Time is so old and love so brief, love is pure gold and time a thief. We're late, darling, we're late, The curtain descends, everything ends, too soon, too soon.
Ogden NashRead
Basketball, a game which won't be fit for people until they set the basket umbilicus-high and return the giraffes to the zoo.
Interpretation
This quote humorously critiques the nature of basketball by suggesting its absurdity if played with giraffes.
Ogden Nash uses humor and satire to highlight the inherent absurdity of basketball as a sport. By jokingly suggesting that the game would be more suitable if baskets were set at an impossible height and giraffes were involved, he invites the reader to reflect on the sometimes ridiculous aspects of sports culture and the arbitrary standards we accept in competitive games.
In practice
During a light-hearted sports discussion at a party.
Time is so old and love so brief, love is pure gold and time a thief. We're late, darling, we're late, The curtain descends, everything ends, too soon, too soon.
I'm like a backward berry, Unripened on the vine, For all my friends are fifty, And I'm only forty-nine.
I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.
Here's a good rule of thumb; too clever is dumb.
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.
Here's a toast to the roast that good fellowship lends, with the sparkle of beer and wine; May its sentiment always be deeper, my friends, than the foam at the top of the stein. Then here's to the heartening wassail, wherever good fellows are found; Be its master instead of its vassal, and order the glasses around.
Humor and knowledge are the two great hopes of our culture.
I can see we're going to get along like a house on fire," said Miss Tick. "There may be no survivors.
There was a time when people said, 'Jim, if you keep on making faces, your face will freeze like that.' Now they just say, 'Pay him!'
Why, dear boy, we don't send wizards to Azkaban just for blowing up their aunts.
Dwarves are still the butt of jokes. It's one of the last bastions of acceptable prejudice.
When a dramatic actor does a funny film, people are like, 'Wonderful! I didn't know he was funny!' But when it flips, people can get really thrown by it.
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