In the garden of found quotes

Dear Jogglers, I feel bad. I have neglected you, but please let me explain. First, I was ten days in the Czech Republic and found no opportunity to write. Then I came home with a souvenir: a hellacious chest cold that has me hacking up more lungs than I thought a body had. As I peck away at this letter, I am on the sofa, swathed in a comforter, feeling quite sorry for myself, my sorrow tempered only by my wife suffering the same affliction. Our house is not pretty. If we still had cats, they'd be miserable too.

But I do have the energy to comb my commonplace book for random quotations that I copied there simply because I found them witty, sometimes profound, always wry. I am not fit for even passable prose, but I can cut and paste, so here you go. More scribblings soon, including an appreciation of Annie Dillard, a bit of dissent from the current AI panic, and delving the profound mystery of why math seems to underly everything.

Excuse me now while I go retch-cough some more. As always, thank you for reading.

Anna Burns, Northern Irish novelist: “My knowledge of the world consisted of fucking hell, fucking hell, fucking hell.”

Ann Finkbeiner, science writer: “I read the lives of saints only to see what idiots they were. St. Francis was born rich and rebelled against his father’s life, and when he was an adolescent, he went into a public square in front of his father and his father’s friends and took off all his clothes. I’m pretty sure I’m meant to read that gesture as a saintly rejection of greed and the self-aggrandizement that often accompanies riches. I’m pretty sure if I were in that square, I’d have thought he was a little jerk sanctimoniously embarrassing his father in front of his father’s friends.”

Temple Grandin, writer, advocate for the autistic: “Who do you think made the first stone spear? That wasn’t the yakety-yaks sitting around the campfire. It was some Asperger sitting in the back of the cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearpoints.”

Nick Harkaway, writer: “Why are we trying to build AI? It’s not because we want to have something that makes coffee properly and walks the dog. It’s because we want a perfect, wise friend to stop us from doing stupid shit. We’re trying to build the angels we were promised who never show up.”

Samuel Johnson: “You must not mind me, madam, I say strange things, but I mean no harm.”

Anne Lamott: “I used not to be able to work if there were dishes in the sink. Then I had a child and now I can work if there is a corpse in the sink.”

John le Carré: “Not nearly enough has been written about the phenomenon of seeming sanity among people who turn out to be barking mad.”

Fran Lebowitz: “Your life story would not make a good book. Don’t even try.”

Jill Lepore, historian: “Historians make piss-poor prophets.”

Receptionist in Birmingham, Alabama: “He went out and came home knee-walkin’ drunk.”

Kenneth Rexroth, beat poet, owner of City Lights Books in San Francisco: “I’ve had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim to love poetry but never buy a book.”

Henry David Thoreau: “Any fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it.”

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: “If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts.”

Young woman in Baltimore coffeeshop: “I don’t lie, but sometimes I don’t explore the full depths of my truthfulness.”