“Tonight’s December thirty-first,
Something is about to burst.
The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark, it’s midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year!”
― Ogden Nash
“Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore,
And that’s what parents were created for.”
― Ogden Nash
“A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.”
― Ogden Nash
“To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the wedding cup, whenever you’re wrong, admit it; whenever you’re right, shut up.”
― Ogden Nash
“You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.”
― Ogden Nash
“Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.”
― Ogden Nash
“Some pains are physical, and some pains are mental, but the one that’s both is dental.”
― Ogden Nash
“LIFE BEGINS AT THE END OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE”
― Ogden Nash
“I have an idea that the phrase “weaker sex” was coined by some woman to disarm the man she was preparing to overwhelm. ”
― Ogden Nash
“Middle age is when you’ve met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.”
― ogden nash
“The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.”
― Ogden Nash
“Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave when they think that their children are naive.”
― Ogden Nash
“If you don’t want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you won’t have to work.”
― Ogden Nash
“Middle age is when you’re sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you.”
― Ogden Nash
“Certainly there are things in life that money can’t buy, but it’s very funny –
Did you ever try buying them without money.”
― Ogden Nash
“A jolly young fellow from Yuma
Told an elephant joke to a puma;
now his skeleton lies
beneath hot western skies-
the puma had no sense of huma”
― Ogden Nash
“Where there is a monster, there is a miracle.”
― Ogden Nash
“There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all.”
― Odgen Nash
“Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove
Of a marriage conducted with economy
In the Twentieth Century Anno Donomy.
We’ll live in a dear little walk-up flat
With practically room to swing a cat
And a potted cactus to give it hauteur
And a bathtub equipped with dark brown water.
We’ll eat, without undue discouragement,
Foods low in cost but high in nouragement
And quaff with pleasure, while chatting wittily,
The peculiar wine of Little Italy.
We’ll remind each other it’s smart to be thrifty
And buy our clothes for something-fifty.
We’ll bus for miles on holidays
For seas at depressing matinees,
And every Sunday we’ll have a lark
And take a walk in Central Park.
And one of these days not too remote
You’ll probably up and cut my throat.”
― Ogden Nash
“Progress is a fine thing, but it’s gone on long enough.”
― Ogden Nash
“Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.”
― Ogden Nash
“either you get eaten by a wolf today or else the shepherd saves you from the wolf so he can sell you to the butcher tomorrow”
― Ogden Nash
“When grandparents enter the door, discipline flies out the window.
― Ogden Nash
“A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.”
― Ogden Nash
“People who have what they want are fond of telling people who haven’t what they want that they really don’t want it.”
― Ogden Nash
“Parsley is gharsley.”
― Ogden Nash
“If called by a panther, don’t anther”
― Ogden Nash
“I give you now Professor Twist
The conscientious scientist.
Trustees exclaimed, “He never bungles”
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside
One day he missed his lovely bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
You mean,” he said “a crocodile.!”
― Ogden Nash
“The cow is of the bovine ilk; one end is moo, the other milk.”
― Ogden Nash
“I dreamt that my hair was kempt. Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.”
― Ogden Nash
“The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late.”
― ogden nash
“The trouble with a kitten is that it eventually becomes a cat.”
― Ogden Nash
“Too clever is dumb.”
― Ogden Nash
“Snow is all right while it is snowing; it is like inebriation because it is very pleasing when it is coming, but very unpleasing when it is going.”
― Ogden Nash
“Remorse is a violent dyspepsia of the mind, But it is very difficult to treat because it cannot even be defined, Because everything is not gold that glisters and everything is not a tear that glistens, And one man’s remorse is another man’s reminiscence”
― Ogden Nash
“If some confectioners were willing
To let the shape announce the filling,
We’d encounter fewer assorted chocs,
Bitten into and returned to the box.”
― Ogden Nash
“Love is a word that is constantly heard,
Hate is a word that is not.
Love, I am told, is more precious that gold.
Love, I have read, is hot.
But hate is the verb that to me is superb,
And love but a drug on the mart.
Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,
But hating, my boy, is an art.”
― Ogden Nash
“Sure deck your lower limbs in pants; Yours are the limbs, my sweeting. You look divine as you advance– Have you seen yourself retreating?”
― Ogden Nash
“Elephants are useful friends: they have handles on both ends.”
― Ogden Nash
“He who has never tasted jail Lives well within the legal pale, While he who’s served a heavy sentence Renews the racket, not repentance.”
― Ogden Nash
“My fellow man I do not care for.
I often ask me, What’s he there for?
The only answer i can find
Is, Reproduction of his kind.”
― Ogden Nash
“Which the Chicken and Which the Egg?
He drinks because she scolds, he thinks;
She thinks she scolds because he drinks;
And nether will admit what’s true,
That he’s a sot and she’s a shrew.”
― Ogden Nash
“The Bronx? No Thonx!”
― Ogden Nash
“At least when I get on the Boston train I have a good chance of landing in the South Station
And not in that part of the daily press which is reserved for victims of aviation.”
― Ogden Nash
“You can have my jellyfish
I am not sellyfish”
― Ogden Nash
“We Don’t Need to Leave Yet, Do We? Or, Yes We Do
One kind of person when catching a train always wants to allow an hour to cover the ten-block trip to the terminus,
And the other kind looks at them as if they were verminous,
And the second kind says that five minutes is plenty and will even leave one minute over for buying the tickets,
And the first kind looks at them as if they had cerebral rickets.
One kind when theater-bound sups lightly at six and hastens off to the play,
And indeed I know one such person who is so such that it frequently arrives in time for the last act of the matinee,
And the other kind sits down at eight to a meal that is positively sumptuous,
Observing cynically that an eight-thirty curtain never rises till eight-forty, an observation which is less cynical than bumptious.
And what the first kind, sitting uncomfortably in the waiting room while the train is made up in the yards, can never understand,
Is the injustice of the second kind’s reaching their scat just as the train moves out, just as they had planned,
And what the second kind cannot understand as they stumble over the first kind’s heel just as the footlights flash on at last
Is that the first kind doesn’t feel the least bit foolish at having entered the theater before the cast.
Oh, the first kind always wants to start now and the second kind always wants to tarry,
Which wouldn’t make any difference, except that each other is what they always marry.”
― Ogden Nash
“Man is a victim of dope
In the incurable form of hope!”
― Ogden Nash
“People can’t concentrate properly on blowing other people to pieces if their minds are poisoned by thoughts suitable to the twenty-fifth of December.”
― Ogden Nash
“Senescence begins
And middle-age ends
The day your descendants
Outnumber your friends”
― Ogden Nash
“Everybody who has a baby thinks everybody who hasn’t a baby ought to have a baby,
Which accounts for the success of such plays as the Irish Rose of Abie,
The idea apparently being that just by being fruitful
You are doing something beautiful,
Which if it is true
Means that the common housefly is several million times more beautiful than me or you.”
― Ogden Nash
“There are people who are very resourceful, at being remorseful,
And who apparently feel that the best way to make friends is to do something terrible and then make amends.”
― Ogden Nash
“Do you think my mind is maturing late, or simply rotted early?”
― Ogden Nash