96 Quotes by Mark Forsyth

The lawyer’s lucky phrase is ‘including but not limited to’, which gets you out of the utterly unnecessary trouble that the unnecessary trouble merism got you into in the first place.

It’s a fifty-fifty chance that your main aim is to be thelyphthoric, a word that comes from the Greek thely meaning “woman” and phthoric meaning “corrupting,” thus the OED’s simple definition: “that corrupts or ruins women.

Human beings, for some reason or another, like symmetry. You leave a bunch of them next to a jungle for a couple of days and you’ll come back to find an ornamental garden. We take stones and turn them into the Taj Mahal or St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Oxygen was called flammable air for a while, but it didn’t catch on.

After all, fiction is only fact minus time.

We all know that scientific words need an obscure classical origin to make them sound impressvie to those who wouldn’t know an idiopathic craniofacial erythema if it hit them in the face.

For though one antithesis is grand, a long list of antitheses is divine and is technically known as a progressio. It was a favorite of God and Dickens.

They gathered for a confabulation and, having established that secure psychiatric care was beyond their means, they turned in despair to the publishing industry, which has a long history of picking up where social work leaves off.

To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility. Mountaineers do it, and climb Everest in clothes that would have you laughed out of the gutter. I suspect they also communicate quickly and efficiently, poor things. But for the rest of us, not threatened by death and yetis, clothes and language can be things of beauty. I would no more write without art because I didn’t need to, than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough.