Carnival Of Snackery Quotes

Oh, offensive jokes…when, if ever, will your time come around again?

This afternoon’s Radio 4 quiz show included the line “One in three Americans weighs as much as the other two.

Question: What’s the difference between a whore and a bitch? Answer: A whore will sleep with anybody. A bitch will sleep with anybody… but you.

Sometimes things happen and I don’t know what to do with my face.

I wanted to be perfect,” he said over dinner. “I…need to be perfect.” It’s such a burden to place on yourself. Say you are perfect—who’s going to recognize it? Few things are like the Olympics, where judges hold up score cards. How does one paint perfectly? Or lawyer perfectly? The key is to fill the space between your skill level and perfection with charm. That said, you can’t do it consciously. Charm can’t be constructed that way.

The camera has replaced actual looking and turned life into evidence. It drives me crazy. February 1, 2014

He didn’t explain how, but then again, no one does. They just say it’s your patriotic duty and everyone kind of goes along with it.

Anyone who does anything even remotely irritating is, from this point on, a Republican.

Black female security officer at the Charlotte airport: How you doing, sweetheart? Me: That’s so nice of you to call me sweetheart. Her: All right, baby. Keep it safe.

One day I’ll wish I had a recording of Gretchen that I could play when I start feeling sorry for myself. I don’t know that I’ve ever met a more enthusiastic person. Her key, I think, is that she’s never stopped being interested in things. She’s never decided that everything reminds her of something else, that everything worthwhile has been crossed off her list.

Amy came for dinner and before eating we watched a dozen YouTube videos by an outfit called Soft White Underbelly. They provide great lighting and a judgment-free space for drug addicts, prostitutes, pimps, hard-core alcoholics, and people who are just plain crazy. Then they ask them really good questions. One of our favorite interviews was with a man who was transitioning into a gender-less dragon.

I’ve finished answering the letters Alyssa gave me a few weeks back. One was from a woman who wrote that when deaf people get their hearing, they’re always surprised that the sun makes no noise. They naturally assumed it would roar, though if it did, you’d think it might have been mentioned somewhere along the way, in songs at least. Maybe that’s what they thought was meant by “I was awoken by the sun.

Dorothy Parker’s “From the Diary of a New York Lady During Days of Horror, Despair, and World Change.

September 25, 2007 Paris To honor the death of Marcel Marceau I observed a minute of silence.

Maybe you should grow a Vandyke.” I didn’t say that I’d rather have herpes, as the doctor had a Vandyke himself. It looked like he’d taken a big gulp from a mugful of hair.

I used to get them all the time. Then I met a woman who told me I needed to put a bar of soap in my bed. I don’t know why it works, but it does!

seems I have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It’s a lifelong appointment and there are no dues, just glory and hobnobbery. I look at the list of current members and feel woozy. In the department of literature, there’s Ann Beattie, Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Hempel, Jamaica Kincaid, David Mamet, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Sharon Olds, Ann Patchett, Jayne Anne Phillips, Francine Prose, Marilynne Robinson, George Saunders, Wallace Shawn, Anne Tyler, Edmund White, Joy Williams, and Tobias Wolff. Really? I think. These people are gods to me. It’s like I’ve been allowed onto Mount Olympus. Then there are the departments of art (Bruce Nauman, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Susan Rothenberg), music, and architecture. Honorary members—people whose work falls outside these categories—include Bob Dylan, Meryl Streep, Frederick Wiseman, and Martin Scorsese.

While each of us thought, separately, Amy brought up Fran Lebowitz. "Someone asked her what her favorite animal is and she answered, 'Steak.' Isn't that perfect?

Americans think that bullfighting is savage and backward, but if you could do it with guns I’m sure we’d be all for it. “Can you imagine?” I said to Patsy. “The bull would be released and someone with a sawed-off deer rifle would blow its front legs off.

One weapons store was located next to a ballet school that also sold powdered vitamin drinks, the kind used by bodybuilders. In the window were tutus, enormous cans of whey protein, and pictures of tanned, overdeveloped men who grimaced and looked, in Hugh’s words, as if they were being roasted alive in a hot oven.

On Christmas Day a man in Philadelphia went to the movies and found himself seated near a couple of chatterboxes, a father and son, according to the report. The two were asked several times to be quiet, and when they continued their conversation, the man who had shushed them pulled out a gun and shot the father in the arm. Reading this, I thought, Well, finally. Everyone knows that calling the manager doesn’t do any good, and why have liberal gun laws if we’re not going to take advantage of them? If someone won’t shut up during a movie, they should be shot, and as often as possible. My only amendment would be that the shooter use a silencer; that way the rest of us won’t be distracted.

Did you know that fourteen days after conception, a fetus can hold a miniature tennis racket?” I said to someone in last night’s signing line. “It can’t return a serve—that comes later—but still, it’s a remarkable achievement.” Next I told someone that at the gestational age of two months, an unborn baby can tune a guitar and braid a lanyard. “Did you know,” I said to a woman named Barbara, “that three weeks after conception, an unborn baby can write a check?” She looked startled. “No one uses checks anymore!” And I said, as if that were the miracle, “I know!

With us was her friend Laurie, who’s on a hundred-day shopping fast. “It’s to teach me to appreciate the things I already have,” she said. “I can buy groceries and food, but nothing else—no clothes or music. Not even newspapers

I’m also getting a kick out of “having a blue,” which means having a fight. You could say, “It was a serious blue,” or “We had a blue,” or “If I talk to this woman there’s going to be a blue.” You could also say, “I’m ready to put the blue on.

They think rabbits lay eggs and a monkey jumped over the got-damn moon. Stupid bitches don’t know shit. Rabbits don’t lay no eggs. Go-rilla can’t shoot no dice.

Before leaving Austin I heard a radio report on an Englishman who’s giving out awards for stupid security measures. First prize goes to an airport scanner who forced a female passenger to drink from three bottles of her own breast milk. She’d pumped it before boarding, and they wanted to make sure it wasn’t poison. This explains why sperm donors are traveling Greyhound.

I read yesterday that when starved for food, the humpback cricket will chew off its own legs. If they regenerated this might be a half-decent idea, but they don’t. So it eats its legs, and, unable to escape danger, it promptly gets eaten itself. That so seems like something I would do.

looked at her picture on Facebook and thought, Of course.

of yesterday, the London Underground announcements will no longer begin with “Ladies and gentlemen.” Gender-queer people said it made them feel excluded, so from now on the conductors will say, “Hello, everyone.

On the shop’s second story were small appliances and some of the saddest clothing I’ve ever seen — a glittery sweatshirt, for instance, that had the word ACTIVITY written on it. We were the only customers, and I felt bad for the security guard, a young man with a single, thick eyebrow who marched back and forth between the toasters and the underpants.