Weekend Words: Egg
It's Easter, have an egg.
It’s Easter, have an egg.
The Ostrich roams the great Sahara.
Its mouth is wide, its neck is narra.
It has such long and lofty legs,
I’m glad it sits to lay its eggs.
—Ogden Nash, “The Ostrich”
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
—Walter Benjamin
Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.
—George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical
I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
—H. L. Mencken
A hen is only a egg’s way of making another egg.
—Samuel Butler, Life and Habit
There was an old man of Thermopylae,
Who never did anything properly;
But they said, “If you choose
To boil eggs in your shoes
You shall never remain in Thermopylae.”
—Edward Lear, More Nonsense
Making capitalism out of socialism is like making eggs out of an omelet.
—Vadim Bakatin
To venerate the simple days
Which lead the seasons by,
Needs but to remember
That from you or me
They may take the trifle
Termed mortality!
To invest existence with a stately air,
Needs but to remember
That the acorn there
Is the egg of forests
For the upper air!
—Emily Dickinson, 90
Remorse, the fatal egg that pleasure laid.
—William Cowper
