Edward Gorey Quotes

The idle mind knows not what it wants.

I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.

Gray is the color... the most important of all... absent of opinion, nothing, neither/nor.

I don't know whether I like it, but it is what I meant.

Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity.

Life, never deciding to master anything in particular.

How can I fail when I have no purpose?

I pursue no objectives, no systems, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don’t know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.

I don't know if I'll ever do it again or not, but frankly I don't really care.

If you hesitate to map out your future, to make a big plan or to set a goal, you've just gone ahead and mapped your future anyway.

Took me a while to get to the point today, but that is because I did not know what the point was when I started.

I've worked with collage a lot. And there's this chance thing that happens - you don't always control things. Why did you find this today and not this? But you've got this thing, and you make it work. It's the way life is, I suppose. Whatever happens, you deal with it.

Lukewarm acceptance is more bewildering than outright rejection.

I love idleness. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them, to come and go as my fancy bids me, to change my plan every moment, to follow a fly in all its circlings, to try and uproot a rock to see what is underneath, eagerly to begin a ten-years' task to give it up after ten minutes: in short, to fritter away the whole day inconsequentially and incoherently, and to follow nothing but the whim of the moment.

About 95% of people can be compared to ships without rudders. Subject to every shift of wind and tide, they're helplessly adrift. And while they fondly hope that they'll one day drift into a rich and successful port, you and I know that for every narrow harbor entrance, there are a 1,000 miles of rocky coastline. The chances against their drifting into port are 1,000 to one.

I wonder why it is that when I plan a route too carefully, it goes to pieces, whereas if I blunder along in blissful ignorance aimed in a fancied direction I get through with no trouble.

Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!

We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.

He didn't know what he wanted. He only knew what he didn't want.

Probably." "Again with the probablys." "A world full of probablys," she said.

If you don't have a plan, you can end up doing some interesting things.

I like things that don't look like you're in control. It's like life itself. You just learn how to benefit from accidents and chances that you take.

It was strange to have no self-to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.

People who say, "I don't know what to do," usually aren't inspired enough to make it happen.

Fence straddlers have no balls. In compensation, however, they enjoy a comfortable seat and can retreat swiftly, when danger threatens, to either side of the fence. There is something to be said for every position.