Written by Mel Reichler and Jim Egan
Copyright 2002
Every truth finds its way blocked by a reasonable desire.
Buffalos don’t come with brakes.
We never think about stopping a large object when it is
standing still.
Things that are easy to lose are hard to find.
Darkness also travels at the speed of light.
The disaster of some people’s lives is that they fall in
love with their first mistake instead of their second.
Waking up is the best proof you’ve been asleep.
Death has a slogan: return the empties.
What God really wanted to forbid he made physically
impossible to do.
When friends separate God puts away the locusts and
chastises only with butterflies.
Safe is never virtuous.
People who demand the impossible may be satisfied with the
improbable, and he who asks for what he can not have must settle for what he is
not likely to get.
A sacred cow makes a bad pet.
Sex is a pleasure; good sex is pleasure; great sex is what
pleasure is about.
The heart of any spoken truth is a feeling that can not be
put into words.
Truth is just the best available metaphor at any given
time.
If you learn to read between the lines you can read
anything, in almost any language.
Reality stands behind its illusions.
There are days that never appear anywhere but on calendars
and then only after the fact, and there are other days that appear and reappear
on privy doors and subway posters and the backs of animals and children’s
drawings and in beer advertisements on T.V., so that they feel like they have
been lived in again and again like an old house that has been occupied for
centuries.
Death does not keep records, at least not good records. Of
course it does not have to.
Pleasure which can not be enjoyed may have to be endured.
Believing should be a matter of choice, disbelieving a
matter of necessity.
Most things have a short end and an
long end.
Sometimes there is no shortest distance between two points.
Events and the memory of events change at different rates.
The memory of an event changes at the same rate as the consequences of an
event. Events change a little more quickly than the anticipation of the
consequences.
Some people need a reason before they act, others need an
excuse.
A reason is an excuse before its time.
A lie is a reason that appeared only after the fact.
Shrewdness is always limited by deceit.
Happiness is boolean.
People seldom survive the bite of a butterfly. On the other
hand the scars of the bite of the butterfly are beautiful.
The strength of the Japanese is not in any particular
Japanese.
Everyone has a good side and a bad side. Unfortunately,
some people’s good side belongs to someone else.
All of us are crazy but some of us wear our straight
jackets only on formal occasions.
The unbelievable occurs regularly—but no one believes it.
Some people crave to be a good servant but can’t find a
good master.
Intelligence sucks and wisdom spits out.
Sex is a palace with neither an exit nor an entrance, only
a window.
Sex makes a better vice than a virtue.
Only in sex can two people be separated from one another by
the thickness of their skins and yet be worlds apart.
Man becomes more like the machines he uses than the food he
eats.
Sex makes love bearable.
We are indebted to unnamed sexual heroes.
Preremembered sex is often better
than remembered sex.
Sex is a metaphor for all other metaphors.
Good sex is the only defense against bad sex.
There is a kind of medicine pigeons practice on fleas.
Youth is filled with deprivations and injustice and pain. What
makes it youth is that it is ignorant of them.
Ignore
virtue and you create a vice.
You can recognize a fool even when he’s fooling around.
Folly is intelligence with a thorn in its paw.
One does not become a fool at a ceremony. Even so, every
ceremony creates its own fool.
To the color blind folly is gray. With acute sight we see
that it is bright gray.
We remember only the original and the latest folly, but
only the latest folly counts.
At the heart of every illusion is a misplaced conviction
that reality is a good master.
If you can’t trust your own eyes whose eyes can you trust.
No wonder we have trouble saying what we mean. We must do
all our talking with second hand words.
Some people have a larger vocabulary than they have words
to say it in.
Contrary to common sense there are no spaces between words.
Like the real numbers the spaces between real words are filled with imaginary
words. The word line is dense.
Sometimes being wrong is the only available relief from
being uncertain.
There is nothing so frustrating as
a day that goes back on its promise.
Some people promise high quality frustration and provide
low quality relief.
The logic of surrender is simple: throw up your hands. The
logic of complete surrender is simpler: throw up.
Panic is crying for help with your feet.
Great novelists die in other people’s sleep.
We always know one character from a great novel personally.
What is impossible is forbidden: anything else you can get
away with is permitted.
Just because it’s been said for the second time doesn’t
mean you heard it the first or will hear it the third.
Experience leaves too much to the imagination to be
trusted.
The virtuous whore is the invention of the virtuous pimp.
A saint is a man who is willing to share his pleasure
without demanding that you share his pain—but has no pleasure to share.
Creative irrationality is art’s reason.
Normality is nothing more than the current standard and
style of being irrational.
Some jobs that really need to be done aren’t for the simple
reason that people make you pay to do them and then make you pay again to do
them well. Other jobs that really need to be done aren’t for the simpler reason
that the person who sees the need is not the person who must do the work to
satisfy it.
The best conversation is about things we can’t talk about.
The best reasons make the worst excuses.
News is gossip we can all agree upon.
Some people’s lives are based on a true story but not their
true story.
In the end most of us are reduced to imitating ourselves.
People we don’t know are just as perplexed as people we do.
Money is always in heat.
The only dollar bill with a pedigree is a counterfeit.
Some people’s reputation leads a richer life than they do.
In the beginning and the end, lovers win.
Each of us is furious when our ideas sound better in
someone else’s sentences.
Every good idea is equally distant from a bad idea and a
great idea.
Life has no end, it is limited
only by our attention span.
Truths come with handles; unfortunately this means that any
idiot can grab hold of them.
Just because a thing is easy to do, doesn’t mean it will be
done well.
People tend not to notice easy things that are done well.
It is bizarre that people will believe anything as long as
you can prove it to them.
The great law of human nature is: if you can catch, it you
can eat it.
Anatomy defeats fantasy.
No ones mind is completely civilized territory.
We are often badly served by those we serve.
We speak the way computers think; linearly, directly and
completely missing the point.
Given the laws of probability an impossible event is likely
to occur at any moment.
She provided grief instantly, and she guaranteed it for
years to come.
The impulse to do the impossible is quite weak.
Doing the impossible is easy, it
is wanting to do the impossible that is impossible.
Small pains are always available as a reminder of big
pains.
N.Y.C. is a great place to visit permanently but no one
wants to live there.
Corkscrews are lost point down and found point up.
The bailiff knows Murphy’s law
better than the judge.
In a pinch you can use a hammer as a screwdriver but only
once per screw.
Those who want to, shouldn’t.
Those who will, can’t. Those who should,
may not. Those who can, won’t. We are always having to
choose between getting things done not quite well enough and getting them done
at all.
There are places steeped in so deep and profound an anarchy
that even Murphy’s law does not hold.
Armies never surrender at night.
The best things in life may be free but the store is always
out of them and they spoil when you take them out of the box, and you can’t
claim them as dependents on your income tax returns, whereas the worst things
in life cost ferociously but are deductible, and available on easy credit, and
are childlike and cling and never grow up.
Graffiti is three dimensional wisdom on a two dimensional
wall.
It may be true that, in the long run, a group can survive
by doing the wrong thing for the right reason as well as it can survive by
doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
It is questionable whether the long run includes tomorrow.
In
Even truth can leave you unprepared for reality and feeling
that you’ve been deceived.
It is important to distinguish what you need from what you
want. It is even more important to distinguish what you want from what you want
to want. But what is most important of all, is to distinguish what you want
badly from what you want badly, but not badly enough.
Big things change because people are too smart for their
own good. Little things change because they are not smart enough.
If you can’t come to terms with reality you have the wrong
terms.
Life, like death is sleight of hand, only a little faster.
Competition is always imperfect where it counts the most.
Pleasure as well as pain, leaves scars.
Commuting is not traveling anywhere. Neither is shuffling.
Saying something, saying something in so many words, and saying
something in any words at all, are quite different things.
Blessed are those who can say what they mean because not
being able to say what you had in mind is a fact of mind.
Every stick has a short end and a long end. The short end
of the stick is always available.
Bad spelling and tragedy don’t mix.
A style of life is a poor metaphor for a way of being.
A perfect bullet can not be shot from anything less than
the perfect gun. Inventing the perfect bullet is easy. Inventing
the perfect gun, impossible.
For some people it is a pleasure to be caught between a
rock and a hard place.
Simplicity in sex is profound.
The prick has no memory. On the other hand, the cunt never forgets.
Any doctor who refuses to believe in divine intervention
and miracles foregoes 2/3rds of the tools of his trade.
The father remembers all his son’s follies: The son
remembers all his father’s follies but one.
We remember how our foolishness feels and how other
people’s foolishness looks.
Foolishness is never terminal.
Sensibility seldom lies outright—but it hardly ever tells
the truth either.
No given collection of words can support their own weight.
Given any collection of words, a good writer can always
take one out and a bad writer put one in.
One may refuse to be frustrated only up to a point.
No event, however painful, lasts forever. It is no
consolation however: the memory of pain lasts a little longer than forever.
It is possible to father a hero when what you think you are
doing is having a little fun.
The mechanism we have for resisting temptation is oiled
with the temptations we have given in to.
We can resist temptation only by convincing ourselves that
we will miss the very last train home. We give into temptation when we remember
that we have legs and can walk.
Sometimes quitting when you’re ahead is the only way of
losing badly.
Great novels have at least three endings only one of which
appears in the novel.
In a great novel we are likely to show up as a peripheral
character.
Stealing the egg does not get you the goose.
Writers have as much control over words as stock brokers do
stocks.
You can not master great literature. You can always ask it
politely however.
Maturity falls on some people like a stone. Other people
trip on it on the way to the bathroom.
Ask and you shall be given, don’t ask and you’ll get it
anyway. Run away and you will trip on
it, stand still and it will fall on you. The inevitable happens whether you
like it or not and usually when you’re looking the other way.
A sentence may be incoherent yet perfectly intelligible. On
the other hand, it may be clear as a bell and incomprehensible.
Modern electronic technology has made commonplace possible
what only freak, tragic, accidents of nature accomplished before: it has made
it possible to march to a different drummer,– in a
different ear, in stereo, at the same time.
There is a fundamental asymmetry about the world. The only
reason we do not see it is because the shift from one imbalance to another
occurs to quickly to be seen.
Writing down something foolish doesn’t make you foolish any
more than writing down something intelligent makes you intelligent, although
why this is so no one knows.
The greedy get the most of the worst of the best of any
possible world or the most of the best of the worst of any possible world and
they enjoy it least—because they are greedy.
When the cost of a steak is more than the price of the cow
we are in trouble.
A nation has absolutely collapsed when it has to import its
common diseases the way it imports its television sets—and from the same place.
A country’s rationality does not depend on any particular
person being rational at any given time, nor does it require that everyone be
rational all the time, only that some people be rational some of the time. Even
with this it is remarkable how few countries are rational.
Complete indifference is as close to Godliness as one is
likely to come in one’s life.
Most of the news that’s fit to print is not fit to read.
There are games you can’t win but can’t lose either. These
are the games without rules that are the most difficult to play.
Money is the dark phase of love. It is capable of tender
mercies.
Change is collective pretend.
If you are not part of the problem you can’t be part of the
solution. Of course, if you are not part of the problem you probably have no
interest in the solution, by which fact you become part of the problem. This is
why the 70’s were rapidly followed by the 90’s.
A woodpecker won’t peck until it smells the bark of the
tree.
Reality makes things true but advertising makes them real.
No object that has been lost twice is worth looking for a
third time.
Doubt lives in the shadow that every truth casts.
Life is a jig saw puzzle in which some pieces fit with
every other piece and some pieces don’t fit with any other piece.
Flattery is beneath contempt, usually with her legs spread
and breathing hard.
It now takes all of western technology to teach a watch to
tick.
At least one piece of the puzzle is always missing.
Human inefficiency on a grand scale is what makes a nation
great and a people small.
A Corkscrew is the common ground between any truth and its
contradiction.
Even the simplest of relationships are hopelessly complex.
If you can’t be young be enthusiastic.
The Druids are here.
Genius is enthusiasm for the incomprehensible.
Love is the incomprehensibly beautiful with teeth.
Great art is always the negation of a great void.
Fortune Cookie Corkscrews
Pleasures from which there is no respite are worse than
pains from which one can flee.
Wisdom, for the ant, is not walking on sidewalks even if
the cracks are filled with candy and cake.
The improbable is merely the impossible with a license.
Wisdom is just intelligence waiting for a person to happen
to.
Sometimes the end of your rope is only an inch off the
ground.
To recover from an incurable illness tempts fate
unnecessarily.
