Words, phrases, quotations that have stuck in your mind (verbal earworms) for years/life

[UTUSN]

Last edited Mon Jun 20, 2022, 01:38 PM - Edit history (2)

* "pretty weed" - SHAKESPEARE

* "All hatred driven hence The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will" - Poem for My Daughter, YEATS

* "There are worlds elsewhere" - Coriolanus, SHAKESPEARE

* "Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds" - SHAKESPEARE

* "a little dab'll do ya" - advertisement (Brillcream?)

* "the incredible, edible egg" - advertisement

* "a date that will live in infamy" - FDR

* "I have heard knell a shipboard bell the hours on a glass blue sea" - line from a poem by me

* "I spent my life in waiting to be born" - a line from a poem by me

* "This place or any other, the domain of my species is measured in eyelengths to the sun" - a line from a poem by me

* "One can smile and smile and be a villain" - Hamlet about his uncle. Could be about Greg ABBUTT

[Binkie The Clown]

1. A few that immediately pop into mind:

She by the river sat / and sitting there she wept, and made it deeper by a tear.
Another Upon Her Weeping by Robert Herrick. (Read once in 1971, remembered always)

"Like a glowing jewel, the city lay upon the breast of the desert. Once it had known change and alteration, but now time passed it by."
Opening line of Arthur C. Clarke's novel The City and the Stars. (Read once in 1959, remembered always)

"Who ya gonna call?" —Ghost Busters

“Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!” —Andy Divine's children's TV show, mid 1950s

"Who was that masked man?" —Lone Ranger TV show, early to mid 1950s

[UTUSN]

8. "Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!"

**************QUOTE*******

http://www.potw.org/archive/potw158.html

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

THE LADY's DRESSING ROOM

**UNQUOTE********

[TygrBright]

2. This is ringing in my head these days during the J6 hearings:

"You have shook hands with reputation, And made him invisible..." -Webster, Duchess of Malfi

And of course MLK: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

thoughtfully,
Bright

[MOMFUDSKI]

3. from my mom:

"You made your bed; now lay in it". Teaching us responsibility for our own actions. And, of course, she stood back and let me handle the pile of poop I had created all by myself! I had a great mom.

[Leghorn21]

4. "Life is hard, and then you die" - Johnny Winter

When my friend Bill described how a starfish gets hold of a clam and sucks its guts out through its tube, I exclaimed, "Damn, Bill, why is Nature always so violent??"

"Because Nature is always hungry", he replied.

[stopdiggin]

5. my generation had a few voices

- The words on the prophets are written on the subway walls. In tenement halls.
- And whispered in the sound of silence -
- (Paul Simon)


- As I remember you're eyes were bluer than robins eggs
- My poetry was lousy you said
- Where are you calling from ....
- (Joan Baez)


- We lost Davey in the Korean War
- Still don't know what for
- Doesn't matter anymore ...
- (John Prine)

[Ptah]

6. Nice!

[musette_sf]

7. "Closer to the bulldozer"

I was a teen, my baby sister was Sesame Street age, and this earworm has stuck with me since then.

Lyrics:
https://members.tripod.com/tiny_dancer/osong.html

[Hugh_Lebowski]

9. I've a few

"I'll be back" - Terminator

"Well, I guess I could stay for a bit" - Sir Galahad from The Holy Grail

"Is there somebody ELSE up there we can talk to?" - Sir Galahad

"Now go away before I taunt you a second time!" - Annoying Frenchman

"Oh! running away, are you?" - The Black Knight

"And this is the machine that goes PING!" - from The Meaning of Life

"Can we have your liver, then?" - from The Meaning of Life

"The man begins by mounting his good lady wife in the ... standard way" - from The Meaning of Life

"MMMM, that IS a tasty burger" - Jules from Pulp Fiction

"Check out the big brain on Brett!" - Jules (that happens to be my name IRL ... he of the big brain, not Jules)

"Daaaaaaamn, that's all you had to say!" - Jules

"But they're f***ing amateurs!" - Walter Sobchek

"I ... did not know that" - Walter Sobchek

"Have it your way Dude!" - Walter Sobchek

"Let me just go find a cash machine" - The Dude

"Hey careful, man, there's a beverage here" - The Dude

"This is our concern, Dude" - Brandt

"Hadn't that ever OCCURRED to you, man? Sir?" - The Dude

"That had NOT occurred to us, Dude" - Brandt

"Nothing is f***ed? The goddamn PLANE has crashed into the MOUNTAIN!" - The Big Lebowski

"I like your style, Dude" - The Cowboy

[tanyev]

10. "Sonja Henie's tutu!"- Col. Potter, MASH

[yardwork]

11. The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity

The Second Coming, by WB Yeats

[stopdiggin]

14. oh, absolutely! -(nt)-

[yardwork]

25. Unfortunately! I'm sorry it's so apropos.

[frogmarch]

12. He tells lies with his bare face hanging out.

My mom said this about certain politicians of the 50s. I think she was talking about bald-faced liars.

