Mark Forsyth Quotes

For though one antithesis is grand, a long list of antitheses is divine and is technically known as a progressio. It was a favorite of God and Dickens

Computers are machines. The internet is, ultimately, a huge army of machines. And machines do not allow in the element of chance. They do exactly what you tell them to do. So the internet means that, though you get what you already knew you wanted, you’ll never get anything more.

Sausages may taste lovely, but it’s usually best not to ask what’s actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body.

So Shakespeare stole; but he did wonderful things with his plunder. He’s like somebody who nicks your old socks and then darns them.

Offices are peculiar places and nobody is ever quite sure what happens in them, least of all the people who work there. But the day tends to begin with a morning meeting, in which everybody decides what they will fail to do for the rest of the day.

Oxygen was called flammable air for a while, but it didn't catch on.

whalers in Nantucket if not the world. In 1823 Valentine Starbuck was chartered by the King and Queen of Hawaii to take them on a trip to England, where the unfortunate royal pair died of measles.

Angry letters of complaint, redundancy notices and ransom notes will, if written in careful hypotaxis, sound as reasonable, measured and genial as a good dose of rough Enlightenment pornography.

if you say, ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’, you will be considered the greatest poet who ever lived. Express precisely the same thought any other way – e.g. ‘your father’s corpse is 9.144 metres below sea level’ – and you’re just a coastguard with some bad news.

After all, fiction is only fact minus time.

Thomas More observed in 1533 that “of newe booke makers there are now moe then ynough.” Luckily for the book trade, More was beheaded a couple of years later.

"The Oxford English Dictionary itself feebly admits that 'In Middle English it is often doubtful whether blac, blak, blacke, means "black, dark," or "pale, colourless, wan, livid".'

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Utterly illogical though all this may sound, there are two good explanations. Unfortunately, nobody is quite sure which one is true. So I shall give you both.

Once upon a time, there was an old Germanic word for burnt, which was black, or as close to black as makes no difference. The confusion arose because the old Germanics couldn't decide between black and white as to which color burning was. Some old Germans said that when things were burning they were bright and shiny, and other old Germans said that when things were burnt they turned black.

The result was a hopeless monochrome confusion, until everybody got bored and rode off to sack Rome.

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The other theory (which is rather less likely, but still good fun) is that there was an old German word black which meant bare, void, and empty. What do you have if you don't have any colours?

Well, it's hard to say really. If you close your eyes you see nothing, which is black, but a blank piece of paper is, usually, white. Under this theory, blankness is the original sense and the two colors — black and white — are simply different interpretations of what blank means."

Oscar Wilde said that “All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime,” and then got sent off to Reading Gaol to reconsider and write ballads.

The ladies towards whom these young champions would be scampering were the camp followers, women of more enterprise than virtue, who would follow the soldiers around and rent their affections by the hour.

When healthy people fall in love, they buy a bunch of flowers or an engagement ring and go and Do Something About It. When poets fall in love, they make a list of their loved one’s body parts and attach similes to them.