The Last Word

By Emily Ghods-Esfahani | Thursday, November 9, 2006

Darling, the legs aren’t so beautiful, I just know what to do with them.
—Marlene Dietrich

There is no such thing as beauty, especially in the human face. So many women I’m told are beautiful...hell it’s like looking at a soup bowl.
—Charles Bukowski

If you can make a girl laugh, you can make her do anything.
—Marilyn Monroe

You dress elegant women. You dress sophisticated women. I dress sluts.
—Gianni Versace

The only thing my old man ever gave me was a beating.
—Sunny Liston

There’s nothing glorious in dying. Anyone can do it.
—Johnny Rotten

Swans sing before they die - ‘twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
—W.H. Auden

Death rattles in my throat like a marble.
—Anne Sexton

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
—Robert Graves

A recent police study found that you’re much more likely to get shot by a fat cop if you run.
—Dennis Miller

It’s a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president except me.
—Barry Goldwater

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
—Samuel Johnson

Things are never so bad they can’t be made worse.
—Humphrey Bogart

I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom.
—George W. Bush

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
—H.L. Mencken

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
—Groucho Marx

The cruelty of ideas lies in the assumption that human beings can be bent to fit them.
—Paul Johnson

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.
—Samuel Johnson

When I was young, I was told: ‘You’ll see, when you’re fifty.’ I am fifty and I haven’t seen a thing.
—Eric Satie

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
—Vladimir Nabokov

The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of the will, intelligence, and spirit.
—Whittaker Chambers

One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we’ve developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.
—Malcom Muggeridge

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.
—Immanuel Kant

I am sorry that I ever made them.
—God, on Man

He knew that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
—Cormac McCarthy

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sense we still are.
—C.S Lewis

Once upon a time there was a lion that lived in Africa with all the other lions. The other lions were bad lions and every day they ate zebras and wildebeests and every kind of antelope. Sometimes the bad lions ate people too. They ate Swahilis, Umbulus and Wandorobos an they especially liked to eat Hindu traders. All Hindu traders are very fat and delicious to a lion.
But this lion, that we love because he was so good, had wings on his back. Because he had wings on his back the other lions made fun of him.
—Ernest Hemingway

The Last Word

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