Edward Gorey quotes
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“There are so many things we've been brought up to believe that it takes you an awfully long time to realize that they aren't you.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“To take my work seriously would be the height of folly.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“My favorite journey is looking out the window.”
-- Edward Gorey -
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“I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist...I am a person who does those things.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.... You can describe all the externals of a performance - everything, in fact, but what really constitutes its core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is what's left over after you've explained everything else.”
-- Edward GoreySource : Edward Gorey (2001). “Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey : Interviews”, Houghton Mifflin
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“It's well we cannot hear the screams we make in other people's dreams.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.”
-- Edward Gorey -
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“This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“A small and sinister snow seems to be coming down relentlessly at present. The radio says it is eventually going to be sleet and rain, but I don't think so; I think it is just going to go on and on, coming down, until the whole world...etc. It has that look.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“I thought I'd be a librarian until I met some crazy ones.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“When people are finding meaning in things -- beware.”
-- Edward GoreySource : Edward Gorey (2001). “Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey : Interviews”, Houghton Mifflin
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“The helpful thought for which you look Is written somewhere in a book.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“God knows, there's enough to worry about without worrying about worrying about things.”
-- Edward GoreySource : Edward Gorey (2001). “Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey : Interviews”, Houghton Mifflin
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“...my least favorite actress of all time, Helena Bonham Carter. I find her lack of a neck very off-putting and especially her acting.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“I don't think anything might have been. What is, is.”
-- Edward GoreySource : Edward Gorey (2001). “Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey : Interviews”, Houghton Mifflin
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“Having got into bed and turned out the light, I quietly burst into tears because I am not a good person. As they came and went for some minutes, I was concerned with the words following 'because' in the previous sentence, rewriting them over and over in my head until they seemed to be as close to the truth as it was possible for me to make them.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“The world may think it idiotic, Nor care at all we're symbiotic, But I will say at once and twice: I find it nice. I find it nice.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“Interviewer: What is your greatest regret? Gorey: That I don't have one”
-- Edward Gorey -
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“If something doesn't creep into a drawing that you're not prepared for, you might as well not have drawn it.”
-- Edward GoreySource : Edward Gorey (2001). “Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey : Interviews”, Houghton Mifflin
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“What is, is, and what might have been could never have existed.”
-- Edward GoreySource : Edward Gorey (2001). “Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey : Interviews”, Houghton Mifflin
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“If I do not seem to be mentioning anything I’ve read lately, it is because I am in one of those periods of undifferentiated flux or something in which I am reading about fifty, at a minimum, books at once, so of course I seldom finish one. Eventually this phase will pass, and I’ll discover I have about ten pages to go in all of them, and will sit down and systematically finish them, one after another.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“Ideally, if anything [was] any good, it would be indescribable.”
-- Edward Gorey -
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“I realize that homosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is - but then, of course, heterosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is, too. And being a man is a serious problem and being a woman is, too. Lots of things are problems.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there's sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children — oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that's true, there really isn't. And there's probably no happy nonsense, either.”
-- Edward GoreySource : Edward Gorey (2001). “Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey : Interviews”, Houghton Mifflin
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“My mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that's what the world is like.”
-- Edward GoreySource : Edward Gorey (2001). “Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey : Interviews”, Houghton Mifflin
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“Vice is nice, but a little virtue won't hurt you.”
-- Edward Gorey -
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“If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“Mr Earbrass stands on the terrace at twilight. It is bleak; it is cold; and the virtue has gone out of everything. Words drift through his mind: anguish turnips conjunctions illness defeat string parties no parties urns desuetude disaffection claws loss Trebizond napkins shame stones distance fever Antipodes mush glaciers incoherence labels miasma amputation tides deceit mourning elsewards.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“Some tiny creature, mad with wrath, is coming nearer on the path.”
-- Edward Gorey -
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“There was a young lady named Mae Who smoked without stopping all day; As pack followed pack, Her lungs first turned black, And eventually rotted away.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“Such excess of passion is quite out of fashion”
-- Edward Gorey -
“I tend to be rather inconsequential and trail off.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“I don't know what it is I'm doing. But it's not that. Despite all evidence to the contrary.”
-- Edward Gorey -
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“Not everything in life can be interpreted metaphorically; that's because things fall out on the way.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“More is happening out there than we are aware of. It is possibly due to some unknown direful circumstance.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“I should like a parsley sandwich. To the best of my knowledge they are not in season.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“I've never had any intentions about anything. That's why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense.”
-- Edward Gorey -
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“Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is left after you have explained everything else.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“Neither mine nor other people's prospects seem particularly pleasing just at the moment, and I have fantasies of going to Iceland, never to return. As it is, I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success.”
-- Edward Gorey -
“I have given up considering happiness as relevant.”
-- Edward GoreySource : Edward Gorey (2001). “Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey : Interviews”, Houghton Mifflin
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“The Suicide, as she is falling, Illuminated by the moon, Regrets her act, and finds appalling The thought she will be dead so soon.”
-- Edward Gorey
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