Clever Jester Quotes & Sayings

The Sermon on the Mount seems dangerous. It challenges the whole underlying conception on which modern society is built. It would replace it by a new conception, animate it with a new motive, and turn it toward a new goal. — E. Stanley Jones

Generally speaking, politicians are an odd bunch. They seem to have very thick skins and genuinely don't care what people think. And charm is a very important part of the politician's armoury. I try to resist that kind of charm. — Paul Merton

But I keep thinking love should be like a tree. You look at trees and they've got bumps and scars from tumors, infestations, what have you, but they're still growing. Despite the bumps and bruises, they're--straight. — Lorrie Moore

Logic is a large drawer, containing some useful instruments, and many more that are superfluous. A wise man will look into it for two purposes, to avail himself of those instruments that are really useful, and to admire the ingenuity with which those that are not so, are assorted and arranged. — Charles Caleb Colton

There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress. — Elizabeth McCracken

The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite - on calories and portion size and what's going into the body versus what's being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel - keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women spend approximately $1 million every hour on cosmetics. This may or may not say something about female vanity, but it certainly says something about female energy, where it is and is not focused. Easier to worry about the body than the soul, easier to fit the self into the narrow slots of identity our culture offers to women than to create one ... that allows for the expression of all passions, the satisfaction of all appetites. The great preoccupation with things like food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is less of a genuine focus on hunger - indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it - than it is a monumental distraction from hunger. — Caroline Knapp

Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That's what you could say about it. — William Golding

They cut the menu from twenty-five items to nine, featuring hamburgers and cheeseburgers, and they made the burgers a little smaller - ten hamburgers from one pound of meat instead of eight. — David Halberstam

Through the sequester'd vale of rural life
The venerable patriarch guileless held
The tenor of his way. — Beilby Porteus

I was very bookish and shy. I didn't have playmates, ever. — Bobbie Ann Mason

it's never good to pass on your fears to the ones you love, you might keep them from discovery, and discovery is what life's all about." Later — Nancy Baker

She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. — Neil Gaiman

Life is spirituality. — Lailah Gifty Akita