Famous quotes containing the words operation, magic and/or carpet:
“It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. The only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of Wut, is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.”
—Sydney Smith (17711845)
“Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.”
—Henry Miller (18911980)
“A wind has started a little whirlpool
of sand where the carpet ought to be,
and shells lie
by the preposterous feet
of that woman who frets me, annihilates me,
O she will kill me yet.”
—Hilda Doolittle (18861961)