Every truth breaks a chain.
Every truth worth knowing can be said in no more than
fifteen words. And any truth that can be said in no more than fifteen words can
be said in six or less. Of course, any truth that can be said in six words or
less is so obvious that it doesn’t need to be spoken of at all. (It is also
clear that truths that are so obvious they don’t need to be spoken of, require no fewer than three volumes to write down.)
No truth is ever spoken clearly. But then no truth is ever
said twice without extensive corrections.
Some people look their age only once in their life.
Sex speaks with forked tongue, don’t you wish.
What creativity lacks in imagination it makes up.
It is too much to require of intelligence that it be
beautiful.
When someone’s cup runneth over,
someone else gets wet.
Pretentiousness is its own reward.
Men with obscure virtues are seldom as well known as those
with obscure vices.
Expertise never comes in a small size.
It is reasonable to ask whether the trains will ever run on
time. It is unreasonable to expect an
answer.
Comfort is always bitter and small.
Being prepared for any emergency means
keeping a good disguise handy.
Evil is dark and shadowy in one dimension but life is dark
and shadowy in three.
Imagination is not a dependable mode of transportation.
Undertakers believe in the angel of death.
Almost anything will stand on its own for a little while.
There is nothing like a little terror to make reality more
real.
To grow old without growing wise is a bad thing. Worse is to grow wise without growing
old. The absolute worst thing that can
happen though, is not to grow old at all.
Someone else’s memories make the best gossip.
Nothing in excess is excessive.
The warning shot warns the shooter.
Reality can always become too real to be borne.
In sex as in life, there are no divisions worth a damn.
Some diseases know us better than we know ourselves.
There are some diseases even leeches can cure.
Some doctors cure bit by bit;
others in one fell swoop.
The germ wishes it could cure a
only it doesn’t know how.
You can always enjoy youth, only not your own.
A person may be foolish only because he had lost, another
only because he has won, and a third only because he has refused to play the
game.
A man’s reputation may hinge not on how he avoids, but how
he recovers from, foolishness.
Death is nothing but terminal foolishness.
Some men are public fools, other practice their foolishness
in private.
Every written book is a victory of sensibility over sense.
Every sentence is a jig saw puzzle with most of the pieces
missing.
Not every word we read has been written.
The future always delivers less than it promises but more
than we can handle.
Common sense is not a guide to great literature.
Things are forbidden only as a warning.
It is not good advice to forgive too much or forbid too
little. In fact, it is not advice at all.
To the starving man there is only one kind of food.
A name is a habit existence develops but does not require.
Some people are paid by the minute for the hour, other are
paid by the hour for the minute.
Some people work hardest when they are having fun.
Advertisements make promises that products can’t keep.
We do not learn something when we discover it is true and
forget it when it becomes false.
We may use any occasion to celebrate the death of a tyrant.
By definition, saints and kings are born on holy days.
It is unreasonable to be rational reaching for the moon.
Irrationality is best served raw not cooked.
It is unreasonable to insist on rationality where guessing
will do.
Rationality is the guardian of illusion and stepfather of
superstition.
Sometimes people want something just a
instant after they need it, and they need something just a fraction of a second
after they had it and let it go.
The best joke in the world is in the process of being told.
In the just society, permitting people to live out
erroneous beliefs will be a criminal act.
Politics gives compromise a bad name.
Politics starts out as a necessity and ends up as a vice.
Like all perversions, politics makes pleasurable what most
people find distasteful.
Rationality gets you in trouble; irrationality gets you in
trouble; You are in trouble.
Life is a Punch and Judy show and you’re the Judy.
Some people believe growing up is merely growing old with a
vengeance.
The human mind is the slide rule of tomorrow.
Kites designed to fly the highest don’t require wind at
all.
The one firm rule of creation is: solutions are created
first. Problems are created only if the solutions do not work.
Only a master craftsman can use a hammer of clay.
Religion is a set of beliefs for those embarrassed by being
human.
Babies are nature’s way of explaining sex in exactly the
same way in which fat is nature’s way of explaining food.
Needing and wanting turn out to be the same thing about as
often as the person you fall in love with turns out to be the person who falls
in love with you.
Only human inefficiency makes human efficiency bearable.
