Line of the Week (Or Month) (Or Season) (Or Whatever)

Texas sportswriter Blackie Sherrod on first seeing University of Kansas sophomore Wilt Chamberlain: "If they're going to let him play basketball . . . they ought to let the Grand Canyon play ditch."

—according to Gary Cartwright in the 1968 article "Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter," and reprinted in Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper's Magazine

Line of the Week (Or Month) (Or Season) (Or Whatever)

"It is an honor / to learn to replace one hope with another."

—Denis Johnson

Line of the Week

"You know, when I drink alone,

I prefer to be by myself."

—George Thorogood

Line of the Week

"I wanted to make a dessert that would re-create the emotions Lionel Messi feels when he scores a goal."

—Jordi Roca, in Adam Gopnik's article, "Sweet Revolution," in the January 3, 2011 New Yorker

Line of the (So-Called) Week

"At the height of the battle, when it might have gone either way, the cool Taylor turned to his artillery officer and said, 'A little more grape, Captain Bragg.' Remarks like that were embedded in my head and took up precious space that should have been occupied with other things but wasn't."

—Charles Portis, from The Dog of the South

Line of the Week

"Everything that distinguishes our era from the dark ages—since we still have plagues and torture chambers—is what we've been able to do with petroleum, and that is going to end very soon."

—Kurt Vonnegut, as quoted in Steve Almond's Not That You Asked

Line of the Week

"I settled down on a hurt as big as Robert Mitchum and listened to Lucinda Williams."

—Vic Chesnutt

Line of the Week

"My grandmother was dead serious. Her sense of humor was a secret."

—Gil Scott-Heron, in Alec Wilkinson's Aug. 9 New Yorker profile of him

Line(s) of the Week

"Her voice was a force of nature, her conversation a fast-moving rapid full of deadly churning eddies. She was like Hitler without the anti-Semitism, MLK without the compassion or noble cause."

—Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

Line(s) of the Week

"I should have moved to New York City, but I never was that cool.

I just languished in the Midwest like some old romantic fool."

—Freakwater

Line(s) of the Week

"What's the difference between a duck?"

"One leg is both the same."

—Hank the Cowdog (as recounted by STF—aka Si Dawg)

Line of the Week

"What falls away is always. And is near."

—Theodore Roethke

Lines of the Week

"It is very difficult to describe an experience of religious significance while you are being sprayed with a garden hose by a laughing, loving woman."

and

"Any game becomes important when you know and love the players."

—W.P Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

Line(s) of the Week

"If the horse you ride

is blind it's good

that it also be slow."

—Stephen Dunn

Line of the Week

"My mind remains a bad neighborhood that I try not to go into alone"

—Anne Lamott

Line of the Week

"Poets run on rocks barefoot when shoes are available for a dime. They stand on cliffs but not too close to the fatal edge."

—Jim Harrison

Line of the Week

"You gave me nothing; now you're taking it away."

—Soul Asylum

Line of the Week

“What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Line of the Week

"I may have been a gerund in a previous life."
—Avrom Schwartz

Line of the Week

"Heaven's where you find it."

—Townes Van Zandt