Mark Forsyth Quotes

You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it’s much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter. It doesn’t matter what it’s about. It can be the exact depth in the sea to which a chap’s corpse has been sunk; hardly a matter of universal interest, but if you say, ‘Full fathom five your father lies’, you will be considered the greatest poet that ever lived. Express precisely the same thought in 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.

"It's a fifty-fifty chance that your main aim is to be thelyphthoric, a word that comes from the Greek thely meaning "woman" and phthoric meaning "corrupting," thus the OED's simple definition: "that corrupts or ruins women.

To remember that I used to like avocados with a touch of walnut oil only adds to my shame.

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.

English teaching at school is, unfortunately, obsessed with what a poet thought, as though that were of any interest to anyone. Rather than being taught about how a poem is phrased, schoolchildren are asked to write essays on what William Blake thought about the Tiger; despite the fact that William Blake was a nutjob whose opinions, in a civilised society, would be of no interest to anybody apart from his parole officer. A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.

The Latin for standing in front of things is pro-stitutio.

Saint Peter and Saint John were idiots simply because they were laymen. They had no qualifications and were therefore their own men, rather than belonging to some professional class. If they had spoken their own language it would have been an idiom, and if they had been eccentrics with their own way of doing things (which they undoubtedly were) they would have been idiosyncratic.

Medieval lovers used to fond each other, and if they did this too often, they began to fondle. Fondling is a dangerous business, as sooner or later it leads to snugging, an archaic word that meant to lie down together in order to keep warm. Repeated incidences of snugging will result in snuggling, and pregnancy.

A dutiful son has to remember not to slouch or swear or, in Hamlet's case, murder the old bat.

Genius, as we tend to talk about it today, is some sort of mysterious and combustible substance that burns brightly and burns out. It's the strange gift of poets and pop stars that allows them to produce one wonderful work in their early twenties and then nothing. It is mysterious. It is there. It is gone.

The worst form of weather is a pogonip, which is a word we stole from the Shoshone Indians (along with the rest of their possessions) to describe a fog so cold that it freezes into ice crystals in mid-air.

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.

If the soup had been as warm as the wine, and the wine as old as the fish, and the fish as young as the maid, and the maid as willing as the hostess, it would have been a very good meal.

This teaches us the important moral lesson that it’s absolutely fine to get pass-out-naked pissed, but it is absolutely not all right to notice. You should politely avert your eyes.

Yet hypotaxis (along with reason) has been declining for a century or more. Gone are those heady and incomprehensible sentences of Johnson, Dickens, and Austen, replaced with the cruel, brutalist parataxes of writers whose aim is to agitate and distress. The long sentence is now a ridiculed rarity, usually hidden away in the Terms and Conditions, its commas and colons, clauses and caveats languishing unread and unloved.