Gratuitous Quotes & Sayings

Thwart: to prevent someone from accomplishing something by means of visiting gratuitous violence upon his smarmy person. — Jim Butcher

It is surely gratuitous to point out that the author suffered from an edifice complex (writing of Ayn Rand) — Claudia Roth Pierpont

I do say no to things that I think are completely gratuitous. — Amber Valletta

It is remarkable, but on the whole, perhaps, not to be lamented, that the world is so unkind to a new book. Any distinguished traveler who comes to our shores is likely to get more dinners and speeches of welcome than he can well dispose of, but the best books, if noticed at all, meet with coldness and suspicion, or, what is worse, gratuitous, off-hand criticism. — Henry David Thoreau

Gratuitous redundancy makes prose difficult not just because readers have to duplicate the effort of figuring something out, but because they naturally assume that when a writer says two things she means two things, and fruitlessly search for the nonexistent second point. — Steven Pinker

He told me that a German doctor named Wolff figured it out in the 1800s by studying X-rays of infants' hips as they transitioned from crawling to walking. "A whole new evolution of bone structure takes place to support the mechanical loads associated with walking," said Lang. "Wolff had the great insight that form follows function." Alas, Wolff did not have the great insight that cancer follows gratuitous X-raying with primitive nineteenth-century X-ray machines. — Mary Roach

Gratuitous fat jokes always hurt, no matter what. — Josh Peck

Nowadays, everything is so gratuitous. The violence is suggested, and it's much more impactful than showing everything. — Oliver Jackson-Cohen

The gifts of Heaven are never quite gratuitous. — Henry David Thoreau

We all lose our innocence soon enough; it's inescapable. Most of us aren't emotionally or intellectually ready for it until our thirties or even later, however, so when one loses it prematurely, in childhood and adolescence, through divorce or the sudden early death of a parent, it can leave one fixated on that loss for a lifetime. Because it's premature, it feels unnatural, violent and unnecessary, a permanent, gratuitous wounding, and it leaves one angry at the world, — Russell Banks

And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.
A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I've tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things - whether it's a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous. — George R R Martin

Life, then will, always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. — James Wood

It never seems to occur to such "criminals" that to behave with decency to another human being might also be "gratuitous. — Saul Bellow

Artists should be aware that petty stroking could be the source of arrested productivity. An artist's job includes the avoidance of premature closure by the begged or gratuitous approval of others. — Robert Genn

Constrained optimization is the art of compromise between conflicting objectives. This is what design is all about. To find fault with biological design - as Stephen Jay Gould regularly does - because it misses some idealized optimum is therefore gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in no position to say whether the designer has proposed a faulty compromise among those objectives. — William A. Dembski

In a word: charity cannot be neutral, antiseptic, indifferent, lukewarm or impartial! Charity is infectious, it excites, it risks, and it engages! For true charity is always unmerited, unconditional, and gratuitous! — Pope Francis

There are three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters, to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.' Katin looked toward the front of the car.
The captain gazed through the curving plate that lapped the roof. His yellow eyes fixed Her consumptive light that pulsed fire-spots in a giant cinder. The light was so weak he did not squint at all.
I am confounded, Katin admitted to his jeweled box, 'nevertheless. The mirror of my observation turns and what first seemed gratuitous I see enough times to realize it is a habit. What I suspected as habit now seems part of a great design. While what I originally took as purpose explodes into gratuitousness. The mirror turns again, and the character I thought obsessed by purpose reveals his obsession is only habit; his habits are gratuitously meaningless; while those actions i construed as gratuitous now reveal a most demonic end. — Samuel R. Delany

I propose a toast to mirth; be merry! Let us complete our course of law by folly and eating! Indigestion and the digest. let Justinian be the male, and Feasting, the female! Joy the depths! Live, O creation! The world is a great diamond. I am happy. The birds are astonishing. What a festival everywhere! The nightingale is a gratuitous Elleviou.
Summer, I salute thee! — Victor Hugo

I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large - this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual. — Aldous Huxley

