Ogden Nash Quotes

Tonight’s December thirty-first, Something is about to burst. The clock is crouching, dark and small, Like a time bomb in the hall. Hark, it's midnight, children dear. Duck! Here comes another year!

Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, And that's what parents were created for.

A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.

To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the wedding cup, whenever you're wrong, admit it; whenever you're right, shut up.

You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.

Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.

Some pains are physical, and some pains are mental, but the one that's both is dental.

LIFE BEGINS AT THE END OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE

I have an idea that the phrase “weaker sex” was coined by some woman to disarm the man she was preparing to overwhelm.

The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.

Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.

Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave when they think that their children are naive.

If you don’t want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you won’t have to work.

Middle age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.

When grandparents enter the door, discipline flies out the window. ~ Ogden Nash

Where there is a monster, there is a miracle.

Certainly there are things in life that money can’t buy, but it’s very funny – Did you ever try buying them without money.

A jolly young fellow from Yuma Told an elephant joke to a puma; now his skeleton lies beneath hot western skies- the puma had no sense of huma

Progress is a fine thing, but it's gone on long enough.

Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.

either you get eaten by a wolf today or else the shepherd saves you from the wolf so he can sell you to the butcher tomorrow

A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.

If called by a panther, don't anther

Parsley is gharsley.

People who have what they want are fond of telling people who haven’t what they want that they really don’t want it.

The cow is of the bovine ilk; one end is moo, the other milk.

I dreamt that my hair was kempt. Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.

The trouble with a kitten is that it eventually becomes a cat.

Too clever is dumb.

To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you're wrong, admit it; Whenever you're right, shut up." ~Happy birthday Ogden Nash! (born 8.19.1902)

To keep one's marriage brimming, With love in the wedding cup, Whenever you're wrong admit it; Whenever you're right, shut up." - Ogden Nash

The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late.

Snow is all right while it is snowing; it is like inebriation because it is very pleasing when it is coming, but very unpleasing when it is going.

If some confectioners were willing To let the shape announce the filling, We'd encounter fewer assorted chocs, Bitten into and returned to the box.

I give you now Professor Twist The conscientious scientist. Trustees exclaimed, “He never bungles” And sent him off to distant jungles. Camped on a tropic riverside One day he missed his lovely bride. She had, the guide informed him later, Been eaten by an alligator. Professor Twist could not but smile. You mean,” he said “a crocodile.!

Sure deck your lower limbs in pants; Yours are the limbs, my sweeting. You look divine as you advance– Have you seen yourself retreating?

Remorse is a violent dyspepsia of the mind, But it is very difficult to treat because it cannot even be defined, Because everything is not gold that glisters and everything is not a tear that glistens, And one man's remorse is another man's reminiscence

Elephants are useful friends: they have handles on both ends.

He who has never tasted jail Lives well within the legal pale, While he who's served a heavy sentence Renews the racket, not repentance.

Which the Chicken and Which the Egg? He drinks because she scolds, he thinks; She thinks she scolds because he drinks; And nether will admit what's true, That he's a sot and she's a shrew.

More than a catbird hates a cat, Or a criminal hates a clue, Or the Axis hates the United States, That's how much I love you. I love you more than a duck can swim, And more than a grapefruit squirts, I love you more than a gin rummy is a bore, And more than a toothache hurts. As a shipwrecked sailor hates the sea, Or a juggler hates a shove, As a hostess detests unexpected guests, That's how much you I love. I love you more than a wasp can sting, And more than the subway jerks, I love you as much as a beggar needs a crutch, And more than a hangnail irks. I swear to you by the stars above, And below, if such there be, As the High Court loathes perjurious oathes, That's how you're loved by me.

My fellow man I do not care for. I often ask me, What's he there for? The only answer i can find Is, Reproduction of his kind.

Come live with me and be my love And we will all the pleasures prove Of a marriage conducted with economy In the Twentieth Century Anno Donomy. We’ll live in a dear little walk-up flat With practically room to swing a cat And a potted cactus to give it hauteur And a bathtub equipped with dark brown water. We’ll eat, without undue discouragement, Foods low in cost but high in nouragement And quaff with pleasure, while chatting wittily, The peculiar wine of Little Italy. We’ll remind each other it’s smart to be thrifty And buy our clothes for something-fifty. We’ll bus for miles on holidays For seas at depressing matinees, And every Sunday we’ll have a lark And take a walk in Central Park. And one of these days not too remote You’ll probably up and cut my throat.

