Time is so old and love so brief, love is pure gold and time a thief. We're late, darling, we're late, The curtain descends, everything ends, too soon, too soon.
Ogden NashRead
Basketball, a game which won't be fit for people until they set the basket umbilicus-high and return the giraffes to the zoo.
Interpretation
This quote humorously critiques the nature of basketball by suggesting its absurdity if played with giraffes.
Ogden Nash uses humor and satire to highlight the inherent absurdity of basketball as a sport. By jokingly suggesting that the game would be more suitable if baskets were set at an impossible height and giraffes were involved, he invites the reader to reflect on the sometimes ridiculous aspects of sports culture and the arbitrary standards we accept in competitive games.
In practice
During a light-hearted sports discussion at a party.
Time is so old and love so brief, love is pure gold and time a thief. We're late, darling, we're late, The curtain descends, everything ends, too soon, too soon.
I'm like a backward berry, Unripened on the vine, For all my friends are fifty, And I'm only forty-nine.
I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.
Here's a good rule of thumb; too clever is dumb.
Middle-age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.
Here's a toast to the roast that good fellowship lends, with the sparkle of beer and wine; May its sentiment always be deeper, my friends, than the foam at the top of the stein. Then here's to the heartening wassail, wherever good fellows are found; Be its master instead of its vassal, and order the glasses around.
How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.
In my youth there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can't say 'girl.'
I've been to many funerals of funny people, and they're some of the funniest days you'll ever have, because the emotions run high.
98% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.
At 50, if you are on a diet on your birthday, you can't eat a piece of your birthday cake. So grab two, a piece in each hand and, lo and behold, you will be on a balanced diet! Happy birthday, old chum!
...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.
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