Digression Quotes

A tiger's DNA is also a 'duplicate me' program but it contains an almost fantastically large digression as an essential part of the efficient execution of its fundamental message. That digression is a tiger, complete with fangs, claws, running muscles, stalking and pouncing instincts. The tiger's DNA says, 'Duplicate me by the round-about route of building a tiger first.' At the same time, antelope DNA says, 'Duplicate me by the round-about route of building an antelope first, complete with long legs and fast muscles, complete with timorous instincts and finely honed sense organs tuned to the danger from tigers. ~ Richard Dawkins

The Duchess looked at Chloe with a look that said, You had the chance to tell him, but you chose to carry on the lie.
How do I know that the Duchess's look said this? Because there is an excellent book in my local library entitled One Thousand Doggy Expressions Explained by Professor L. Stone.
I digress. ~ David Walliams

(This is not a digression.) ~ N.K. Jemisin

This is why, if I may be forgiven a digression, I believe it is time for the black race to forget about rhetoric and instead show what we are capable of doing. The testing will surely go on for the next generation and the next, but each time we meet the test, we'll climb another rung of the ladder until finally we arrive at parity, having earned our place rather than pleading or demanding that it be given to us. ~ Yvonne S. Thornton

Nothing is more to the point than a good digression. ~ Ralph Caplan

And maybe digression isn't really digression, maybe the shortest distance between two mind points is not a straight line. Chew on that. ~ David Duchovny

The real secret, though, is that nobody belongs, whether they are natives or not. After expulsion from paradise all humans are in exile. You can be a Colonel Sanders chicken, born, raised and fried in one quarter of a square foot and you'll still be an outsider. The thing we call reality is a holding tank for people who must worry about belonging -- it's a worrier prison. Don't worry people! You'll soon be fried and eaten. A few of us are writers, hence double-alienated, but happier (because we are busy)
If it's true that many of us go through life feeling like we don't belong, could digression (geographical and otherwise) be our way of trying to forget, or to escape, that feeling?

Bad news: there are no digressions. Everything is connected in the whole darn ball of yarn: start pulling at any end and you'll get to the same place. On the other hand, most normal people dislike digression because they have to lose themselves to follow you. The surest way to drive your dear ones crazy is to digress. In private, it's an offense. In public it's "art," "performance. ~ Andrei Codrescu

If I have any fault, it is digression ~ George Gordon Byron

The feeling of being a digression not the link in the argument,
a new direction, an offshoot, the limb going on elsewhere,
and liking that error, a feeling of being capable because an error,
of being wrong perhaps altogether wrong a piece from another set
stripped of position stripped of true function
and loving that error, loving that filial form, that break from perfection
where the complex mechanism fails, where the stranger appears in the clearing,
out of nowhere and uncalled for, out of nowhere to share the day. ~ Jorie Graham

That propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression, is very Russian. I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the practical forms of political liberty known to the western world. I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value. But this is a digression indeed ... ~ Joseph Conrad

I was in full digression! far from the subject! ... my colonel was losing track ... rapidly, of my story! my story! ... my own story! ... the gifts that I had personally received from Heaven! ... yet I had insisted, every time! truly extraordinary gifts! ... I'd made him repeat them a hundred times! ... enough so he'd remember! that I was the only true genius! the century's only writer! the proof: that no one ever spoke of me! ... everyone was jealous! Nobel! no Nobel! they had all joined forces to have me executed! ... they could just go fuck off! ... drop dead! since it was a question of death between me and them! I'll send their readers packing! all their readers! I'll make the public grow sick of their books! cabal! no cabal! since there was no room for two styles! ... it was mine or theirs! ... crawl or breastroke! ... you understand! ... the only inventor of the century! is me! me! me right here! the only genius, you might say! damned or not! ... ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

Circumlocution," said Mr. Croup to Mr. Vandemar. "It's a way of speaking around something. A digression. Verbosity. ~ Neil Gaiman

Digression and digestion. It's what we do. ~ David Duchovny

Gather Me


Scatter me into the digression of this noise
For, I hear not when my eyes are at peace.
I smother the audacity in my voice
Hiding behind a half-charred fleece;
Let me dwell with the fleeting score,
For, I breathe not when my heart is agog!
I strangle the remains of what you tore
Building the ruins of a deserted synagogue;
Then, gather me
From the compositions of a faded song,
From the reverberations of an unaided gong;
From the mirth of our spring sky,
From the waters where thirsts lie;
From the sleekness of white-rose petals,
From the shrieks of remorse bells;
From the digression of laughter beats,
From the silence of bloodied streets;
From the eyes of their precarious silence,
From there; thence, from there; thence,
Then, gather me. ~ Ashfaq Saraf

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones. ~ Ray Bradbury

Now that I am past picking the knife to stab one, the reward of stabbing a few more comes at an unfairly lower risk! ~ Pawan Mishra

Such ordeals always strike one with their strangeness, their digression from the normal flow of events, and often provoke a universal protest: "Why me?" Be sure that this is not a question but an outcry. The person who screams it has been instilled with an astonishing suspicion that he, in fact, has been the perfect subject for a very specific "weird," a tailor-made fate, and that a prior engagement, in all its weirdness, was fulfilled at the appointed time and place. ~ Thomas Ligotti

The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for while sin may be venial, digression is mortal. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Half an hour later, as I was deeply immersed in the story of The Man of the Hill, that curious, lengthy digression which seems to have nothing to do with the main narrative but is in fact its cornerstone.. ~ Jonathan Coe

Oh, I don't know. That digression business got on my nerves. I don't know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It's more interesting and all. ~ J.D. Salinger

McLarney laughs, then leaps into the parable of Snot Boogie, who joined the neighborhood crap game, waited for the pot to thicken, then grabbed the cash and bolted down the street only to be shot dead by one of the irate players.
"So we're interviewing the witnesses down at the office and they're saying how Snot Boogie would always join the crap game, then run away with the pot, and that they'd finally gotten sick of it ... "
Dave Brown drives in silence, barely tracking this historical digression.
"And I asked one of them, you know, I asked him why they even let Snot Boogie into the game if he always tried to run away with the money."
McLarney pauses for effect.
"And?" asks Brown.
"He just looked at me real bizarre," says McLarney. "And then he says, 'you gotta let him play ... This is America ~ David Simon

The more learned a writer, the more digression beckons him. ~ Mason Cooley

He is best of all who of himself conceiveth all things; Good again is he too who can adopt a good suggestion; But whoso neither of himself conceiveth nor hearing from another Layeth it to heart; - he is a useless man. [Sidenote: V] But to return from this digression. Now of the Chief Good (i.e. of Happiness) men seem to form their notions from the different modes of life, as we might naturally expect: the many and most low conceive it to be pleasure, and hence they are content with the life of sensual enjoyment. For there are three lines of life which stand out prominently to view: that just mentioned, and the life in society, and, thirdly, the life of contemplation. ~ Aristotle.

Instead of always worrying about being efficient, I wanted to spend time on exploration, experimentation, digression, and failed attempts that didn't always look productive. ~ Gretchen Rubin

I have digressed, which is also the kind of writer I would become. ~ John Irving

Sunday: this satisfied procession
Of definite Sunday faces;
Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces
In repetition that displaces
Your mental self-possession
By this unwarranted digression.
Evening, lights, and tea!
Children and cats in the alley;
Dejection unable to rally
Against this dull conspiracy.
And Life, a little bald and gray,
Languid, fastidious, and bland,
Waits, hat and gloves in hand,
Punctilious of tie and suit
(Somewhat impatient of delay)
On the doorstep of the Absolute. ~ T. S. Eliot

That digression business got on my nerves. I don't now. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It's more interesting and all ... lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most ... I like it when somebody gets excited about something. ~ J.D. Salinger

(The subject of Peter Gallagher's eyebrows, I realize, is a digression away from the Oneida Community, and yet, I do feel compelled, indeed almost conspiracy theoretically bound to mention that one of the reasons the Oneida Community broke up and turned itself into a corporate teapot factory is that a faction within the group, led by a lawyer named James William Towner, was miffed that the community's most esteemed elders were bogarting the teenage virgins and left in a huff for none other than Orange County, California, where Towner helped organize the Orange County government, became a judge, and picked the spot where the Santa Ana courthouse would be built, a courthouse where, it is reasonable to assume, Peter Gallagher's attorney on The O.C. might defend his clients.) ~ Sarah Vowell

When I was young I believed people should be told everything and that, as a pastor, I had a duty to share all my knowledge. Over the years I came to see that was a mistake. A person may know only what they are capable of assimilating. I have been thinking about this for half my life, and especially since I have been in Israel, but there are few people I can confide in. Really only you. You see, it is a terrible thing to disturb someone's equilibrium. If a person has become accustomed to thinking in a particular way, even a slight digression from that can prove painful. Not everybody is open to new ideas, to making their understanding more precise and supplementing it, to change. I have to admit that I am changing. Today my views on many matters have diverged from those generally accepted in the Catholic world, and I am not the only person in that situation. "You see, the birth of the One whom ~ Lyudmila Ulitskaya

Waste not a day in vain digression; with resolute, courageous trust seek every possible impression and make it firmly your posession you'll then work on because you must. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe