candies…”
Oddly enough, I found myself nodding in agreement.
“Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did…”
“This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
Charles Darwin
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
(via Caterina Fake)
“Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he has been robbed.
“Most putts don’t drop. Most beef is tough. Most children grow up to be just people. Most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration.
“Most jobs are more often dull than otherwise… Life is like an old-time rail journey — delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed.
“The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.”
Jenkins Lloyd Jones
“Big Rock Candy Mountains”
Deseret News, June 12, 1973, A4
“Cynicism: an extension of ennui maintaining that not only are you bored, you are in a state of disbelief as well. And you cannot be convinced otherwise. More than a pose, it’s also a handy time saver. By deflating your companion’s enthusiasm, you can cut conversation in half.”
Lisa Birnbach
The Official Preppy Handbook, 1981
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Man and Superman, Epistle Dedicatory
“Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.”
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
Surprised by Joy, 1956
“I think that this feigning, this ceaseless pretense of interest in matters to me supremely boring, was what wore me out more than anything else. If the reader will picture himself, unarmed, shut up for thirteen weeks on end, night and day, in a society of fanatical golfers — or, if he is a golfer himself, let him substitute fishermen, theosophists, bimetallists, Baconians, or German undergraduates with a taste for autobiography — who all carry revolvers and will probably shoot him if he ever seems to lose interest in their conversation, he will have an idea of my school life.”
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
Surprised by Joy, 1956
“Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conquerer of disease or major motion picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the world ‘collectible’ as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success.”
Fran Lebowitz
Social Studies, 1981
The movie’s idea of parenthood is a familiar one, at once cautionary and comforting: having a child, it suggests, will wreck your life, but it will also make you a better person. (This notion, needless to say, is wildly narcissistic, absurdly melodramatic and unconscionably sentimental. It is not, however, altogether inaccurate.)
from A. O. Scott’s review of Matchstick Men,
The New York Times
“The fact that the inspectors have not yet come up with new evidence of Iraq’s WMD program could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq’s noncooperation.”
Donald Rumsfeld
Secretary of Defense
“The fact that we’ve never seen his horns or cloven hooves could be evidence, in and of itself, that George W. Bush is concealing the fact that he is Satan.”
Grettir Asmundarson
Nobody in Particular
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant…
“We…make the modern error of dignifying the Individual. We do everything we can to butter him up. We give him a name, assure him that he has certain inalienable rights, educate him, let him pass on his name to his brats and when he dies we give him a special hole in the ground…But after all, he’s only a seed, a bloom and a withering stalk among pressing billions. Your Individual is a pretty disgusting, vain, lewd little bastard…By God, he has only one right guaranteed to him in Nature, and that is the right to die and stink to Heaven.
Ross Lockridge (1914-1948)
quoted in Short Lives, 1980
I think someone needs to attend a “Sound of Music” sing-along and do a few verses of “My Favorite Things.”
The June 3, 2002, issue of Newsweek has a cover story entitled, “In Defense of Teen Girls” that discusses the current state of teen girls in light of two recent books, “Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls” and “Queen Bees and Wannabes.” This is an oversimplification on my part, I’m sure, but the books seem to portray most teen girls as mean-spirited and manipulative spoiled brats who “use backbiting, exclusion, rumors, name-calling, and manipulation to inflict physical pain on targeted victims.”
(Of course, that pretty much describes my life in Junior High School, too, although you’d have to add actual physical pain to the list since, as a boy, I didn’t have the luxury of non-violent nemeses.)
The Newsweek article tries to point out that there are a lot of teen girls who have avoided the pitfalls outlined in the books and who essentially have their heads screwed on straight. My favorite quote from one of these well-balanced “gamma girls” was:
“What on earth do we have to complain about? Everyone has at least one little thing, but compared to the rest of the world we are doing pretty dandy.”
Jennifer Teschler, 15
El Cajon, California
If nothing else, Jennifer’s use of the word “dandy” gives me hope for her generation.
Tiny Pineapple is the personal website of Grettir Asmundarson, single father of two tween girls, information security wonk, writer, film school drop-out, and actor (semi-retired).
