What if this were fun?

Or, a sesquicentennial synthesis

La Clairvoyance, 1936 by Rene Magritte, ft. thought bubble and the number 150

Collecting great quips is like painting a fence in the rain: You wonder if anything is going to stick. In sifting through 150 issues of Get Wit Quick, I’ve used a simple metric to find the best bits: Which of these lines have I actually remembered and applied? 

Here are five I think about a lot, preceded by these three caveats: 

a) My fifth grade English teacher Ms. Betts told me that if you say “a lot” you can only ever be referring to a vacant patch of land.

b) Whenever anyone collects the Top 100 Tweets/Movies/Music Videos/Memes of All Time, the Bronze Age is woefully underrepresented.

c) A Nicolas Chamfort line I’ve yet to unpack: “Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything.”

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1. “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
— G.K. Chesterton

My rephrasing: What if this were fun? Ask yourself this as many times a day as is necessary.

2. “We can be offered only two kinds of information — what we already know, which is boring, and what we do not, which is humiliating.”
— Quentin Crisp

Learning hurts. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a liar or a superior being. It’s an extrapolation of the line “I don’t like to write but I like having written.”

3. “I try to keep my abiding love for all humanity in one place, but somehow it always ends up in piles on the dining room table.”
— Duchess Goldblatt

The wits who said the meanest things they could think of (Patricia Highsmith, James Whistler) were real and miserable; those who consistently keep it light (Duchess Goldblatt, Ted Lasso) are fictional and thriving. Dunking is no way to live. 

4. “Let’s have some new cliches.”
— Samuel Goldwyn

The surest way to make a work of art invisible is to hang it where you’ll see it every day. Best to make like Zora: Sharpen your oyster knife, discard the shells, and keep looking for pearls. When you find one, hold it aloft like Clive James, who said:

5. “All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.”

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Quick quips; lightning

“Life itself is a quotation.”
— Jorge Luis Borges

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
— Oscar Wilde

“Life doesn’t wait to be asked: it comes grinning in, sits down uninvited and helps itself to bread and cheese, and comments uninhibitedly on the decorations.”
— Philip Larkin

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Speaking of…

Distilling 100 issues into 12 forms of wit

Forms of wit, ranked

Distilling the year 2020 into 51 zingers

The 51 best tips from sharp wits

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Three years and 150,000 words in, that was GWQ No. 150. Welcome to everyone who climbed aboard thanks to Sarah Lazarovic’s shout out. I’m always looking for fine lines; just hit reply with any zingers that have lodged in your cranium. This newsletter grew out of my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting and will keep going until it’s a complete catalogue of everything good ever said by anybody … so at least another month? Tapping the ❤️ below is widely recognized as a thing you can do.