Compose Your Own Aphorisms and Insert Them Here (but Do Thrust Gingerly)
 

Attention, friends:

Please add your own mottoes and epigrams here as they occur to you.


A few of my own recent sayings to start you off:

"In a perfect world, the word remarks would always be replaced by remains. 'The commissioner delivered his remains to a spellbound audience.'"

"Aviary Cathartidae: atrium carcaris. All wingéd pets are inmates."

"What if objects really do become blurred when we remove our glasses? What if the distinct forms we limn through lenses are merely the flawed representations of ambiguous convergences? What if vagaries are the only verities?"

"Expecting people to unpack a joke is fine unless you care about making them feel like your valets."

"It's not you; it's your punctuation."

"The euphony of angels reflects their awful supposition: That they are good collectively and therefore right individually. The earthbound fanatics who created them passed on this reflexive certainty, which not only motivates angels but excuses their murders and mutilations."

"There is no truth. There is only the intensity of apprehension."

"I disagree with Toni Morrison's pronouncement that gruesomely expressed nihilism is a cliche. Several grim-witted pessimists and clinically depressed artists would challenge that premise."

"Ubiquity's implied by the excurrent branching of deities' limbs."

"Tropes for morbidity can become trite, but morbidity itself is not reducible to a cliche, as those who presume to exemplify good taste would insist. Our obsession with moribundity is profound enough to have sired gods in multiple religions and fiction in every language."

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"A great story is a story that you never tire of re-reading."

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"Every second of every hour, people choke on their own grief. Some of them stay silent or hide until they've caught themselves. Some try to communicate the feeling in places like this: with the vernacular scrawl of the overcome, they indicate that something has eviscerated them and an empty suit of entrails now totters in their place. Still others try to follow the code I learned early on: To restrain their grief even as they express it. To tighten their fists around the bars that define the cell of perfect manners until the visitor leaves and their fingers relax at last. To muster flickering dignity as they fail to understate their loss."

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"Have you ever pressed your ear to an elevator door and listened as the car rose toward you? If so, then you've heard the spine of a titan chafing against a fretboard. You've also heard the portamento twang of the titan's spine being tuned."

"My first root canal felt like a tungsten tinnitus eel shrieking holes into my teeth. I'm still queasy from the drugs and alien violations."

"Reports of extraterrestrial abductions are modeled after the experience of dental surgery: Your tormentors keep you awake but immobile as they force you open and ply you with pin-bladed instruments. Later, you recall everything vaguely through layers of nausea, revulsion and mental aspic."

"Why are Snickers Bars more popular than Ridicule Bars or Chocolate Taunts?"

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"I'm sick of people who presume it's their right to order women to smile.

"First of all, vanilla isn't the most perfect flavor in the world. Smiles can be shallow, frowns can be profound and deadpan expressions can be witty.

"Second, it's more important to recognize someone else's misery than it is to be consoled by a perpetually bland veneer.

"Third, most women aren't paid to be spokesmodels for sleepwalkers' happiness."

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"Today I monogrammed my charcoal-gray welcome mat with the word sfigurato (Italian for disfigured). My neighbors won't register the actual meaning of the word, leaving that stealth confession of my identity undetected."

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"My boss asked me to make a mental note of some instruction or other he was giving me. I told him I was out of paper."

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The lips that silence are often liverwurst and bruised; not at all the lips of actual power, but the secondhand variety cloistered in a small room with a dated phone.

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"The more idyllic one's surroundings, the greater the urgency to imagine catastrophes. Every pastoral landscape evokes an Eismeer."

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"Rimbaud might have coined a phrase to describe the style of certain breathless time-shifting novelists:

"The systematic derangement of the tenses."

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The optimist says the glass is half filled; the pessimist says the glass is half empty; the nihilist says : "Half full or half empty, the water is poisoned".

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"To believe one has fallen-when each success has merely been a fluke."

"What is regret when even the prospect of failure abandons me?"

"Innocent-I thought I could endure my success; corrupted-I thought I could endure my failure. Nowhere to go now."

"Mystery of the self: joy for what I have been, despite not knowing who or what creature has lived in me."

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Nihilist is what we call a relativist we dislike.

All black cats may be the same in a darkened room but the one with rabies will stand out.

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Whoever said you can't get blood from a stone clearly wasn't squeezing hard enough.

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Ooooh! May I use that sometime?

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"No one in the history of language has done more damage to the craft of writing prose than Jack Kerouac. He is to Joyce as C.P.E. Bach is to J.S. Bach.; as Johann Strauss is to Richard Strauss."

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"The Beats confused run-on sentences in the vernacular with authenticity. Such mannerisms will never make a writer's conjectures and reminiscences more valid."

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Who needs the Great Gatsby when you've got the Great Cthulhu?

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The impossible task of human consciousness is to make chaos cohere.

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Every leader of every country has blood on his hands; the good leaders endure it; the bad ones exult in it.

Even God was perplexed by the perversity of the human heart; like many a great artist, He found His creation more stubbornly complex than intended.

To forgive and forget is not difficult; wanting to do so is.

When you were born, a world of love and hate, of Gods and Devils, was created; obviously, your powers of imagination are great.

If bullets were outlawed and wars were fought by soldiers hurling handfuls of excrement, men might come to their senses and ask, "Who needs this s*it?" (No dung, no glory).

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I cried because I had no eyes; then I met a man who had no head.

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If its every thing you ever wanted, every thing you ever hoped for, it's a Lie; If it tastes like bitter medicine, eats your gut like poison, it's probably the Truth.