Sex is like groping with your feet for something that you
can not grasp with your hands.
We mourn in our victory the death of possibility.
It is nowhere written that you have to be happy with what
pleases you most.
Some people require more to satisfy them than to make them
happy.
Truth makes little effort to appear true. Lies try harder, they must be convincing.
The best part of us always dies in some childhood tragedy
while the worst part of us grows up with two sets of parents.
Most people have two childhoods, one too early, one too
late.
The trouble with men is that they think that the same thing
that caused a thing to happen explains it. The trouble with women is that they
know that this is not so—and they know why.
There are three sides to any truth, one side to obvious to
be noticed, another to subtle to be overlooked and a third to clear to be
understood.
Arguing that machines can’t think because they can’t think
like men is the same as arguing men can’t fly because they can’t fly like
birds.
Clever is what adults are when they think like children.
Sophisticated means to be able to do something before you
know the name for what you are doing and why you’re doing it.
In matters of love, rub a thorn, remember the knife.
An aroused and agitated creativity is one of God’s fiercer
creatures.
Failure misuses us, victory uses us up.
There is something about beauty that is repugnant to
effort. At the same time, there is something about effort that makes it repugnant
to beauty.
Beauty is always bait for one trap
or another.
Looking back requires that one stop and turn around.
It is almost impossible to locate the exact point at which
the comic becomes tragic but it is the same point at which adolescence turns
into middle age.
He was so loved that when he died no one would come forth
to identify the body.
Many people think of surrendering but never find a general
worth surrendering to.
A lost love is a lost life.
Any good idea is as translatable into theoretical physics
as it is into a sonnet.
Only words travel by word of mouth: It takes art to move
ideas.
There are certain hard cold facts, believing in which is
equivalent to believing in the tooth fairy.
Pain is something for which everyone makes time.
The devil works harder than God to achieve the same end.
That’s his punishment.
Virtue is always unreasonable, vice never.
Unnatural virtue breeds contempt.
Scars breed: for instance a painter’s scars breed art.
The capacity to sin is a potentially underdeveloped resource.
The real story of creation never appeared in the Bible for
the simple reason that it is still going on.
Even rats and mice gossip.
Even God needs someone to keep score.
Most of us outgrow childhood: only the truly lucky ones
outgrow adulthood.
Sex has many competitors as a vice, few as a virtue.
Sex is footnote to love.
Intuition lies frequently enough to be mistrusted.
Sex is man’s only defense against ungodly desire.
Some people are saints only because they give their foolishness
away with all of their other possessions.
Folly is one of those rare prizes that some people struggle
to gain, others are given, and still others win in the lottery.
Folly’s discipline is as exacting as wisdom’s.
The worst fool flatters foolishness.
Foolishness has no ancestors only
descendants.
It is possible to write sentences that hum with words that
bark. This is what makes writing an art.
To a modern musician silence is not an inferior sound.
There are silences so profound even the deaf hear them.
Putting one foot in front of the other is not dancing, at
least not dancing well.
In great writing there is always a struggle between words
and sense that sense wins, almost, but only in the end.
Some people remind you of a sentence you have written, then
forgotten, and then forgotten you have written, then
forgotten you have forgotten.
A great novel is merely the concentration of the diffuse
light that illuminates a thousand living rooms.
In a creative society the guardian of reason is the least
rational being available.
Never measure the value of a question by the value of its
answer.
Evolving is not traveling anywhere.
Men have one childhood, women two.
Imitating yourself does not produce good sex.
It is easier to live with the life you choose then the
thousands of lives you choose not to live.
The only difference worth noticing between two saints is
they way they dress.
Great writers write in order to find out what they have to
say; less great writers because they want to hear themselves say it.
Art is what remains when all of the recognizable pieces of
anything are taken away.
There’s a custom tailored logic for every madman.
Enthusiasm is a medium of exchange.
Never outrun the carrot: it is always easier to outrun the
carrot than the stick.
What we choose to forget is more important than what we
care to remember.
Creativity is the willingness to plagiarize God.
No one goes to the trouble of destroying that which has no
value.
Priest tells us what we should not want, parents what we
shouldn’t do, spouse tells us what we don’t need, government what we can’t
have: No wonder we can’t hear the voice inside that tells us what would make us
happy.