Irvin Cobb Quotes & Sayings

To be born in Kentucky is a heritage; to brag about it is a habit; to appreciate it is a virtue. — Irvin S. Cobb

Middle age: when you begin to exchange your emotions for symptoms. — Irvin S. Cobb

Good motives butter no parsnips, and hell is paved with buttered parsnips. — Irvin S. Cobb

He also could feel it in his nostrils like an impalpable soot; the emanations of the millions about them, packed away at night in layers like martins in martin boxes and by day wriggling and squirming down between the tall buildings like larvae enclosed within the ribs of a dead horse; and with this effluvia of humans, the taint of burnt gasoline and burnt lubricating oils and the smoke and the coal grit and the dirt motes that were churned and rechurned and never at rest - the Pollen of the City. — Irvin S. Cobb

If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers. — Irvin S. Cobb

You couldn't tell if she was dressed for an opera or an operation. — Irvin S. Cobb

A good storyteller is a person with a good memory and hopes other people haven't. — Irvin S. Cobb

Down our way we're always had a theory that the Civil War was not brought on by Secession of Slavery or the State's Rights issue. These matters contributed to the quarrel, but there is a deeper reason. It was bought on by some Yankee coming down south and putting nutmeg in a julep. So our folks up and left the Union flat. — Irvin S. Cobb

Son, it ain't that flag we've got a gredge ag'inst, it's the fellers that air bidin' under her now. They're our middlin'-meat, or will be when the fusees start poppin'. But that flag's all hunky-dory. Come to that, she's ez much our'n ez she is ther'n. She's fell into bad company for the time bein', that's all. And it ain't her fault, ez I can see it and ez all here sees it. So let her flaunt! — Irvin S. Cobb

A woman may have a witty tongue or a stinging pen but she will never laugh at her own individual shortcomings. — Irvin S. Cobb

Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn. — Irvin S. Cobb

Reelfoot is, and has always been, a lake of mystery.
In places it is bottomless. Other places the skeletons of the cypress-trees that went down when the earth sank, still stand upright so that if the sun shines from the right quarter, and the water is less muddy than common, a man, peering face downward into its depths, sees, or thinks he sees, down below him the bare top-limbs upstretching like drowned men's fingers, all coated with the mud of years and bandaged with pennons of the green lake slime. — Irvin S. Cobb

Of all American cities of whatever size the most friendly on preliminary inspection, and on further acquaintance the most likable. The happiest-hearted, the gayest, the most care-free city on this continent. — Irvin S. Cobb

A funeral eulogy is a belated plea for the defense delivered after the evidence is all in. — Irvin S. Cobb

Men are vain; but they won't mind women working so long as they get smaller wages for the same job. — Irvin S. Cobb

You had to hate the Colonel a whole lot to keep from loving him. — Irvin S. Cobb

If I wanted to go crazy I would do it in Washington because it would not be noticed — Irvin S. Cobb

An epitaph is a belated advertisement for a line of goods that has been discontinued. — Irvin S. Cobb

If a woman likes another woman, she's cordial. If she doesn't like her, she's very cordial. — Irvin S. Cobb

Daylight would have shown a wilderness weathered and blowzy, a wanton that had lived her summer too fast and too greedily. It would have shown the white birches pale and shivering in a sudden ague, and here and there an ash or a sumac burning red, like a hectic spot, where the first frosts already had set the marks of their galloping consumption on the cheek of the forest, giving warning of the time when the white plague of the winter would make a massacre of all this present glory and turn the trees to naked skeletons and stretch a bony bare cadaver on every steeper hillside to bleach there until the snows covered things up. But now the kindly nighttime had all signs and threats of approaching death, so that each shriveled speckled leaf, as revealed and traced in the waning light, seemed flawless - a perfect part of a perfect tapestry. — Irvin S. Cobb

In the country, a good he-snowstorm makes a lovely design for putting on a holiday greetings card. In the city it just makes an infernal mess for the street-cleaning department to wrestle with. ... By midday of next day it would be licked to a custard - molten into puddles of foggy slush where cellar furnaces exhaled their hot breath up out of sidewalk gratings, roiled and fouled and crunched down beneath the heels and the tires of the town, flung up in crumply billows by the conscripted shovel crews, and under the park trees and on the park meadows would show a stark and grayish cast like the face of a grimy pauper whose corpse the undertaker scanted. And the longer it stayed there the sootier and the dirtier and the deader-looking it would get to be. You may worry the city with your winter weathers; you cannot keep her licked for any great length of time. — Irvin S. Cobb

I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial. — Irvin S. Cobb

Golf - a young man's vice and an old man's penance. — Irvin S. Cobb

Until you go to Kentucky and with your own eyes behold the Derby, you ain't never been nowhere and you ain't seen nothin'! — Irvin S. Cobb

As I understand it, sport is hard work for which you do not get paid. — Irvin S. Cobb