Brendan Gill quotes:

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  • Parody is homage gone sour.

  • Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

  • The guns of the big events rumble through our pages, but the tiny firecrackers are constantly hissing and popping there as well; it appears that much of my life as a journalist has been devoted to sedulously setting off firecrackers.

  • It is in the nature of the New Yorker to be as topical as possible, on a level that is often small in scale and playful in intention.

  • I will try to cram these paragraphs full of facts and give them a weight and shape no greater than that of a cloud of blue butterflies.

  • In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skyscrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniature Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water.

  • We must all face the fact that in a single lifetime we lead several simultaneous lives; our intention should be to make them reinforce one another instead of colliding.

  • Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.

  • Avain attempt to subdue that unsubduable country.

  • Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run.

  • The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.

  • To die quickly in one's eighth decade at the very top of one's powers is an enviable end, and not an occasion for mourning.

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