Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.

If on a friend’s bookshelf You cannot find Joyce or Sterne Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton, You are in danger, face the fact, So kick him first or punch him hard And from him hide behind a curtain.

New Hampshire has always been cheap, mean, rural, small-minded, and reactionary. It's one of the few states in the nation with neither a sales tax nor an income tax. Social services are totally inadequate there, it ranks at the bottom in state aid to education--the state is literally shaped like a dunce cap--and its medical assistance program is virtually nonexistent. Expecting aid for the poor there is like looking for an egg under a basilisk.... The state encourages skinflints, cheapskates, shutwallets, and pinched little joykillers who move there as a tax refuge to save money.

It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in Basic Color Terms demonstrate exhaustively and empirically, the very simple thesis that anywhere in the world, as a language develops and acquires names for color, the colors always enter in the same order. The most primitive are black and white. Then red. Then either green or yellow.

I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply a means of passing time.

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.