Mr. Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these... roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test t...hose around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn't make any sense if quoted as it stands.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly Englis...h. "I don't quite understand you," she said, as politely as she could.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they always purr. "If ...they would only purr for 'yes,' and mew for 'no,' or any rule of that sort," she had said, "so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that sho...ws us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bog...us enthusiasm, the constant drinking and drabbing, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When Mabelle Webb died, Clifton began the mourning that lasted until his own death. Noel Coward noted in a letter, . . . "Poor Cli...fton . . . is still, after two months, wailing and sobbing over Mabelle's death. As she was well over ninety, gaga, and driving him mad for years, this seems excessive and over indulgent. . . ." The most famous remark to go the rounds of Clifton Webb's friends was Noel Coward's final, acerbic one to him: "It must be tough to be orphaned at seventy-one!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »