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)
“The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“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)