“You are so graceful and fine. Even when you are running from tigers you are like a ballerina who is running away from tigers.”
“When a mamma-turkey answers an invitation and she finds she has made a mistake in accepting it, she does as the mamma partridge does—remembers a previous engagement and goes limping and scrambling away, pretending to be very lame; and at the same time she is saying to her not-visible children, ” Lie low, keep still, don’t expose yourself; I shall be back soon as I have beguiled this shabby swindler out of the country.”
“Dear Victor: Wow. That … really got out of hand. I’m sending this cat in as a peace offering. I forgive you for all the stuff you wrote on the walls about my sister, and I’m going to just ignore all the stuff you wrote about my “giant ass” (turn cat over for rest) because I love you and you need me. Who else loves you enough to send you notes written on cats? Nobody, that’s who. Also, I stapled a picture of us from our wedding day to the cat’s left leg. Don’t we look happy? We can be that way again.”
“Brian kept the photograph inside an old Bible. He knew it would be safe there. Nobody ever opened it.”
“Honestly, I don’t understand Zen. It seems if you don’t answer properly, or if you are rude, people get enlightened.”
“If New York is the “city that never sleeps,” then Los Angeles is the “city that’s always passed out on the couch.”
“There’s no point in drinking if no one’s watching.”
“You remind me of an old cat I once had. Whenever he killed a mouse he would bring it into the drawing-room and lay it affectionately at my feet. I would reject the corpse with horror and turn him out, but back he would come with his loathsome gift. I simply couldn’t make him understand that he was not doing me a kindness. He thought highly of his mouse and it was beyond him to realize that I did not want it.
You are just the same with your chivalry. It’s very kind of you to keep offering me your dead mouse; but honestly I have no use for it. I won’t take favors just because I happen to be a female.”
“I shouldn’t believe anything I say if I were you. And that includes what I just told you.”
“Only that morning he had refused to eat his wholesome bread-and-milk on the seemingly frivolous ground that there was a frog in it. Older and wiser and better people had told him that there could not possibly be a frog in his bread-and-milk and that he was not to talk nonsense; he continued, nevertheless, to talk what seemed the veriest nonsense, and described with much detail the coloration and markings of the alleged frog.
The dramatic part of the incident was that there really was a frog in Nicholas’s basin of bread-and-milk; he had put it there himself, so he felt entitled to know something about it.”
“Alive and well,” answered Ivan Matveitch, “and, thanks to the Almighty, swallowed without any damage whatever. I am only uneasy as to the view my superiors may take of the incident; for after getting a permit to go abroad I’ve got into a crocodile, which seems anything but clever.”
“The nose looked at the Major and frowned a little.”
“If you don’t behave,” says I, “I’ll take you straight home. Now, are you going to be good, or not?” (This was said by the kidnapper.)
“George goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day, except Saturdays, when they wake him up and put him outside at two.”
“I mingle with my peers or no one. And since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.”
“Many people die of thirst but the Irish are born with one.”