I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings. — Jonathan Miller

A taxonomy of abilities, like a taxonomy anywhere else in science, is apt to strike a certain type of impatient student as a gratuitous orgy of pedantry. Doubtless, compulsions to intellectual tidiness express themselves prematurely at times, and excessively at others, but a good descriptive taxonomy, as Darwin found in developing his theory, and as Newton found in the work of Kepler, is the mother of laws and theories. — Raymond Cattell

His remit will be to monitor the use of reality-modification weapons by both sides in the conflict and to assure the civilized worlds that the New Republic does not engage in gratuitous use of time travel as a weapon of mass destruction. — Charles Stross

To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity. — H.L. Mencken

No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to un-Christianize society than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women, for taking the bloom of childhood, in short, FOR SHEER GRATUITOUS MISERY-PRODUCING POWER this influence stands alone. — Henry Drummond

Pounce if I'm outta some arbitrary line, Specter, but from what you say this demilout's runnin' hogwild over creation with no better motive than a gratuitous and luxurious will to do evil. — Steve Aylett

Yet another gratuitous cruelty: the killer targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. It was a phenomenon that the Italian writer Primo Levi identified after emerging from Auschwitz, when he wrote that he and his fellow survivors never wanted to see one another again after the war because they had all done something of which they were ashamed. — Barbara Demick

I'd like to think I'd never do a gratuitous fart joke. — Harold Ramis

There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. — John Updike

If everything in chemistry is explained in a satisfactory manner without the help of phlogiston, it is by that reason alone infinitely probable that the principle does not exist; that it is a hypothetical body, a gratuitous supposition; indeed, it is in the principles of good logic, not to multiply bodies without necessity. — Antoine Lavoisier

In Aristotle ... leisure is a far more noble, spiritual goal than work ... leisure is pursued solely for its own sake ... : the pleasures of music and poetry, ... conversation with friends, and ... gratuitous, playful speculation. In Latin, the ultimate good is otium - the opposite is negotium, or gainful work.
We have sought too much counsel in the proto-Calvinist work ethic preached by St Paul ... during the cessation of work we nurture family, educate, nourish friendships ... in loafing, most of our innovations come ... the routine of daily work has too often served as ... sleep ... a refuge from two crucial states - awakedness to the needs of others, and to the transcendent, which only comes ... loitering, dallying, tarrying, goofing off. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

Thwart," I said. "To prevent someone from accomplishing something by means of visiting gratuitous violence upon his smarmy person."
"I'm pretty sure that isn't the definition." Sarissa said.
"It is today. — Jim Butcher

To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life. — Simone Weil

I don't say that I'm going to be like every other comic that's blue, or gratuitous use of language. I do try to have my own standards: I don't do everything the audience wants, and I do try to surprise them. — Gallagher

Public charities and benevolent associations for the gratuitous relief of every species of distress, are peculiar to Christianity; no other system of civil or religious policy has originated them; they form its highest praise and characteristic feature. — Charles Caleb Colton

I don't smoke and I don't want to smoke. I am not a fan of gratuitous smoking in films. — Edward Norton

I tried not to think of all the horror movies featuring this exact scenario, soon to be followed by an abundance of gratuitous blood and gore. — M.A. George

Educate your children, educate yourself, in the love for the freedom of others, for only in this way will your own freedom not be a gratuitous gift from fate. You will be aware of its worth and will have the courage to defend it. — Joaquim Nabuco

Well, for me, gratuitous abstinence is just as bad as gratuitous sex. — Bianca Sommerland

Fiction in general holds little interest for me. Novels, in particular, arouse more suspicion than intrigue. It truly baffles me that any practitioner of make-believe should (especially in this day and age) feel the need to produce anything so gratuitous. The fact that certain examples of this fare can approach the length of your average dictionary seems inherently absurd. — Dan Garfat-Pratt

I went in and said, "If I see one more gratuitous shot of a woman's body, I'm quitting ... " I think the show should be emotional story lines, morals, real- life heroes. And that's what we're doing — David Hasselhoff

gratuitous masturbation
of the
psyche. — Charles Bukowski

Being accused of making money by selling sex in Hollywood, home of the casting couch and the gratuitous nude scene, is so rich with irony that it's a better subject for a comic novel than a column ... On one coast the cops are busting sex workers on Eighth Avenue, dragging them downtown to night court where they pay the fine and go right back to their corner; on another they're charging Heidi Fleiss with pandering in a town in which the verb is an art form. — Anna Quindlen