There are lots of them these days.

[Midnight Writer]

13. "With great power comes great responsibility" -Uncle Ben Parker (Stan Lee)

[Jilly_in_VA]

15. Mine come from all over the place

'Thee poured it out, thee will eat it."--- punch line of a joke, but means pretty much the same as "you made your bed, now lie in it." Often used by my mother.

"It isn't the wand that does the trick, it's the magician behind it."---from a friend. Can be said about a lot of things.

"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."---Arthur C. Clarke, The Nine Billion Names of God.

"We choose to do a thing not because it it easy, but because it is hard."---JFK

"Your saying so doesn't make it so."---my dad.

"I know about Occam's razor and I'll cut you off!"---Mary Kelly, a long-ago acquaintance, in the middle of a heated discussion.

"History is just one damn thing after another." ---William Appleman Williams, who I was privileged to have for American History 101 at UW-Madison

[Binkie The Clown]

19. Oh yes ! I remember that one vividly

"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."---Arthur C. Clarke, The Nine Billion Names of God.

[yardwork]

26. I love that story!

[Binkie The Clown]

27. When I was in high school (late 50s, early 60s) I belonged to the Science Fiction Book Club.

I first read it in an anthology that came as one of the monthly selections.
I believe the anthology title was something like "From the Oceans to the Stars." (probably 1961 or 1962)

[yardwork]

28. I read it while procrastinating in grad school in the late 80s.

It was in an old anthology - maybe like yours!

[Auggie]

16. Some of mine

"Clean Plate Club" -- family "reward" for eating everything on the dinner plate

"If you're not learning you're dead" -- Told to me by my college prof, changed from the original Albert Einstein quote

"We're gonna need a bigger boat" -- Roy Scheider, Jaws

"It's showtime!" -- Roy Scheider, All That Jazz

"I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." -- Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz

"When in Rome ..."

"Take the gun. Leave the cannoli." -- Richard Castellano, The Godfather

"We're going to steal meat from under the tiger's paw." -- Travis McGee / John D. MacDonald

"Now is the winter of our discontent." -- Richard III

"What fresh hell is this?"

[highplainsdem]

17. Weird. Despite having been interested for a long time in literature and

different types of writing, I've never focused on particular quotations, lines of lyrics or dialogue, ad slogans, etc.

I don't know whether I've just focused on too many over the years, or I'm simply not perceptive or literate enough.

I do have a couple of books of quotations here if I need to find something, though.

And it's interesting to see what all of you are posting.


LOL! Editing to add that right after I posted this, a favorite line from one of my favorite plays by Shakespeare came to mind.

One of Puck's lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

Applies to me, of course...

[UTUSN]

18. Excellent, but no, it doesn't apply to you: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks"

And Google has been a remedy for my blanking on words. When my increasingly synapse snaps happen and can't think of a word, I put in synonyms or whatever into Google and *PRESTO* there is the word I couldn't think of!

It might be a stopgap to a formal diagnosis!

[highplainsdem]

21. LOL! I don't think I'm going to need a formal diagnosis any decade soon (nor will you). When

I blank on something, it's usually because of too many choices.

Asking for a favorite quote from Shakespeare might have brought that to mind immediately. It's much more likely it would have occurred to me if someone had mentioned A Midsummer Night's Dream, because that's been my favorite line from the play since I read it in grade school.

I've never had a list of favorite quotes, though -- quotes that I think of so often they come to mind immediately. So it's been intriguing to read the ones here.

[Binkie The Clown]

20. Wasn't that the cook who said "Ah what foods these morsels be." nt

[highplainsdem]

22. LOL!

And thanks!

[marked50]

23. Just a few came to mind, but given few more minutes

I wouldn't be able to stop the keyboard from burning up. A truly fun OP.

--"Odd Ogg, Odd Ogg, half turtle and half frog".--never had one

"42" --from "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"

"It's a Cook Book!" -Serling's Twilight Zone-episode??

[Jilly_in_VA]

24. I have this weird memory thing

where I can remember whole chunks of oft-read books. I think I've just read some so often that I've absorbed them into my brain. There are parts of Little Women, Anya Seton's Katherine, The Rising of the Lark by Ann Moray, Zenna Henderson's stories of The People, various of the Anne of Green Gables series, Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage, just to name a few, that wander through my mind unbidden at odd times for no particular reason. I don't understand it and never will.

[yardwork]

29. How wonderful! I've never had that kind of memory.

[Totally Tunsie]

30. "Wait until your father gets home..."

No explanation needed!