Quotes from Edward Gorey

Books, Cats, Life is Good.

Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin.

The world may think it idiotic, Nor care at all we're symbiotic, But I will say at once and twice: I find it nice. I find it nice.

Vice is nice, but a little virtue won't hurt you.

Neither mine nor other people's prospects seem particularly pleasing just at the moment, and I have fantasies of going to Iceland, never to return. As it is, I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success.

Each night Father fills me with dread When he sits on the foot of my bed; I'd not mind that he speaks In gibbers and squeaks, But for seventeen years he's been dead.

Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

On November 18 of alternate years Mr Earbrass begins writing 'his new novel'. Weeks ago he chose its title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book. It being tea-time of the 17th, he is alarmed not to have thought of a plot to which The Unstrung Harp might apply.

This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it's no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.

Having got into bed and turned out the light, I quietly burst into tears because I am not a good person. As they came and went for some minutes, I was concerned with the words following 'because' in the previous sentence, rewriting them over and over in my head until they seemed to be as close to the truth as it was possible for me to make them.

If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.

I should like a parsley sandwich. To the best of my knowledge they are not in season.

If I do not seem to be mentioning anything I've read lately, it is because I am in one of those periods of undifferentiated flux or something in which I am reading about fifty, at a minimum, books at once, so of course I seldom finish one. Eventually this phase will pass, and I'll discover I have about ten pages to go in all of them, and will sit down and systematically finish them, one after another.

All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.... You can describe all the externals of a performance - everything, in fact, but what really constitutes its core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is what's left over after you've explained everything else.

where was I? in remarking that me is the envelopes and not nearly so much so, the often foolish letters inside.

my least favorite actress of all time, Helena Bonham Carter. I find her lack of a neck very off-putting and especially her acting.

There was a young woman named Fleager Who was terribly, terribly eager To be all the rage On the tragedy stage, Though her talents were pitifully meagre.

Mr Earbrass stands on the terrace at twilight. It is bleak; it is cold; and the virtue has gone out of everything. Words drift through his mind: anguish turnips conjunctions illness defeat string parties no parties urns desuetude disaffection claws loss Trebizond napkins shame stones distance fever Antipodes mush glaciers incoherence labels miasma amputation tides deceit mourning elsewards...

I just kind of conjured them up out of my subconscious and put them in order of ascending peculiarity.

When they answered the bell on that wild winter night. There was no one expected - and no one in sight.

I just don't think humanity is the ultimate end. We're so smug about ourselves, secure about how much we know. Well, I've lived with cats most of my life, so I'm very aware that there's another world going on. . . . it sees everything differently, hears everything differently, and probably thinks differently.

Mr. Earbrass has rashly been skimming through the early chapters, which he had not looked at for months, and now sees TUH for what it is. Dreadful, dreadful , DREADFUL. He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel. Mad. Why did n't he become a spy? How does one become one? He will burn the MS. Why is there no fire? Why are n't there the makings of one? How did he get in the unused room on the third floor?

Anyway, for whatever interest is to be derived therefrom. Bacon, Balthus, and Magritte are my three favourite painters, along with Dubuffet, of the whole post-impressionist period, by which I mean that before them Bonnard, Vuillard, & Seurat are my favourite painters of that time.

A lady both callous and brash Met a man with a vast black moustache; She cried, 'Shave it, O do! And I'll put it with glue On my hat as a sort of panache.