The scene that has raised the most objections in 'The Interview' is at the very end, when Kim's head dissolves into flames. To me, it feels gratuitous. — Barbara Demick

How many people similarly spent their lives searching for their own spells - some gratuitous benefit such as a silver tree or political power or undeserved acclaim - when all they really needed was to be satisfied with what they already had? Sometimes what they had was better than what they thought they wanted. — Piers Anthony

Everything is gratuitous, this garden, this city and myself. When you suddenly realize it, it makes you feel sick and everything begins to drift ... that's nausea. — Jean-Paul Sartre

A single crocus blossom ought to be enough to convince our heart that springtime, no matter how predictable, is somehow a gift, gratuitous, gratis, a grace. — David Steindl-Rast

How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? And what might our ancient attraction for flowers have to teach us about the deeper mysteries of beauty - what one poet has called "this grace wholly gratuitous"? Is that what it is? Or does beauty have a purpose? (64) — Michael Pollan

We acknowledge, indeed, that Christ in human nature is called a Son, not like believers by gratuitous adoption merely, but the true, natural, and, therefore, only Son, this being the mark which distinguishes him from all others. Those of us who are regenerated to a new life God honours with the name of sons; the name of true and only-begotten Son he bestows on Christ alone. But how is he an only Son in so great a multitude of brethren, except that he possesses by nature what we acquire by gift? — John Calvin

One realizes that everything about the world that seems so unexceptional and drearily predictable is in fact charged with an immense and imponderable mystery. In that instant one is aware, even if the precise formulation eludes one, that everything one knows exists in an irreducibly gratuitous way: "what it is" has no logical connection with the reality "that it is"; nothing within experience has any "right" to be, any power to give itself existence, any apparent "why." The world is unable to provide any account of its own actuality, and yet there it is all the same. In that instant one recalls that one's every encounter with the world has always been an encounter with an enigma that no merely physical explanation can resolve. One cannot dwell indefinitely — David Bentley Hart

In the beginning - and neither can this be overstated - a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done, that the attempt of white people to destroy him - for that is what it is - is utterly gratuitous, it is not hard for him to think of white people as devils. — James Baldwin

Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift. — Octavio Paz

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one's failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous "self-esteem" that educators would impart to students, as though by magic. — Matthew B. Crawford

The wonder is- given the errant nature of freedom and the burgeoning of texture in time-the wonder is that all the forms are not monsters, that there is beauty at all, grace gratuitous, pennies found, like mockingbird's free fall. Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator's exuberance that grew such a tangle, and the grotesques and horrors bloom from that same free growth, that intricate scramble and twine up and down the conditions of time.

This, then, is the extravagant landscape of the world, given, given with pizzazz, given in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over. — Annie Dillard

I think the last one would have to be The Godfather because it was such a powerful story. There was lots of violence in it but I could take it because I thought there was a reality to it. It wasn't gratuitous, it was just these guys' story. — Bobby Farrelly

Let a thing be but a sort of punctual surprise, like the first cache of violets in March, let it be delicate, painted and gratuitous, hinting that the Creator is solely occupied with aesthetic considerations, and combines disparate objects simply because they look so well together, and that thing will admirably fill the role of a flower. — Hope Mirrlees

If to know is to work, then knowledge is the fruit of our own unaided effort and activity; then knowledge includes nothing which is not due to the effort of man, and there is nothing gratuitous about it, nothing "inspired", nothing "given" about it. — Josef Pieper

The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings. Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but your rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush. — Jay McInerney

That my lunacy had been recognized was chastening enough, but the judge's gratuitous "fatuous" carried with it intimations that I was in a blubbering, nose-picking state; an I had visions of arriving at my mother's door, garbed not in the "attractive," melancholic dementia of the poet but in the drooling, masturbatory, moony-eyed condition of the Mongoloid. — Frederick Exley

All you can do is make a piece of product, sell it on its own terms, stand behind it and hope that people will go see it. If you try to be like something else or appeal to any given group, then you can very easily end up being gratuitous and imitative. There's not much to be gained by that and I think too much time is spent going around trying to be like someone else. — Roddy McDowall