Love is a word that is constantly heard, Hate is a word that is not. Love, I am told, is more precious that gold. Love, I have read, is hot. But hate is the verb that to me is superb, And love but a drug on the mart. Any kiddie in school can love like a fool, But hating, my boy, is an art.

Senescence begins And middle-age ends The day your descendants Outnumber your friends

You can have my jellyfish I am not sellyfish

Man is a victim of dope In the incurable form of hope!

The Bronx? No Thonx!

Do you think my mind is maturing late, or simply rotted early?

People can't concentrate properly on blowing other people to pieces if their minds are poisoned by thoughts suitable to the twenty-fifth of December.

At least when I get on the Boston train I have a good chance of landing in the South Station And not in that part of the daily press which is reserved for victims of aviation.

People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.

There’s nothing that keeps it’s youth So far as I know, but a tree and the truth

How easy for those who do not bulge To not overindulge!

Professional men, they have no cares; Whatever happens, they get theirs.

There are people who are very resourceful, at being remorseful, And who apparently feel that the best way to make friends is to do something terrible and then make amends.

Hark to the sky of a seagull! He cries because he's not an eagle. Oh, what if you were you silly he-gull? What would you say to your she-gull?

There is something about a Martini, Ere the dining and dancing begin, And to tell you the truth, It is not the vermouth-- I think that perhaps it's the gin." --Ogden Nash

I could not eat a kangaroo. But many fine Australians do. Those with cookbooks as well as boomerangs Prefer him in tasty kangaroo-meringues.

Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets them.

How do I feel today? I feel as unfit as an unfiddle, And it is the result of a certain turbulence in the mind and an uncertain burbulence in the middle. What was it, anyway, that angry thing that flew at me? I am unused to banshees crying Boo at me. Your wife can’t be a banshee— Or can she?

Everybody who has a baby thinks everybody who hasn't a baby ought to have a baby, Which accounts for the success of such plays as the Irish Rose of Abie, The idea apparently being that just by being fruitful You are doing something beautiful, Which if it is true Means that the common housefly is several million times more beautiful than me or you.

Philo Vance / Needs a kick in the pance.

You can be young only once, but you can be immature forever.

Where there is a monster, the wise American poet Ogden Nash told us, there is a miracle.

I have an idea that the phrase “the weaker sex” was coined by some woman to disarm the man she was preparing to overwhelm. —OGDEN NASH

Middle age is when you’ve met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else. Ogden Nash

A Caution to Everybody consider the Auk. Becoming extinct before because he forgot out to fly and could only walk. Consider Man, who may well become extinct, Because he forgot how to walk and learned to fly before he thinked.

VI. FINAL WARNING There are monsters in these pages, but as Ogden Nash pointed out in my first short-story collection, Smoke and Mirrors, where there’s a monster, there’s also a miracle. There are some long stories and some short ones. There are a handful of poems, which perhaps might need their own warning for the people who are frightened, disturbed, or terminally puzzled by poetry. (In my second short-story collection, Fragile Things, I tried to explain that the poems come free. They are bonuses for the kind of people who do not need to worry about sneaky and occasional poems lurking inside their short-story collections.) There. Consider yourself warned. There are so many little triggers out there, being squeezed in the darkness even as I write this. This book is correctly labeled. Now all we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you. Thank you for coming. Enjoy the things that never happened. Secure your own mask again after you read these stories, but do not forget to help others.

Baclli swarm within my portals Such as ne'r conceived by mortals, But, bred by scientists, Wise and hoary in some Olympian laboratory. Bacteria as large as mice With feet of fire and heads of ice, Who never interrupt for slumber Their stomping, elephantine rumba. ( From the poem--- " The Common Cold " )

Indeed, everybody wants to be a wow, But not everybody knows exactly how. Some people think they will eventually wear diamonds instead of rhinestones Only by everlastingly keeping their noses to their ghrinestones

The trouble with a kitten is that....... It eventually becomes a cat!

Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.

It's my own dream, I dreamt it, I dreamt that my hair was kempt, then I dremat my true love unkempt it.

O, money, money, money, I'm not necessarily one of those who think thee holy, But I often stop to wonder how thou canst go out so fast when thou comest in so slowly.

