Weekend Words: Six

After deftly taking out Marco Rubio in the New Hampshire debate, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey was rewarded with sixth place in the nation’s first primary vote and exited the presidential arena “without an ounce of regret.”

It is amazing how soon one becomes accustomed to the sound of ones voice, when forced to repeat a speech five or six times a day. As election day approaches, the size of the crowds grows; they are more responsive and more interested; and one derives a certain exhilaration from that which, only a few weeks before, was intensely painful. This is one possible explanation of unlimited debate in the Senate.

—J. William Fulbright

Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said: ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’

‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!’

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.

—Salvador Dali

I came to the conclusion long ago that all life is six to five against.

—Damon Runyon

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

—Cardinal de Richelieu

And six little Singing-boys—dear little souls!
In nice clean faces, and nice white stoles.

—R. H. Barham, The Ingoldsby Legends

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, and defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty

—Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.

—George Moore

But manly set the world on six and seven;
And if thou die a martyr, go to heaven.

—Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde

In some of my hardest days when everything went wrong with everybody at home and all my manuscripts came back for six weeks at a time without one acceptance, I recall looking out of my little north window upon the lonely road bordered with lonelier Lombardy poplars, and thinking, ‘Before night something beautiful will happen to change everything.’ There was so much I wanted.

—Ella Wheeler Wilcox

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

—Exodus 20:11

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.

—Shirley Temple Black

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steak in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

—T. S. Eliot, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

A man who sees another man on the street corner with only a stump for an arm will be so shocked the first time he’ll give him sixpence. But the second time it’ll only be a three penny bit. And if he sees him a third time, he’ll have him cold-bloodedly handed over to the police.

—Bertolt Brecht

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

—Virginia Woolf