Evan Esar Quotes

The cloud never comes from the quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.

I misdirect the audience, so they have no idea where they are or who they're listening to.

An example is often a deceptive mirror, and the order of destiny, so troubling to our thoughts, is not always found written in things past.

It is an endless procession of surprises. The expected rarely occurs and never in the expected manner.

Things never pass where you think, nor along the paths you think

Things are always different from what they might be.

Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn't even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your best friend could try to strangle you. Smack in the middle of an orchid there might be a blob of jello and inside a Mickey Mouse doll, a fixed and radiant star.

There is nothing more marvelous or madder than real life.

Control is an illusion.

In between effect and cause and just beyond the range of normal sight, this glittering joker was dancing in the dragon's jaws.

The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning.

The devil fools with the best laid plans.

life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.

Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.

If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.

Politics is like waking up in the morning. You never know whose head you'll find on the pillow.

That is life. Just one long succession of misunderstandings and rash acts and what not. Absolutely.

Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors.

When a man does exactly what a woman expects him to do she doesn't think much of him. One should always do what a woman doesn't expect, just as one should say what she doesn't understand.

A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep on changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingos. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland, isn't it?

When life gives you lemons....they could really be oranges.

Life is a whoopee cushion, a chair pulled away just as you were taking a seat.

In this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.

Life compulsively dangled the possibility of life. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.