Crossword Puzzle Day Quotes

When asked "What do we need to learn this for?" any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.

But I'm really enjoying my retirement. I get to sleep in every day. I do crossword puzzles and eat cake.

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing! It’s sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.

She liked her bookstore. She liked cups of chamomile tea and rainy days and the Sunday morning crossword puzzle. She liked her quiet life.

The point of trying to understand the cross better is not so that we can congratulate ourselves for having solved an intellectual crossword puzzle, but so that God’s power and wisdom may work in us, through us, and out into the world that still regards Jesus’s crucifixion as weakness and folly.

Within the same hour as the murder took place, Isabel Trumbo sat in her armchair dozing, the Alaskan Outdoor magazine on her lap. Her kid sister Alma fidgeted in the other armchair, from time to time picking up her newspaper folded over to the day’s crossword puzzle.

Imagine you live on a planet where the dominant species is far more intellectually sophisticated than human beings but often keeps humans as companion animals. They are called the Gorns. They communicate with each other via a complex combination of telepathy, eye movements & high-pitched squeaks, all completely unintelligible & unlearnable by humans, whose brains are prepared for verbal language acquisition only. Humans sometimes learn the meaning of individual sounds by repeated association with things of relevance to them. The Gorns & humans bond strongly but there are many Gorn rules that humans must try to assimilate with limited information & usually high stakes. You are one of the lucky humans who lives with the Gorns in their dwelling. Many other humans are chained to small cabanas in the yard or kept in outdoor pens of varying size. They are so socially starved they cannot control their emotions when a Gorn goes near them. The Gorns agree that they could never be House-Humans. The dwelling you share with your Gorn family is filled with water-filled porcelain bowls.Every time you try to urinate in one,nearby Gorn attack you. You learn to only use the toilet when there are no Gorns present. Sometimes they come home & stuff your head down the toilet for no apparent reason. You hate this & start sucking up to the Gorns when they come home to try & stave this off but they view this as evidence of your guilt. You are also punished for watching videos, reading books, talking to other human beings, eating pizza or cheesecake, & writing letters. These are all considered behavior problems by the Gorns. To avoid going crazy, once again you wait until they are not around to try doing anything you wish to do. While they are around, you sit quietly, staring straight ahead. Because they witness this good behavior you are so obviously capable of, they attribute to “spite” the video watching & other transgressions that occur when you are alone. Obviously you resent being left alone, they figure. You are walked several times a day and left crossword puzzle books to do. You have never used them because you hate crosswords; the Gorns think you’re ignoring them out of revenge. Worst of all, you like them. They are, after all, often nice to you. But when you smile at them, they punish you, likewise for shaking hands. If you apologize they punish you again. You have not seen another human since you were a small child. When you see one you are curious, excited & afraid. You really don’t know how to act. So, the Gorn you live with keeps you away from other humans. Your social skills never develop. Finally, you are brought to “training” school. A large part of the training consists of having your air briefly cut off by a metal chain around your neck. They are sure you understand every squeak & telepathic communication they make because sometimes you get it right. You are guessing & hate the training. You feel pretty stressed out a lot of the time. One day, you see a Gorn approaching with the training collar in hand. You have PMS, a sore neck & you just don’t feel up to the baffling coercion about to ensue. You tell them in your sternest voice to please leave you alone & go away. The Gorns are shocked by this unprovoked aggressive behavior. They thought you had a good temperament. They put you in one of their vehicles & take you for a drive. You watch the attractive planetary landscape going by & wonder where you are going. You are led into a building filled with the smell of human sweat & excrement. Humans are everywhere in small cages. Some are nervous, some depressed, most watch the goings on on from their prisons. Your Gorns, with whom you have lived your entire life, hand you over to strangers who drag you to a small room. You are terrified & yell for your Gorn family to help you. They turn & walk away.You are held down & given a lethal injection. It is, after all, the humane way to do it.

His day-to-day life was fairly frivolous and lazy and laid-back. It was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a bunch of cats hanging on his shoulders and maybe reading a book at the same time or doing a crossword puzzle." - Ken Morton, Edward Gorey's first cousin once removed, on Gorey's daily routines.

