Brendan Gill Quotations

I will try to cram these paragraphs full of facts and give them a weight and shape no greater than that of a cloud of blue butterflies.

It is in the nature of the New Yorker to be as topical as possible, on a level that is often small in scale and playful in intention.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

If it were better, it wouldn't be as good.

We're going to take a closer look at how notification needs to occur.

To die quickly in one's eighth decade at the very top of one's powers is an enviable end, and not an occasion for mourning.

The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run.

In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skyscrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniature Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water.

Avain attempt to subdue that unsubduable country.

Parody is homage gone sour.

The guns of the big events rumble through our pages, but the tiny firecrackers are constantly hissing and popping there as well; it appears that much of my life as a journalist has been devoted to sedulously setting off firecrackers.

Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.

We must all face the fact that in a single lifetime we lead several simultaneous lives; our intention should be to make them reinforce one another instead of colliding.

Based on the forecast, we do predict icing will be a problem.

If the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined past is not worth possessing; it bears fruit only by being held continuously up to the light, and is as changeable and as full of surprises, pleasant and unpleasant, as the future

If the state were to suspend the gas tax, it would most likely result in the state being sued by the bondholders,

It is not uncommon for contracts like this to run later than expected. We're just not at that stage yet to proceed.

Our offense really needed that. We've been waiting for that all season. We knew how to do it, we just had to execute and at least for one inning (Thursday), we did that. Hopefully we can keep it going.

It depends on what they find. Basically, they're replacing lighting devices, doing some troubleshooting and eliminating any trouble with the current lighting.

Express doesn't necessarily mean faster. It just means direct -- direct to the bridge.

What exactly happened? How did our practices work? Could we have done more?

We don't think there's any problem from an engineering perspective or a structural perspective. The bridge is safe.

We're going to address the problem. If you want to characterize that as a shift in the position of the department, that would be fair.

As of now, we've done everything we can to be prepared.

There's a lot of communication going on and that's why we're having a face-to-face meeting. We're not worried but we won't be satisfied until we have the (funding plan) approved.

The Federal Highway Administration should essentially recognize that later-year funding in the program will be subject to state legislative action, and that happens in many states,