To keep track of funny sayings I’ve come across:

(most are inevitably heavily distorted, owing to my poor recall. Best attempt at attribution.) (quotes are reserved for actual, checked quotes.)

  • miserliness is the surest sign of general unhappiness1
  • you may bark, or not bark, but as part of the pack you must wag your tail2
  • TODO: (Quine’s thing about infinite cardinals, in the P-G edit)
  • “I was send off to Tokyo in a taxi, lest I do damage to my leg– this at Chūō Kōron expense, though I shall insist upon re-paying. The tariff I set down for the record, since I shall probably never again have such a long taxi ride: ¥5,540. Very cheap, I say– less than a day of Mr. Hertz.3
  • “This last fact perhaps helps to confirm a theory I have long had, that the novel got out of hand, that Tanizaki did not really want Taeko to be so likeable.”4
  • “By 1965, researchers could no longer read [computability theory] papers.”5

  1. Kafka, English tr ↩

  2. Chekhov, English tr ↩

  3. E. Seidensticker ↩

  4. ibid. After referring to the real life inspiration of Taeko as “coarse and vulgar”. ↩

  5. Soare, in Formalism and intuition in computability ↩