Edward Gorey Quotes

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.

The sky has grown completely black,
It's time to think of turning back.

Fall down, or scream, or rush about-
There is no way of getting out.

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.

There was a young woman named Fleager
Who was terribly, terribly eager
To be all the rage
On the tragedy stage,
Though her talents were pitifully meagre.

When people are finding meaning in things
beware.

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.

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.

Mr. Earbrass has rashly been skimming through the early chapters, which he had not looked at for months, and now sees TUH for what it is. Dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL. He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel. Mad. Why did n't he become a spy? How does one become one? He will burn the MS. Why is there no fire? Why are n't there the makings of one? How did he get in the unused room on the third floor?

More is happening out there than we are aware of.
It is possibly due to some unknown direful circumstance.

Interviewer: What is your greatest regret?
Gorey: That I don't have one

I tend to be rather inconsequential and trail off.

I just kind of conjured them up out of my subconscious and put them in order of ascending peculiarity.

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.

. . . I just don't think humanity is the ultimate end. We're so smug about ourselves, secure about how much we know. Well, I've lived with cats most of my life, so I'm very aware that there's another world going on. . . . it sees everything differently, hears everything differently, and probably thinks differently.

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.

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.

The helpful thought for which you look
Is written somewhere in a book.

. . . when I talk to people I really like to talk to them, and not just exchange pleasantries and wonder which of us is going to try to get away first. Most social occasions leave me less than enthralled.

I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty ...

Some tiny creature, mad with wrath, is coming nearer on the path.

Books. Cats. Life is Good.

He presented it with a length of string
and passed on to the statue of Corrupted Endeavor
to await the arrival of Autumn.

I have given up considering happiness as relevant.

It's well we cannot hear the screams we make in other people's dreams.

The Suicide, as she is falling,
Illuminated by the moon,
Regrets her act, and finds appalling
The thought she will be dead so soon.

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 ...

I don't think anything might have been. What is, is.

The Baron told her that only art meant anything.

What is, is, and what might have been could never have existed.

Where was I? in remarking that me is the envelopes and not nearly so much so, the often foolish letters inside.

Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is left after you have explained everything else.

Not everything in life can be interpreted metaphorically; that's because things fall out on the way.

I suppose it was obvious that The Loathsome Couple was based on the Moors Murders, which disturbed me very greatly for some reason.

Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH:
A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay'd
By your/their indiff'rence in the dank brown shade
Below the garden ...
His mind's eye sees them quoted on the bottom third of a right-hand page in a (possibly) olive-bound book he read at least five years ago. When he does find them, it will be a great nuisance if no clue is given to their authorship.

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.

If something doesn't creep into a drawing that you're not prepared for, you might as well not have drawn it.

I should like a parsley sandwich.
To the best of my knowledge they are not in season.

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.

When they answered the bell on that wild winter night. There was no one expected - and no one in sight.

Vice is nice, but a little virtue won't hurt you.

let's take the time that has been given to us and find that clock.

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.

Such excess of passion
is quite out of fashion

My least favorite actress of all time, Helena Bonham Carter. I find her lack of a neck very off-putting and especially her acting.

Apropos of nothing at all except that it has been on my mind and I think I had better say it because it accounts for a good deal of my behaviour. There is a strong streak in me that wishes not to exist and really does not believe that I do, so that I tend to become unnerved when these curious ideas are proved to be not really true because someone (in this case you) has responded to something I have said or done just as if I were an actual person the same as you (especially) or anyone else. Some of it is, I guess, just the worst sorts of arrogance and irresponsibility , but not all of it, as I really don't think I exist a lot of the time, so I'm asking you to bear with it, me, whatever, for the sake of what? - friendship I suppose, which I want to be capable of, which is obviously not enough. More brains might help, but enough unseemly remarks for eight o'clock in the morning and the shivering in pyjama bottoms syndrome.

All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.

Only art means anything.

I don't know what it is I'm doing. But it's not that. Despite all evidence to the contrary.

A lady both callous and brash
Met a man with a vast black moustache;
She cried, 'Shave it, O do!
And I'll put it with glue
On my hat as a sort of panache.

Sir U__ fell down from a speeding train,
Which did some damage to his brain,
And after that he did not know
How to pronounce the letter O.