WHEN ASKED “ What do we need to learn this for?” any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness. Because it’s true. Latin, geography, the gods of ancient Greece and Rome: unless you know these things, you’ll be limited to doing the puzzles in People magazine, where the clues read “Movie title, Gone ____ the Wind” and “It holds up your pants.” It’s not such a terrible place to start, but the joy of accomplishment wears off fairly quickly.

Turn your obstacles to your advantage. If you can find a plus out of a negative, then it cannot weigh you down. I like to think I have a superpower called dyslexia. I am creative, intuitive, and empathetic. I am great with problem-solving, and I can think outside the box. Just the other day, I was helping my daughter with a crossword puzzle, and she said, “Dad, how do you find the answers so fast? And I said, “I have dyslexia, and it helps me see things differently. To which she replied, “Aw, I want that.” If we can see our differences or unique qualities as gifts, we can bypass the stigmas that come with them and impress upon ourselves and society we can do anything any other person can do, just differently, and sometimes better.

Well, my epic freedom moment was short-lived, because I realized my cell phone was dead. I walked down the road to a gas station and asked if I could use the phone. I called Tracy and told her where I was and asked her to pick me up. When Tracy arrived I hopped in the car and the very first thing I said to her was “I gotta get home. I have to print out some TV guides and I need to write a letter to some of the guys in there.” She started laughing and when she could compose herself enough to talk said, “My sisters and I all said we guarantee Noah is going to come out of jail with new friends. He’s going to be friends with everybody.” I got home and immediately wrote a letter to Michael Bolton. I put my email address at the bottom. I printed out TV guides. I printed out crossword puzzles. I even printed a couple of pages of jokes and riddles and whatever would be fun to read and do and folded them up and put them in an envelope. All that was left to do was to write the address, put a stamp on the envelope, and put it in the mailbox. I put the envelope in the car in between the seat and the center console to take to the post office. I must have been distracted or had to do something else because the envelope sat there for months. Every so often I would look at it and go, Oh crap, I haven’t sent that yet. And then at some point I spilled something on it so I knew I would never send it now. I threw it out. To this day I’m worried that one day I’m going to be at the gas station in line and hear a voice behind me say, “I’m Michael Bolton and you never sent me my damn TV guide. You’re just like the rest.” He’s going to shank me in my side and that will be the end of the Noah Galloway story.

We cannot provide a definition of those products from which the age takes it name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. The cleverer writers poked fun at their own work. Many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, dancers, gymnasts, aviators, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on. All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. It is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness. If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out. Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder. Thousands upon thousands spent their leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps according to certain rules. But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phaeacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles--for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.

Two weeks had passed when Willie got home from school one day to find a letter postmarked Tyler, Texas. “Dear Willie,” Marla wrote, Dad was right. I love it here. I’ve got three girl cousins I go to school with. One’s in my grade, and one’s ahead of me and one behind. And my aunts are neat. They’re so kind to Mama. Oh, and Dad got a job right away that he likes so far. Anyway, what I want to tell you is how sorry I am. I mean, I wasn’t nice when I first met you because I thought you were a goofball and you’d mess up my life. How was I to know you were really my frog prince? Write me, Willie. I miss you a lot. Your friend, Marla. “Nice letter?” Mom asked. “Yeah,” Willie said. “She says I’m her frog prince.” “Of course you’re a prince. Didn’t I always tell you?” Mom asked. Willie laughed. It didn’t matter if she had; she was his mother, so he knew better than to believe her. “I’m going to write and tell Marla how Booboo’s doing,” Willie said. He’d tell her that since Booboo was back in Willie’s bed at night he was quiet--most of the time. And Booboo hadn’t wet on any more crossword puzzles, either. Of course, Dad hadn’t left any on the floor now that he was back at work and happy being busy again, but still Booboo deserved some credit. Instead of a signature at the end of the letter, he’d draw a picture of a frog with his own face and a crown. Yeah, that’d be good. He bet it would make Marla laugh, and even if he couldn’t hear her, he’d like that.

He makes it to the door before turning one-hundred-eighty degrees to jog right back to me. I have the smoothie in one hand and my crossword puzzle in the other, but Isaiah throws his arms around my shoulders, pulling me into a hug.  It’s foreign yet comforting, and my body holds no protest to his hug. He holds me as if I were important to him, needed in order for him to get through his day. It feels good, so good. He’s so good.

Nana was the wisest woman anyone knew. She did the crossword puzzle every day and knew about words my father didn’t. She knew how to keep all of her flowers fully bloomed through October, and whenever I fought with my mother over the last grocery bag in the car, Nana would recite a Bible passage from memory. We’d be silenced by the immediacy of God standing before us in a knit sweater, burgundy heels.

She liked cups of chamomile tea and rainy days and the Sunday morning crossword puzzle. She liked her quiet life.

As Epstein writes: “How many households are in New York? What portion might have pianos? How often are pianos tuned? How long might it take to tune a piano? How many homes can one tuner reach in a day? How many days a year does a tuner work?” You won’t guess it exactly, but you’ll be much more likely to be in the ballpark. As Epstein writes, “None of the individual estimates has to be particularly accurate in order to get a reasonable overall answer.

I’ve seen the dark side of puzzles, how they can overlap with paranoia and obsession. And I grew to love types of puzzles that never appealed to me before. I talked to scientists about why we’re so drawn to puzzles, why an estimated 50 million people do crosswords every day and more than 450 million Rubik’s Cubes have been sold.

According to this theory, every morning you should spend two minutes giving your spouse your full and complete attention. Look deeply into their eyes, ask how they are, and really listen to the answer. Then, after work, do the same thing for three minutes. And finally, two minutes before bed. Seven minutes a day, and—voilà!—a lifetime of matrimonial bliss.

These days, everyday words and phrases, even if they haven’t yet made the dictionary, are encouraged. Avoid, as the Times put it, “uninteresting obscurity (a Bulgarian village, a water bug genus).” Crosswordese (ESNE, ESTE, YSER) should be kept “to a minimum,” and no two extremely tricky answers should cross each other.

I was not a key member of the staff. It was my job to take the articles the writers faxed over and type them into the computer system—it was 1996, email was still viewed as a curious phenomenon that might blow over. Also, I had to input the crossword puzzle by looking back and forth between the paper the puzzle-crafter sent me and my computer screen, trying to remember if it went black, black, white, black, or black, white, black, black. I was in a constant state of embittered self-righteousness at the office. How had I been mistaken for a charwoman? Mayita was similarly horrified by the tumble her status had taken: As a senior at Wesleyan just a few months before, she had been the next Sally Mann. Now she alphabetized negatives all day. (When we expressed subdued versions of our outrage to our elders, their responses invariably included the phrase “paying your dues.” It was not a phrase we cared for.)

• Focus on quantity. You’ve got to get the basics first. If you’re not in bed longer, you can’t get more sleep. For me that meant getting to bed 10 minutes earlier, then another 10, and so on. • Focus on quality. I found two things made a difference: paying more attention to what I eat and drink in the afternoon and evening (no more afternoon lattes!) and doing something other than work, like sudoku or a crossword puzzle, right before falling asleep. • Be accountable. It helps to have help. In my case, I had Arianna as my sleep coach. I can picture her talking about the tough choices she’s made to get enough sleep and I’m motivated to do the same. And on the delicious mornings when I wake up more rested (okay, not every day) I imagine her smiling and saying, “Oh, good, darling, you’ve slept!” • Play the long game. Change is never a straight line, and trying to get more sleep has been no exception. Stuff comes up at work that I want to tackle. I’m with my family and friends, and I don’t want to leave the party. Some nights I just don’t sleep well—but I remind myself that this is a long game, and little incremental changes add up.

Besides not tasting good, the dodo had one or two fateful weaknesses. It laid its eggs upon the open ground, instead of concealing them. And it could not fly. As to why it could not fly—It seems inevitable for it to be said that this was because there were no predators on Mauritius. Indeed there were none either, in Australia, where lived the emu, which could not fly. There were none in New Zealand, where the flightless moa dwelt, in awful ignorance of the awful fact that some day its chief fame would be as an adjunct to the composers of cross-word puzzles. There were no predators in Iceland, to the great comfort of the great auk. Nor were there any on the frozen shelves of Antarctica, land of the flightless penguin.3 However, does this really explain anything?

Prayer is irksome. An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome. When it is over, this casts a feeling of relief and holiday over the rest of the day. We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish. While we are at prayer, but not while we are reading a novel or solving a cross-word puzzle, any trifle is enough to distract us… The odd thing is that this reluctance to pray is not confined to periods of dryness. When yesterday’s prayers were full of comfort and exaltation, today’s will still be felt as, in some degree, a burden.