Edward Gorey

“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs.B is for Basil assaulted by bears.C is for Clara who wasted away.D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh.E is for Ernest who choked on a peach. F is for Fanny sucked dry by a leech.G is for George smothered under a rug.H is for Hector done in by a thug.I is for Ida who drowned in a lake.J is for James who took lye by mistake.K is for Kate who was struck with an axe.L is for Leo who choked on some tacks.M is for Maud who was swept out to sea.N is for Neville who died of ennui.O is for Olive run through with an awl.P is for Prue trampled flat in a brawl.Q is for Quentin who sank on a mire.R is for Rhoda consumed by a fire.S is for Susan who perished of fits.T is for Titus who flew into bits.U is for Una who slipped down a drain.V is for Victor squashed under a train.W is for Winnie embedded in ice.X is for Xerxes devoured by mice.Y is for Yorick whose head was bashed in.Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin.”

“I have given up considering happiness as relevant.”

“This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.”

“To take my work seriously would be the height of folly.”

“The Suicide, as she is falling,Illuminated by the moon, Regrets her act, and finds appallingThe thought she will be dead so soon.”

“The Baron told her that only art meant anything.”

“I suppose it was obvious that The Loathsome Couple was based on the Moors Murders, which disturbed me very greatly for some reason.”

“Some tiny creature, mad with wrath, is coming nearer on the path.”

“Mr Earbrass stands on the terrace at twilight. It is bleak; it is cold; and the virtue has gone out of everything. Words drift through his mind: anguish turnips conjunctions illness defeat string parties no parties urns desuetude disaffection claws loss Trebizond napkins shame stones distance fever Antipodes mush glaciers incoherence labels miasma amputation tides deceit mourning elsewards...”

“Mr Earbrass escaped from Messrs Scuffle and Dustcough, who were most anxious to go into all the ramifications of a scheme for having his novels translated into Urdu, and went to call on a distant cousin.”

“There was a young lady named MaeWho smoked without stopping all day;As pack followed pack,Her lungs first turned black,And eventually rotted away.”

“A small and sinister snow seems to be coming down relentlessly at present. The radio says it is eventually going to be sleet and rain, but I don't think so; I think it is just going to go on and on, coming down, until the whole world...etc. It has that look.”

“Neither mine nor other people's prospects seem particularly pleasing just at the moment, and I have fantasies of going to Iceland, never to return. As it is, I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success.”

“I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty...”

“Anyway, for whatever interest is to be derived therefrom. Bacon, Balthus, and Magritte are my three favourite painters, along with Dubuffet, of the whole post-impressionist period, by which I mean that before them Bonnard, Vuillard, & Seurat are my favourite painters of that time.”

“On the way home I absently minded (you know what I mean) went through a stop sign in Hyannis so of course there was a police car to apprehend me. A soft answer turnethed away wrath, fortunately.”

“We did I think talk about your feeling of it's fun to be square, and while I'll go along with the Borges-like ramifications, I don't think I was the one who thought it up. In the past my justification for my self-conscious oddness of appearance (by now I figure this is the way I look, and it would not only be more self-conscious but also uncomfortable to change) was that people would think their impression of oddity came simply from the way I looked, and eventually become (hopefully) pleasantly surprised that I was not nearly as much of a nut as I looked, and was really quite ordinary, which is also true I think. It seemed preferable to people thinking 'Well, he looked perfectly ordinary and then it became apparent there was something wrong with his head...' Of course now practically everybody to my middle aged way of thinking looks too peculiar for words, and only very infrequently attractive at the same time.”

“where was I? in remarking that me is the envelopes and not nearly so much so, the often foolish letters inside.”

“Apropos of nothing at all except that it has been on my mind and I think I had better say it because it accounts for a good deal of my behaviour. There is a strong streak in me that wishes not to exist and really does not believe that I do, so that I tend to become unnerved when these curious ideas are proved to be not really true because someone (in this case you) has responded to something I have said or done just as if I were an actual person the same as you (especially) or anyone else. Some of it is, I guess, just the worst sorts of arrogance and irresponsibility , but not all of it, as I really don't think I exist a lot of the time, so I'm asking you to bear with it, me, whatever, for the sake of what?—friendship I suppose, which I want to be capable of, which is obviously not enough. More brains might help, but enough unseemly remarks for eight o'clock in the morning and the shivering in pyjama bottoms syndrome.”

“The world may think it idiotic,Nor care at all we're symbiotic,But I will say at once and twice:I find it nice. I find it nice.”

“Having got into bed and turned out the light, I quietly burst into tears because I am not a good person. As they came and went for some minutes, I was concerned with the words following 'because' in the previous sentence, rewriting them over and over in my head until they seemed to be as close to the truth as it was possible for me to make them.”

“The thing is, and here we come to E. Gorey's Great Simple Theory About Art (which he has never tried to communicate to anybody else until now, so prepare for Severe Bafflement), that on the surface they are so obviously those situations that it is very difficult to see that they really are about something else entirely. This is the theory, incidentally, that anything is art, and it's the way I tell, is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it's no good having one without the other, because if you have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.”

“...my least favorite actress of all time, Helena Bonham Carter. I find her lack of a neck very off-putting and especially her acting.”

“Books. Cats. Life is Good.”

“He wrote it all down Zealously.”

“Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin.”

“It's well we cannot hear the screams we make in other people's dreams.”

“I should like a parsley sandwich.To the best of my knowledge they are not in season.”

“More is happening out there than we are aware of.It is possibly due to some unknown direful circumstance.”

“The helpful thought for which you lookIs written somewhere in a book.”

“Such excess of passionis quite out of fashion”

“I tend to be rather inconsequential and trail off.”

“I don't know what it is I'm doing. But it's not that. Despite all evidence to the contrary.”

“There are so many things we've been brought up to believe that it takes you an awfully long time to realize that they aren't you.”

“I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist...I am a person who does those things.”

“Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH:A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay'dBy your/their indiff'rence in the dank brown shadeBelow the garden...His mind's eye sees them quoted on the bottom third of a right-hand page in a (possibly) olive-bound book he read at least five years ago. When he does find them, it will be a great nuisance if no clue is given to their authorship.”

“I don't think anything might have been. What is, is.”

“My favorite journey is looking out the window.”

“Mr. Earbrass has rashly been skimming through the early chapters, which he had not looked at for months, and now sees TUH for what it is. Dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL. He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel. Mad. Why did n't he become a spy? How does one become one? He will burn the MS. Why is there no fire? Why are n't there the makings of one? How did he get in the unused room on the third floor?”

“Not everything in life can be interpreted metaphorically; that's because things fall out on the way.”

“On November 18 of alternate years Mr Earbrass begins writing 'his new novel'. Weeks ago he chose its title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book. It being tea-time of the 17th, he is alarmed not to have thought of a plot to which The Unstrung Harp might apply.”

“I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.”

“He presented it with a length of stringand passed on to the statue of Corrupted Endeavorto await the arrival of Autumn.”

“I've never had any intentions about anything. That's why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense.”

“Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is left after you have explained everything else.”

“All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.”

“My mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that's what the world is like.”

“What is, is, and what might have been could never have existed.”

“Interviewer: What is your greatest regret?Gorey: That I don't have one”

“If something doesn't creep into a drawing that you're not prepared for, you might as well not have drawn it.”