She pinned him to the bulkhead with a kiss that was pure alchemy, and his hands found their way down her tunic, down to her breeches, where he unhitched her weapons belt with as much gratuitous fondling of the areas not covered by it as he could manage.
She took the belt from his hands and flung it against one of the stiffened canvas walls, where it struck with a clattering racket and slid to the floor. "If there is no way, make a way, Jean Tannen. Losers don't fuck in this particular cabin."
He picked her up, making a seat for her from his crossed arms, and whirled her around so that her back was against the bulkhead and her feet were dangling. He kissed her breasts through her tunic, grinning at her reaction. He stopped to put his head against her chest; felt the rapid flutter of her heart against his left cheek. — Scott Lynch

Government, on their part, are much disposed to favor the establishment of these large companies, and to give them privileges to the detriment of their rivals, and of the public, with the expectation of receiving from them loans, either gratuitous or at a low rate which these never refuse. It is thus that the one sells its protection and the other buys it; and this is already a very great evil. — Antoine Destutt De Tracy

I'd never been fond of gratuitous cursing. I figured it was lazy, a communication habit of people who couldn't be bothered finding the correct word. — Susan Lyons

There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me. Frankly, I am shocked at you. You must know this, surely? Some years ago I suffered such an offensively gratuitous piece of good advice that I was depressed for six months afterward. It was a very close call - I almost never recovered. — Gregory David Roberts

To me, a sex scene in a movie generally means a gratuitous scene that doesn't serve the story but gives a kind of excuse - we've got these two actors, we want to see them naked, so let's bring in the music and the soft light. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

We were mainly concerned about nudity - how much could be shown in 1959 and how much would convey, without being gratuitous, the terror of being attacked naked and wet. — Joseph Stefano

There's nothing gratuitous about my films. — Dario Argento

Why is it that our many mental institutions are overcrowded? People will not take their time. They do not live in the present! For are not all fears, phobias, crippling anxieties tied in with the future - a time that has not yet come - and may not? And are not deep depressions, melancholias, and foolish guilt complexes connected with the past - a time that is gone, and is gone forever - a time that cannot be changed even by God Almighty? These dementias most certainly bespeak some relation to the fact that those plagued with them have not been objective enough to stay in contact with the one great gratuitous reality called now. — M. Raymond

Verbal virtuosities or the gratuitous expense of time or money that is presupposed by material or symbolic appropriation of works of art, or even, at the second power, the self-imposed constraints and restrictions which make up the "asceticism of the privileged" (as Marx said of Seneca) and the refusal of the facile which is the basis of all "pure" aesthetics, are so many repetition of that variant of the master-slave dialectic through which the possessors affirm their possession of their possessions. In so doing, they distance themselves still further from the dispossessed, who, not content with being slaves to necessity in all its forms, are suspected of being possessed by the desire for possession, and so potentially possessed by the possessions they do not, or do not yet, possess. — Pierre Bourdieu

On the one hand I follow a vocation because I have an ability that I should exercise, but I want to use it for a reason, because I don't see that the freedoms that I enjoy are God-given realities. So I have a very healthy, activist general tension in me which feels that no, this is not gratuitous, it is important to keep this in focus. — Wolfgang Tillmans

As much as anybody since George Wallace or Pat Buchanan, he has overtly sent dog whistles of race out to white working-class voters. That gratuitous defamation of group after group, person after person, is just anathema to Obama. He genuinely believes this guy would be a calamity for the country." Unlike the Bushes, who outsourced their political thuggery, Donald Trump does his own wet work. "He — Maureen Dowd

I don't think they're gratuitous with the nudity on 'Game of Thrones.' It's very much part of the world. There's a lot of it, but that's the world they come from. It never is there to distract from the scene or the actors or story. — Neil Marshall

Though humility and acknowledgement of one's real failings is good, the gratuitous eating of worms not put before us by God does not nourish our souls a bit - merely in fact upsets the spiritual tummy. — Evelyn Underhill

Inside, the festivities would continue, probably well into the night, with flirtation and merriment and gratuitous use of mistletoe. It was an inexpressibly wearying thought. — Lauren Willig

