[You must remain unalarmed when you discover that the Technical Assistant has but a magpie mind. He was born in a library, and subsequently raised there. He has no memories from before he could read. He’s a creature entirely built on words, with not a scrap of experience to bind him. Thus, the magpie mind. Not even a lint trap, which at least holds the actual events of the day, for him. He is after every shiny phrase, every jewel of a word, every passing mention of his favored subjects. If he did not work for the Labs, he might have made a first-rate plagiarist, or driver of trucks.
There is often rhyme in these quotations, but seldom any reason. They do not differentiate between wisdom and folly, between the answerable and the questionable, between the mission and the musing. They are generously called Eclectic, but if they were collected to explain the philosophy and history of Wonderful Labs, they are in truth Electric Boogaloo. They dazzle, they sing, these quotations and findings from all reaches of the Paperverse. They do not necessarily cohere or inform.
So here’s to you, Tech-Tech! You're a book-worm eating your way through the world. You started with Golden Books and worked your way up to Choose-Your-Own Adventures, but you never thought to step outside the binding. You sent lyrics as love notes and didn’t realize that your own imperfect sentences would be more appreciated. You pointed when you should have grasped. Tech-Tech! I love you! You’re so messed up, but you’re messed up for literary reasons.
Is it possible to have read too much? Can we stay alive as long as there are more things we want to read? Or do we only stay alive as long as people read our words, til human voices wake us and we drown.]
"So the people with the answers
met the people with the questions
and the people with the books sat down
They finally decided to sit around
and talk about the problems, to see if they could come up with some
answers to meet the questions and some questions to meet the answers..."
- The Beta Band, "Eclipse"
"The time is the day after tomorrow; the place is anywhere so long as it can accommodate a bank, a main street, and a library - along with a myopic little man named Henry Bemis who has only one passion in life and that is to read."
-Rod Serling, "Time Enough At Last"
"Born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."
- Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche
"Some people resent the idea of luck. Accepting the role of chance in our lives suggests that our creations and triumphs are not entirely our own, and that in some way we're undeserving of our success. I say, get over it. This is how the world works. In creative endeavors luck is a skill."
- Twyla Tharp, "The Creative Habit"
"Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer."
- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
COOK: Is it male or female?
ROBBY: In my case, sir, the question is totally without meaning!
-Forbidden Planet
GROUCHO: Is it male or female?
CHICO: No, I no think so.
-Duck Soup
"My brain I'll prove the female of my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts;
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humors like the people of this world...
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented..."
-William Shakespeare, "Richard II"
"Nothing is too wonderful to be true."
- Michael Faraday
"Was it the onset of acute schizophrenia, or was it a genuine mystic revelation, and then again, is there any difference?"
-R. Crumb, “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick"
"Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good."
-Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
"Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it - if he wants a safe seat in the audience - let him read somebody else."
-D.H. Lawrence, quoted in "The Literary 100"
"Emotions have been discarded for the good of the race. And you constantly make jokes. I'm afraid that won't do."
-Orson from Ork, Mork & Mindy - A novel by Ralph Church based on the hit television series Mork & Mindy With a Special Mork & Mindy Photo Section
"Sometimes I feel like I'm writing pornography in the notebook of the gods."
-Grant Morrison, The Invisibles
"Who knows how long this gravy train is going to keep rolling? We have to make hay while the mixed metaphors last."
-Peter Milligan, X-Force #121
"I says, 'Surf's up space ponies! I'm making gravy without the lumps!'"
-The Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight, "The Tick: Mighty Blue Justice!"
"We get to do what other series don't, because we just refuse to do it. Wow, that makes no sense."
-Ben Edlund on the Tick tv series
"This is the mode of the dilettante, as distinguished from the technique of the more stately gentleman of scientific decorum."
-Heinrich Zimmer, the king & the corpse
"The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text."
-Umberto Eco, "Postscript to The Name of The Rose"
"I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind."
-Flann O'Brien, At-Swim-Two-Birds
"The figure one resembles an erect phallus and the horizontal figure 8, the lemniscate, represents the testes and stands for creative power."
- Dr. S. Heywood
"It's true. I'm lovable and wonderful."
- Mr. Nobody, Doom Patrol
"How do they choose to reward Lex Luthor, the greatest genius in this world? Do they give him glory, do they give him treasure? What, as a matter of fact, do they give him?"
-Lex Luthor, Superman II
"On my break - the week that I was off - I was Batman. I went from town to town, lowering the alert level."