Were it not for frustration and humiliation I suppose the human race would get ideas above its station.

Higgledy piggledy, my black hen, She lays eggs for gentlemen. Gentlemen come every day To count what my black hen doth lay. If perchance she lays too many, They fine my hen a pretty penny; If perchance she fails to lay, The gentlemen a bonus pay. Mumbledy pumbledy, my red cow, She’s cooperating now. At first she didn’t understand That milk production must be planned; She didn’t understand at first She either had to plan or burst, But now the government reports She’s giving pints instead of quarts. Fiddle de dee, my next-door neighbors, They are giggling at their labors. First they plant the tiny seed, Then they water, then they weed, Then they hoe and prune and lop, They they raise a record crop, Then they laugh their sides asunder, And plow the whole caboodle under. Abracadabra, thus we learn The more you create, the less you earn. The less you earn, the more you’re given, The less you lead, the more you’re driven, The more destroyed, the more they feed, The more you pay, the more they need, The more you earn, the less you keep, And now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to take If the tax-collector hasn’t got it before I wake.

Bugs. Adam had'em.

My garden will never make me famous. I'm a horticultural ignoramus. I can't tell a string-bean from a soybean, or even a girl bean from a boy bean

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all. -Ogden Nash, poet (1902-1971)

Unwillingly Miranda wakes, Feels the sun with terror, One unwilling step she takes, Shuddering to the mirror. Miranda in Miranda's sight Is old and gray and dirty; Twenty-nine she was last night; This morning she is thirty. Shining like the morning star, Like the twilight shining, Haunted by a calendar, Miranda is a-pining. Silly girl, silver girl, Draw the mirror toward you; Time who makes the years to whirl Adorned as he adored you. Time is timelessness for you; Calendars for the human; What's a year, or thirty, to Loveliness made woman? Oh, Night will not see thirty again, Yet soft her wing, Miranda; Pick up your glass and tell me, then-- How old is Spring, Miranda?

Ogden Nash wrote a line that I have always remembered: “The old men know when an old man dies.” With the years, that line has become ever more poignant to me. After all, an old person to one who has known him for a long time is not an “old person” but is much more likely to be thought of as the younger person who inhabits our memory, vigorous and vibrant. When an old person dies who has been a part of your life, it is part of your youth that dies. And though you survive yourself, you must watch death take away the world of your youth, little by little.

In high school, we barely brushed against Ogden Nash, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, or any of the other so-unserious writers who delight everyone they touch. This was, after all, a very expensive and important school. Instead, I was force-fed a few of Shakespeare's Greatest Hits, although the English needed translation, the broad comedy and wrenching drama were lost, and none of the magnificently dirty jokes were ever explained. (Incidentally, Romeo and Juliet, fully appreciated, might be banned in some U.S. states.) This was the Concordance again, and little more. So we'd read all the lines aloud, resign ourselves to a ponderous struggle, and soon give up the plot completely.

I believe that people believe what they believe they believe.

I am a conscientious man, when I throw rocks at seagulls I leave no tern unstoned.

In the world of mules There are no rules.

...I would not engage the wombat In any form of mortal combat.

We Don't Need to Leave Yet, Do We? Or, Yes We Do One kind of person when catching a train always wants to allow an hour to cover the ten-block trip to the terminus, And the other kind looks at them as if they were verminous, And the second kind says that five minutes is plenty and will even leave one minute over for buying the tickets, And the first kind looks at them as if they had cerebral rickets. One kind when theater-bound sups lightly at six and hastens off to the play, And indeed I know one such person who is so such that it frequently arrives in time for the last act of the matinee, And the other kind sits down at eight to a meal that is positively sumptuous, Observing cynically that an eight-thirty curtain never rises till eight-forty, an observation which is less cynical than bumptious. And what the first kind, sitting uncomfortably in the waiting room while the train is made up in the yards, can never understand, Is the injustice of the second kind's reaching their scat just as the train moves out, just as they had planned, And what the second kind cannot understand as they stumble over the first kind's heel just as the footlights flash on at last Is that the first kind doesn't feel the least bit foolish at having entered the theater before the cast. Oh, the first kind always wants to start now and the second kind always wants to tarry, Which wouldn't make any difference, except that each other is what they always marry.

