Any discussion of the problems of being funny in America will not make sense unless we substitute the word wit for humor. Humor in...spires sympathetic good-natured laughter and is favored by the "healing-power" gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every reader of the French or German papers knows that not a day passes without producing some uneasy discussion of supposed socia...l decrepitude;Mfalling off of the birthrate;Mdecline of rural population;Mlowering of army standards;Mmultiplication of suicides;Mincrease of insanity or idiocy,--of cancer,--of tuberculosis;Msigns of nervous exhaustion,--of enfeebled vitality,--"habits" of alcoholism and drugs,--failure of eyesight in the young,--and so on, without end.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For me, it's enough! They've been here long enough--maybe too long. It's a funny thing, though. All these years Fred was too busy ...to have much time for the kids, now he's the one who's depressed because they're leaving. He's really having trouble letting go. He wants to gather them around and keep them right here in this house.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I suppose the fact is that no friendship can stand the breakfast test.... Civilisation has done away with curl-papers, yet at that... hour the soul of the Hausfrau is as tightly screwed up in them as was ever her grandmother's hair, and though my body comes down mechanically, having been trained that way by punctual parents, my soul never thinks of beginning to wake up for other people till lunch-time, and never does so completely till it has been taken out of doors and aired in the sunshine. Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning? It is the hour of savage instincts and natural tendencies; it is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the Cross. I am convinced that the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but in bed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth, The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons... Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere ... The summer demands and takes away too much, But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I feel the carousel starting slowly And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,... Photographs of friends, the window and the trees Merging in one neutral band that surrounds Me on all sides, everywhere I look.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on th...e adult world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one fro...m writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can remember the day when all that a professor was supposed to do was to mark "C minus" on students' examination papers, then go... home to tea. Nowadays they seem to feel that they must know just how much we (outside the university) eat, what we do with our spare time, and how we like our eggs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »