Anecdote Quotes

“On a hot day in Virginia, I know nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally's cellar.”

“I have recall. I don't know why or how. I had a guy once who said he played against me in novice [league, for kids under nine], for the Detroit Lasers. And I said, "Oh yeah, we beat you in the tournament, 8-1 and I think I scored seven goals, and the goalie was left-handed." And he was, "Oh my God. I was the goalie!" .”

“The last year I was playing, I asked the stick boy to get me a Diet Coke and he said, "Really?" But I always had one on the bench because that's what I did in 1979 when there wasn't Gatorade. If you needed energy you went and got a Snickers or a Kit Kat. Nobody knew any better.”

“King old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always to to a good man, they say.”

“I thought tamarinds were made to eat, but that was probably not the idea. I ate several, and it seemed to me that they were rather sour that year. They pursed up my lips, till they resembled the stem-end of a tomato, and I had to take my sustenance through a quill for twenty-four hours. They sharpened my teeth till I could have shaved with them, and gave them a 'wire edge' that I was afraid would stay; but a citizen said 'no, it will come off when the enamel does' - which was comforting, at any rate. I found, afterward, that only strangers eat tamarinds - but they only eat them once.”

“That day, Miss Mdingane told me that my new name was Nelson. Why she bestowed this particular name upon me I have no idea. Perhaps it had something to do with the great British sea captain Lord Nelson, but that would be only a guess.”

“My mama told me I was already in a hurry as a child. I even had measles and chicken pox at the same time”

“I smoked my first cigar in 1991, when we won the championship. Up to that point, I had never smoked a cigar, never smoked anything.”

“My mother tells the story about how I'm fussing and she's like, 'Baby, what do you want? What do you need?' And I just looked at her and I said, 'Fweedom.'”

“He laid it on George, me and our wives without telling us at a dinner party at his house. He was a friend of George's, and our dentist at the time. He just put it in our coffee or something. He didn't know what it was, it was just, 'It's all the thing,' with the middle-class London swingers. They had all heard about it and didn't know it was different from pot or pills. And they gave it to us, and he was saying, 'I advise you not to leave,' and we thought he was trying to keep us for an orgy in his house and we didn't want to know.”

“The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.”

“He [Groucho's father] had absolutely no training, and if you had ever seen one of his suits, you'd realize what an accurate statement that is. You see, Pop never used a tape measure. He didn't believe in it. He said he could just look at a man and tell his size, with the result that frequently he'd make a pair of pants with one trouser leg seven or eight inches longer than the other.”

“Scott Fitzgerald was mortally afraid of lightning.”

“Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all the furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.”

“I took an estimated two thousand years of high school French, and when I finally got to France, I discovered that I didn't know one single phrase that was actually useful in a real-life French situation.”

“No man had ever knocked little Richard down. But of course Ammm was not a man.”

“I called a company and asked to speak to Bob. The person who answered said, "Bob is on vacation. Would you like to hold?”

“I walked out of the movie "Lincoln" and bought the book [of Doris Kearns Goodwin] at the bookstore next door.”

“We had a guy, a gentlemen by the name of Mr. Greenleaf who lived behind the house we were shooting [Fences], and he was like a part of the movie.He would come downstairs, and he couldn't hear well to say, "Ya'll want some coffee?"”

“I'm happy to start on one topic and end on another one entirely, as long as it's funny.”

“Ben Franklin was a little stout later in life and it was said that in Paris a young woman, tapping him on his protruding abdomen, said,"Dr. Franklin, if this were on a woman, we'd know what to think." And Franklin replied,"Half an hour ago, Mademoiselle, it was on a woman, and now what do you think?"”