There is one thing that ought to be taught in all the colleges, Which is that people ought to be taught not to go around always making apologies. I don't mean the kind of apologies people make when they run over you or borrow five dollars or step on your feet, Because I think that is sort of sweet; No, I object to one kind of apology alone, Which is when people spend their time and yours apologizing for everything they own. You go to their house for a meal, And they apologize because the anchovies aren't caviar or the partridge is veal; They apologize privately for the crudeness of the other guests, And they apologize publicly for their wife's housekeeping or their husband's jests; If they give you a book by Dickens they apologize because it isn't by Scott, And if they take you to the theater, they apologize for the acting and the dialogue and the plot; They contain more milk of human kindness than the most capacious diary can, But if you are from out of town they apologize for everything local and if you are a foreigner they apologize for everything American. I dread these apologizers even as I am depicting them, I shudder as I think of the hours that must be spend in contradicting them, Because you are very rude if you let them emerge from an argument victorious, And when they say something of theirs is awful, it is your duty to convince them politely that it is magnificent and glorious, And what particularly bores me with them, Is that half the time you have to politely contradict them when you rudely agree with them, So I think there is one rule every host and hostess ought to keep with the comb and nail file and bicarbonate and aromatic spirits on a handy shelf, Which is don't spoil the denouement by telling the guests everything is terrible, but let them have the thrill of finding it out for themselves.

Very Like a Whale One thing that literature would be greatly the better for Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor. Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts, Can'ts seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else. What foes it mean when we are told That the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold? In the first place, George Gordon Byron had had enough experience To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot of Assyrians. However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and thus hinder longevity, We'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity. Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold, Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a wolf on the fold? In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy there are a great many things, But i don't imagine that among then there is a wolf with purple and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings. No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof; Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof woof? Frankly I think it very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say, at the very most, Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host. But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them, With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers to people they say Oh yes, they're the ones that a lot of wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them. That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets, from Homer to Tennyson; They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison, And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket after a winter storm. Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of snow and I'll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical blanket material and we'll see which one keeps warm, And after that maybe you'll begin to comprehend dimly, What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

Cuckoos lead Bohemian lives, They fail as husbands and as wives, Therefore they cynically disparage Everybody else's marriage - Ogden Nash, The Cucko

The trouble with a kitten is THAT Eventually it becomes a CAT

Middle age is when you’re sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you. Ogden Nash (1902–71), American poet I

Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on far too long.

At HQ, meantime, the Dispatcher of Inspectors is cackling hatefully as he cuddles his Bradshaw's Railway Guide, for the train the inspectors will catch at Victoria has a restaurant car but it is too late for what British Rail jestingly calls "breakfast" and too early for a life-giving drink. Heh, heh! At Eastbourne, they [the bank inspectors] stamp into the bank's Market Street branch, flourishing many a dread credential and reciting an Ogden Nash-like poem which goes after this fashion: Keys, Please. Then they glance swiftly around to observe which cashier has gone green about the gills, which teller is slipping his pocket-money back into the petty-cash box and feeding the racing pages of the Daily Mirror into the shredding machine, which assistant manager is sidling out in the general direction of Gatwick Airport.

Despite Ogden Nash’s observation that “people who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up,” a growing chorus of exercists who nag us to exercise condemn sitting as a modern scourge.1 One prominent physician has declared that chairs are “out to get us, harm us, kill us” and that “sitting is the new smoking.”2 According to him, the average American sits for an unacceptable thirteen hours a day, and “for every hour we sit, two hours of our lives walk away—lost forever.” This admonition is obviously hyperbole, but other well-publicized studies estimate that sitting more than three hours a day is responsible for nearly 4 percent of deaths worldwide and that every hour of sitting is as harmful as the benefit from twenty minutes of exercise.3 By some estimates, replacing an hour or two of daily sitting with light activities like walking can lower death rates by 20 to 40 percent.4 As a result, standing desks are all the rage, and many people now wear sensors or use their phones to keep track of and limit their sitting time. We have become exercised about sitting.

Very Like a Whale

ADVENTURES OF ISABEL Isabel

She and Gerald rarely argued, and when they did, she quickly nipped it in the bud, silently reciting an Ogden Nash poem entitled "A Word to Husbands," though she thought it applied to just as well to wives: To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you're wrong, admit it; Whenever you're right, shut up.

I am a conscientious man, when I throw rocks at seabirds I leave no tern unstoned.