Downtown St. Paul

Hey kid, let's do a show
I know a place where we can go
It's in hustlin', bustlin' downtown St. Paul
And the World Theater is the name of the hall
There's no sweeter little theater that you ever saw
It's on the corner of Exchange and Wabasha
So dust off the seats and scrape off the gum
Cause World Theater here we come!

-Garrison Keillor

Best Imitation of Myself

I feel like a quote out of context,
Withholding the rest,
So I can be for you what you want to see
I’ve got the gestures and sounds
Got the timing down
It's uncanny, yeah, you’d think it was me
Do you think I should take a class
To lose my Southern accent?
Did I make me up, or make a face till it stuck?
I do the best imitation of myself

-Ben Folds

What's Wrong With the World?

Dear Sirs, I am.

-G. K. Chesterton (letter sent to The Times in response to the above question)

Stop It!

-Bob Newhart

The Days of Noah

"This is like the days of Noah to me:
as I swore that the waters of Noah
should no more go over the earth,
so I have sworn that I will not be angry with you,
and will not rebuke you.
For the mountains may depart
and the hills be removed,
but my steadfast love shall not depart from you,
and my covenant of peace shall not be removed,"
says the Lord, who has compassion on you.

-Isaiah 54:9-10

Pumpkin Pie

Pumpkin pie is nothing but mediocrity. The best one you ever ate wasn't that much better than the worst. It's just an excuse to eat nutmeg.

-Garrison Keillor

When Cows Go Bad

The better stuff a creature is made of—the cleverer and stronger and freer it is—then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. A cow cannot be very good or very bad; a dog can be both better and worse; a child better and worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of genius still more so; a superhuman spirit best—or worst—of all.

-C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 53.

Vade Mecum

I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table to be perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.

-Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room

In the Wilderness Prepare

In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

-Isaiah 40:3-5

St. Crispen's Day Speech

This day is called the Feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tiptoe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words–
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester–
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

-William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act IV, Scene III.

A Decent Fellow

What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.

-A. A. Milne

A Fable

Once upon a time there was a teacher who set his class an examination to perform. And when the youths had finished he marked their scripts. But at the end of his labors he found that, by evil chance, he had worked with a total of 99. And, being an industrious man, he converted all the marks into percentages.

So it was that a pupil with 58 marks gained 58.585858 . . . per cent and a pupil with 73 marks gained 73.737373 . . . per cent, and others likewise.

And when the time was come that he should return the scripts to his class, being an honest man as well as industrious, he confessed what he had done and delivered to them their marks in the form of percentages.

Until he came to one named Smith whose work was perfect, to whom perforce he had awarded the percentage 99.999999 . . . per cent.

"So, Smith Minor," saith he, "though I find no fault in you, yet your percentage falls short of the full total of 100. What say you?"

"Sir," saith Smith Minor, moved to anger, "I call that the limit."

-Fantasia Mathematica, ed. Clifton Fadiman, 294.

The Unfortunate Topologist

A burleycue dancer, a pip
Named Virginia, could peel in a zip;
But she read science fiction
And died of constriction
Attempting a Moebius strip.

-Cyril Kornbluth, Fantasia Mathematica, ed. Clifton Fadiman, 266.

There Once Was a Breathy Baboon

There once was a breathy baboon
Who always breathed down a bassoon,
For he said, "It appears
That in billions of years
I shall certainly hit on a tune."

-Sir Arthur Eddington, Fantasia Mathematica, ed. Clifton Fadiman, 267.

For All Practical Purposes

A professor, asked what he meant by the phrase ["for all practical purposes"] explained:

"Suppose all the young men in this class were to line up on one side of the room, and all the young ladies on the other. At a given signal, the two lines move toward each other, halving the distance between them. At a second signal, they move forward again, halving the remaining distance; and so on at each succeeding signal. Theoretically, the boys would never reach the girls; but actually, after a relatively small number of moves, they would be close enough for all practical purposes."

-C. Stanley Ogilvey, Fantasia Mathematica, ed. Clifton Fadiman, 284.