His conviction of having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pennant, dependent on each gusting wind. The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions
gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose. — Yukio Mishima

I don't like gratuitous violence. I don't like the 'Saw' movies. I don't like the 'Hostel' movies. I don't like anything that is violence for violence's sake. — Michael Biehn

We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve "the problem of evil," yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is the "problem of good." How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results. — Richard Rohr

It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir. — Henry Miller

Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading. — Billy Collins

More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree - a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader. — Billy Collins

The idea of a priori moral judgements ('It is morally wrong to inflict gratuitous pain') is completely acceptable to the vast majority of human beings. Only a few philosophers would disagree. — William Boyd

Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous. — Annie Dillard

A little bit of gratuitous violence in a well-thought-out story is fine. — Ray Wise

I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way. — Rebecca Solnit

A young gratuitous smile; trust and distrust;
Promiscuities of bed and board and road;
The one assured treasure
A life, in recollection, truly possessed. — Robert Wells

I never want to do nudity that's gratuitous. Girls look so much better in lingerie or a t-shirt and leave the rest up to the imagination. I make it clear that I have a line. Everyone tries to push you, and it's easy to get talked into doing those things. I'll just walk off-set. But not everyone realizes they can do that. — Ashley Benson

That's all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there's no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment. — Irvine Welsh

Sometimes nudity is gratuitous. We just live in a society where everything goes. — Judi Dench

Equality, citizens, is not the whole of society on a level, a society of tall blades of grass and small oaks, or a number of entangled jealousies. It is, legally speaking, every aptitude having the same opportunity for a career; politically all consciences having the same right. Equality has an organ, gratuitous and compulsory education. We must begin with the right to the alphabet. — Victor Hugo

WARNING
This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as non-traditional grammar, split infinitives, and the odd wank. If that sort of thing bothers you, then gentle reader pass by, for we endeavor only to entertain, not to offend. That said, if that's the sort of thing you think you might enjoy, then you have happened upon the perfect story! — Christopher Moore

But their discovery of the void brings with it new implications: not only that they must continue on in their actions and diligence, no longer considered as duties but as gratuitous, senseless routines, but also the exhilarating realization that all is nothing but a game. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

I did my first nude scene in Mildred Pierce, and that was absolutely terrifying, but it was for an important part of the film and for a reason, and it's incredibly powerful. It's not gratuitous. I think the stuff they show on MTV is so much worse. — Evan Rachel Wood

Bush invited his constituency to be blind to the world's real problems, and leftists often do the opposite, gazing so fixedly at those problems that they cannot see beyond them. Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it's more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity--seeing the troubles in this world--and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable. — Rebecca Solnit

Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous. — Annie Dillard

I've seen shows on Showtime, and they're very provocative, if you will, but nothing to the point that's over-the-top or gratuitous. — Megalyn Echikunwoke

I swung my hips around like I unscrewed at the waist. — Amber Dawn

Life is not found in commandments or declarations of penalties, but in the promise of mercy and only in a gratuitous promise. — John Calvin

I'm not for gratuitous nudity, but if there's humor, I don't have a problem. — Rebecca Romijn

Even as we ransack our own diseases, those of other people regard us no less. In an age of biographies, no one bandages his wounds without our attempting to lay them bare, to expose them to broad daylight; if we fail, we turn away, disappointed. And even he who endured on the cross - it is not because he suffered for us that he still counts for something in our eyes, but because he suffered and uttered several lamentations as profound as they were gratuitous. For what we venerate in our gods are our own defeats en beau. — Emil Cioran

And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is. — Mircea Eliade

And it was this location that provides my second memory. (It must come after the first because in it I am now standing up.) I was bitten by a rabbit. Or rather, I was nibbled by a rabbit, but, because I was such a weedy, namby-pamby little pansy, I reacted as though I'd lost a limb. It was the sheer unfairness of it all that so upset me. One minute, I was saying, 'Hello, Mr Bunny!' and smiling at its sweet little face and funny floppy ears. The next, the fucker savaged me. It seemed so gratuitous. What, I asked myself, had I done to the rabbit to deserve this psychotic response? — John Cleese