Roy Blount Quotes
October 4, 1941
More 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— Alphabet Juice (2008), p. 93
Usage ain't always a matter of ought.
Roy Blount— Alphabet Juice (2008), p. 149
Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky.
Roy Blount— “Reading and Nothingness, Of Proust in the Summer Sun,” New York Times (June 2, 1985)
A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.
Roy Blount— “Reading and Nothingness, Of Proust in the Summer Sun,” New York Times (June 2, 1985)
In the beginning, Atlanta was without form, and void; and it still is.
Roy Blount— Long Time Leaving (2007)
I do hope you realize that every time you use disinterested to mean uninterested, an angel dies.
Roy Blount— Alphabet Juice (2008), p. 7
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.
Roy Blount— Alphabet Juice (2008), p. 17
A convention has to be something that more than one person is moved to take hold of. It's a convention to call your sweetheart "dumplin" or "honeybun." It would also be a convention to call her "gulag," if she would stand for it, which she won't, and why would you want to be around someone who would?
Roy Blount— Alphabet Juice (2008), p. 66
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.
Roy Blount— Alphabet Juice (2008), p. 155
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.
Roy Blount— Alphabet Juice (2008), p. 324
That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.
Roy Blount— Alphabet Juice (2008), p. 359