Mission

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission—I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.

I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place while not intending it—if I do but keep His Commandments.

Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends, He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me—still He knows what He is about.

-John Henry Cardinal Newman

Sneezes

Not long ago, I walked out the door of my house on a clear, cold morning and was thinking pure business when, halfway across the porch, I felt that familiar pleasant wave in the chest—the magnetic field of the sneeze—and the long intake of breath and the pulsation in the head. I wound up, reared back, and delivered a sneeze worthy of Pavarotti—a six-syllable sneeze that sounded like "onomatopoeia!" On the accented syllable I stamped my foot (wham!) on the wooden floor, and then the majestic cry (and wham!) came bouncing back to me off the house across the street. I thought, God bless you! I said good morning to the bunch of children who wait for their schoolbus on my corner. They appeared to be awestruck. I climbed into my car and drove off, and at the corner the stoplight turned a luminous green.

-Garrison Keillor, We Are Still Married, 163-164.

Journalistic Courage

Real sensationalism, of which I happen to be very fond, may be either moral or immoral. But even when it is most immoral, it requires moral courage. For it is one of the most dangerous things on earth genuinely to surprise anybody. If you make any sentient creature jump, you render it by no means improbable that it will jump on you. But the leaders of this movement have no moral courage or immoral courage; their whole method consists in saying, with large and elaborate emphasis, the things which everybody else says casually, and without remembering what they have said. When they brace themselves up to attack anything, they never reach the point of attacking anything which is large and real, and would resound with the shock. They do not attack the army as men do in France, or the judges as men do in Ireland, or the democracy itself as men did in England a hundred years ago. They attack something like the War Office—something, that is, which everybody attacks and nobody bothers to defend, something which is an old joke in fourth-rate comic papers. just as a man shows he has a weak voice by straining it to shout, so they show the hopelessly unsensational nature of their minds when they really try to be sensational. With the whole world full of big and dubious institutions, with the whole wickedness of civilization staring them in the face, their idea of being bold and bright is to attack the War Office. They might as well start a campaign against the weather, or form a secret society in order to make jokes about mothers-in-law.

-G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, "The Mildness of the Yellow Press"

Grasshopper

This business of having one last leg
Must take some getting used to
When I see the grasshopper on the porch,
He looks less like a grasshopper and more like a car wreck

Nose down, dead still, not a body
So much as some great damage
And I know that it was no accident
Deciding it had to be done was the hardest part

He thought about it for a long, long time
Well, he loved his leg, but it was broken
And how could another one grow
Until he ate the first?

One morning, he felt a tickle
He knew might be a new leg sprouting
So carefully, so very carefully
He pulled out from under his grief and took the first bite

-Jeanne Murray Walker

Expectations

That boy had the highest of expectations
And he heard that Jesus would fill him up
Maybe something got lost in the language
If this was full then why bother?

This was not the way it looked on the billboard
Smiling family beaming down on the interstate

You know that we all try to blame someone
When our dreams won’t rise up from their sleep
And the reaching of the steeple felt like one more
Expensive ad for something cheap

This was not the way it looked on the billboard
Smiling family beaming down on the interstate

Dressed up nice for the congregation
Scared somebody's gonna find him out
The din and the clatter of the hallelujahs
Stained glass Jesuses

This was not the way it looked on the billboard
Smiling family beaming down on the interstate

-Caedmon's Call

Puns

...We might almost ask what is to happen to a man who meets a pun. Is he to cut it dead; is he always to pass by on the other side; is he to disown such disreputable company, as of course our refined stylists would do? I am presupposing that he is not out hunting puns or similar monsters; I presuppose that he is walking down the street on some legitimate business of his own. But if the grotesque animal actually comes to meet him, if it stands obviously in his path, I think it is natural for him to take it in his stride.

-G. K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shadows, "An Apology for Buffoons," 17-18.

Literary Criticism

...When the more refined critic implies that my own manner of writing almost makes him die, I think he over-estimates my power over life and death.

-G. K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shadows, "An Apology for Buffoons," 16.