Roy Blount quotes

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies. (Roy Blount)
A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic. View quote
Roy Blount
To me, letters have always been a robust medium of sublimation. I don't remember what I was like before I learned my ABC's, but for as long as I can remember I have made them with my fingers and felt them in my bones. View quote
Roy Blount
The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs'. View quote
Roy Blount
Any given generation gives the next generation advice that the given generation should have been given by the previous generation but now it's too late. View quote
Roy Blount
That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp. View quote
Roy Blount
Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky. View quote
Roy Blount
People don't necessarily want or need to be done unto as you would have them do unto you. They want to be done unto as they want to be done unto. View quote
Roy Blount
A dog will make eye contact. A cat will, too, but a cat's eyes don't even look entirely warm-blooded to me, whereas a dog's eyes look human except less guarded. A dog will look at you as if to say, "What do you want me to do for you? I'll do anything for you." Whether a dog can in fact, do anything for you if you don't have sheep (I never have) is another matter. The dog is willing. View quote
Roy Blount
I heard on public radio recently, there's a thing called Weed Dating. Singles get together in a garden and weed and then they take turns, they keep matching up with other people. Two people will weed down one row and switch over with two other people. It's in Vermont. I don't think I'd be very good at Weed Dating. View quote
Roy Blount
Usage ain't always a matter of ought. (Roy Blount)
In the beginning, Atlanta was without form, and void; and it still is. View quote
Roy Blount
When I weed, I like to get off into my own head. For one thing, my wife plants and I have trouble telling which plants are weeds and which are my favorite plants. So I tend to hop around and grab the weeds that I know are weeds. So I don't weed all that linearly. I tend to weed haphazardly. View quote
Roy Blount
I know, you want to make a citizen's arrest of anyone whose menu lists "Idaho potato baked in it's skin," but you can't. View quote
Roy Blount
Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ. View quote
Roy Blount
I just think lots of words have physicality. How about the word 'wobble?' You think that's arbitrary? When you say the word 'wince,' you wince. How about that? View quote
Roy Blount
When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it's not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language. View quote
Roy Blount
Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me. View quote
Roy Blount
I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is. View quote
Roy Blount
I do some eccentric dancing. View quote
Roy Blount
I like weeding, but I tend to think of it as a solitary activity. (Roy Blount)
According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary. View quote
Roy Blount
Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words. View quote
Roy Blount
Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. View quote
Roy Blount
People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature. View quote
Roy Blount