-Jon Stewart, The Daily Show 03/03/03
"But I have never had too high a regard for what is generally called "reality." Reality, to me, is not so much something you perceive, but something you make. You create it more rapidly than it creates you."
-Philip K. Dick, "The Android and the Human" (1972)
"A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again."
- Alexander Pope, “A Little Learning”
"I think all the stories you hear about world- traveling lawn gnomes these days started with the humbler travels of our duck, back in '59. Or vice versa, I suppose."
-Tim Powers, "Itinerary"
"At this point the coincidences were becoming just too bizarre."
- Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders
"This is not a complete. Sentence. This either."
-David Moser (?)
"There are beings - and artifacts - against which we batter our intelligence raw, and in the end make peace with reality only by saying, 'It was an apparition, a thing of beauty and horror.'"
-Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator
"Even when I make a cup of coffee I change the world."
- Jean-Paul Sartre
CYCLOPS: This is no ordinary life, Xorn.
-Grant Morrison, "New X-Men" #126
"Thou art so truth, that thoughts of thee suffice,
To make dreames truths; and fables histories"
- John Donne, "The Dreame"
"Madame, you're delicious!"
-Gene Kelly, An American in Paris
"When better drawrings
are drawrn...
They'll be drawrn by
WOOD.
He's real gone."
-marginalia by Harvey Kurtzman and/or Wallace Wood, "SUPERDUPERMAN!" MAD #4, 1953
"It is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky, and be flooded with a cocky feeling, and feel pretty cool, and all that. Oh, I can make all kinds of phony thing, you see what I mean, blinded by it, or I can show you some really fancy movement. But to express one's self honestly, not lying to one's self, and to express myself honestly, now that, my friend, is very hard to do."
-Bruce Lee, "Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey"
"Say what you mean and say it mean."
-Foetus
"Enchant long. Divine short."
-Peter Carroll
"The map is not the territory."
-Alfred Korzybski
"The menu is not the meal."
-Alan Watts
"Wide shoulders are the flared trousers of the Eighties."
-David Bowie, 1987 Rolling Stone interview with Kurt Loder
"A Paradox May Be Paradoctored."
-Robert A. Heinlein, "All You Zombies --"
"[Fiendish Growling]"
-Subtitles for the Hearing Impaired from Six-String Samurai
"The demonic is that which cannot be explained in a cerebral and a rational manner. It is not peculiar to my nature but I am subject to its spell."
-Goethe, in a letter to Eckermann
"Bearing this in mind, it occurred to the Myles na gCopaleen Research Bureau the other day to try to ascertain whether the truth still dawns in the eyes of the ladies of to-day."
-Myles na cGopaleen (Brian O'Nolan), 'Cruiskeen Lawn', _The Irish Times_
"Do you have to open graves to find girls to fall in love with?"
-Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann), The Mummy (1932) John L. Balderston, script
"I am reminded of those fanatically religious homophobes who stand on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral during Gay Pride, holding signs that say 'Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!' I have always wanted to go up to them and say, 'Well, of course not Adam and Steve. Never Adam and Steve. It's Adam and Steven.'"
-David Rakoff, "In New England Everyone Calls You Dave"
"We wouldn't be caught dead with men. Rough, hairy beasts! With eight hands! They all want just one thing from a girl."
- Jerry/Daphne, Some Like It Hot
"I just want to get back to my pots and pans."
-Mr. Frost
"I should be back in the restaurant quaffing root beers with that waitress... I think she kind of liked me..."
-Snoopy, WWI Flying Ace
"You could see a message in their eyes, too: Nobody was to tell the outside world that NASA was running the goddamnedest massage parlor in history."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
“It’s very important to encourage that. What's forbidden or superfluous or "too easy."
"Too easy" is where your gift is. (laughter)”
- David Del Tredici
"And aching for the sight of a friendly face, I gave tongue like a bloodhound."
-P.G. Wodehouse, "Jeeves and the Impending Doom”
"I should say you were intruding! Pardon me, I should say you are intruding. I was using the subjunctive instead of the past tense. Yes, we're way past tents. We're living in bungalows."
-Groucho, Animal Crackers
"Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner. Oh Christ what a scene is this! Can tongue or pen accommodate these scandals?”
- Williams S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
"Writer's Block is a fancy term, made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol."
-Steve Martin
"The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend."
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
"Now, look; I don't want sympathy; what I am trying to do is tell you that your crisis, your ordeal, assuming you have one, is not something that is going to be endless, and I want you to know that you will probably survive it through your courage and wits and sheer will to live."
-Philip K. Dick, introduction to "The Golden Man"