bait and switch

Something is funny because it is able to suggest gently that even the worst of our circumstances and sins is subject to eventual mercy.

— Steve Almond

"You only lose energy when life becomes dull in your mind. Your mind gets bored and therefore tired doing nothing. You don’t have to be tired. Get interested in something. Get absolutely enthralled in something. Throw yourself into it with abandon. Get out of yourself. Be somebody. Do something. Don’t sit around moaning about things, reading the papers, and saying, “Why don’t they do something?” The man who is out doing something isn’t tired. If you’re not getting into good causes, no wonder you’re tired. You’re disintegrating. You’re deteriorating. You’re dying on the vine. The more you lose yourself in something, the more energy you will have."

— Norman Vincent Peale (via austinkleon)

Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.

— Lewis Hyde

I may get this tattooed on the palm of my hand — unironically.

in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear

— David Foster Wallace

I am not anti-gun. I’m pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We’d turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don’t ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.

— Molly Ivins

Our nation has a gun problem.

Regarding the Jack and the Beanstalk story: “The end justifies the beans.”

— Stephen Sondheim

Jim has been out of town for a week; Catherine and I have reverted to our old ways.

Last night was spent pun telling and Gangnam Style dancing (my moves scared one of our dogs so bad she lunged and barked at me every time I tried to ride an invisible horse). This was all followed by falling asleep to an early ’90s “Law and Order.”

We didn’t choose the thug life; the thug life chose us.

If your house is really a mess and a stranger comes to the door greet him with, “Who could have done this? We have no enemies.”

- Phyllis Diller

R.I.P.

I’m not completely sure what type of outfit would make you look like both a hooker and a grandmother (a grandmother going up a wheelchair ramp, no less!), but I sure hope it is what I am wearing right now! (via Buzzfeed)

If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.

— Nancy Andreasen

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.

- Flannery O’Connor

“I’m totally crazy, I know that. I don’t say that to be a smartass, but I know that that’s the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that’s fine. I don’t do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can’t not do it.”

— Maurice Sendak (via Mental Floss)

I happen to think that the main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the “closed mode” to the “open mode” quicker than anything else.

— John Cleese

“The only difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist.”

— Salvador Dali