Edward Gorey Quotes & Sayings

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. — Edward Gorey

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

All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important. — Edward Gorey

On the way home I absently minded (you know what I mean) went through a stop sign in Hyannis so of course there was a police car to apprehend me. A soft answer turnethed away wrath, fortunately. — Edward Gorey

He wrote it all down Zealously. — Edward Gorey

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. — Edward Gorey

The helpful thought for which you look
Is written somewhere in a book. — Edward Gorey

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

Such excess of passion
is quite out of fashion — Edward Gorey

I thought I'd be a librarian until I met some crazy ones. — Edward Gorey

I've never had any intentions about anything. That's why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense. — Edward Gorey

Apropos of nothing at all except that it has been on my mind and I think I had better say it because it accounts for a good deal of my behaviour. There is a strong streak in me that wishes not to exist and really does not believe that I do, so that I tend to become unnerved when these curious ideas are proved to be not really true because someone (in this case you) has responded to something I have said or done just as if I were an actual person the same as you (especially) or anyone else. Some of it is, I guess, just the worst sorts of arrogance and irresponsibility , but not all of it, as I really don't think I exist a lot of the time, so I'm asking you to bear with it, me, whatever, for the sake of what? - friendship I suppose, which I want to be capable of, which is obviously not enough. More brains might help, but enough unseemly remarks for eight o'clock in the morning and the shivering in pyjama bottoms syndrome. — Edward Gorey

I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist ... I am a person who does those things. — Edward Gorey

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. — Edward Gorey

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. — Edward Gorey

There was a young woman whose stammer
Was atrocious, and so was her grammar,
But they were not improved
When her husband was moved
To knock out her teeth with a hammer. — Edward Gorey

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

I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty ... — Edward Gorey

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 ... — Edward Gorey

I have given up considering happiness as relevant. — Edward Gorey

Interviewer: What is your greatest regret?
Gorey: That I don't have one — Edward Gorey

Sir U fell down from a speeding train,
Which did some damage to his brain,
And after that he did not know
How to pronounce the letter O. — Edward Gorey

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

Only art means anything. — Edward Gorey

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

Mr Earbrass escaped from Messrs Scuffle and Dustcough, who were most anxious to go into all the ramifications of a scheme for having his novels translated into Urdu, and went to call on a distant cousin. — Edward Gorey

A small and sinister snow seems to be coming down relentlessly at present. The radio says it is eventually going to be sleet and rain, but I don't think so; I think it is just going to go on and on, coming down, until the whole world ... etc. It has that look. — Edward Gorey

Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH:
A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay'd
By your/their indiff'rence in the dank brown shade
Below the garden ...
His mind's eye sees them quoted on the bottom third of a right-hand page in a (possibly) olive-bound book he read at least five years ago. When he does find them, it will be a great nuisance if no clue is given to their authorship. — Edward Gorey

I suppose it was obvious that The Loathsome Couple was based on the Moors Murders, which disturbed me very greatly for some reason. — Edward Gorey

We did I think talk about your feeling of it's fun to be square, and while I'll go along with the Borges-like ramifications, I don't think I was the one who thought it up. In the past my justification for my self-conscious oddness of appearance (by now I figure this is the way I look, and it would not only be more self-conscious but also uncomfortable to change) was that people would think their impression of oddity came simply from the way I looked, and eventually become (hopefully) pleasantly surprised that I was not nearly as much of a nut as I looked, and was really quite ordinary, which is also true I think. It seemed preferable to people thinking 'Well, he looked perfectly ordinary and then it became apparent there was something wrong with his head ... ' Of course now practically everybody to my middle aged way of thinking looks too peculiar for words, and only very infrequently attractive at the same time. — Edward Gorey

Books. Cats. Life is Good. — Edward Gorey

let's take the time that has been given to us and find that clock. — Edward Gorey

I tend to be rather inconsequential and trail off. — Edward Gorey

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. — Edward Gorey

It's well we cannot hear the screams we make in other people's dreams. — Edward Gorey

I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. 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. — Edward Gorey

When people are finding meaning in things
beware. — Edward Gorey

The Suicide, as she is falling,
Illuminated by the moon,
Regrets her act, and finds appalling
The thought she will be dead so soon. — Edward Gorey

I don't know what it is I'm doing. But it's not that. Despite all evidence to the contrary. — Edward Gorey

I don't think anything might have been. What is, is. — Edward Gorey

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. — Edward Gorey

Not everything in life can be interpreted metaphorically; that's because things fall out on the way. — Edward Gorey

If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there's sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children - oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that's true, there really isn't. And there's probably no happy nonsense, either. — Edward Gorey

I do remember with great pleasure, if not terribly clearly, a play by Richard Foreman with music by Stanley Silverman called Hotel For Criminals, which I saw in a sinisterly suitable mansion in the cultured wilds of western Massachusetts in the summer of 1974, and which could be described as based loosely on Fantomas. — Edward Gorey

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. — Edward Gorey

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

I realize that homosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is - but then, of course, heterosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is, too. And being a man is a serious problem and being a woman is, too. Lots of things are problems. — Edward Gorey

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? — Edward Gorey

The Baron told her that only art meant anything. — Edward Gorey

If something doesn't creep into a drawing that you're not prepared for, you might as well not have drawn it. — Edward Gorey

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. — Edward Gorey

My mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that's what the world is like. — Edward Gorey

To take my work seriously would be the height of folly. — Edward Gorey

Ideally, if anything [was] any good, it would be indescribable. — Edward Gorey

What is, is, and what might have been could never have existed. — Edward Gorey

My favorite journey is looking out the window. — Edward Gorey

More is happening out there than we are aware of.
It is possibly due to some unknown direful circumstance. — Edward Gorey

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. — Edward Gorey

I thought it was going to be different;
It turned out to be(,) just the same. — Edward Gorey

There was a young lady named Mae
Who smoked without stopping all day;
As pack followed pack,
Her lungs first turned black,
And eventually rotted away. — Edward Gorey

Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is left after you have explained everything else. — Edward Gorey

Some tiny creature, mad with wrath, is coming nearer on the path. — Edward Gorey

There are so many things we've been brought up to believe that it takes you an awfully long time to realize that they aren't you. — Edward Gorey

He presented it with a length of string
and passed on to the statue of Corrupted Endeavor
to await the arrival of Autumn. — Edward Gorey

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