the things people say

Here is a collection of weird and/or insightful things said by friends of mine over the years, and which I in my own weirdness decided to write down for posterity in my little quote book:

Unusual greetings used instead of "hello":

"Phreap!" -Gene Epstein
"Biff!" -Doug DuPriest
"Do I know you?" (response: "I think not") -Kay Parkin, Elise Porter (source: play Dust on a Bowl of Rose Leaves
"Wanna mess around?" -Fred Sanderson

Quotes (fractured and otherwise) from other sources used as catch phrases or quips:

"Don't touch me I break!" -Larry Kutner (from the 1962 movie David and Lisa)
"There I was hacking my way through a wall of living flesh, dragging my canoe behind me." -Elise Porter (a W.C. Fields line)
"Is that a cucumber in your pocket?" -Elise Porter (Mae West)
"Come up and see my bean seedlings." -Ed Frank (Mae West)
"I wish I didn't know now, what I didn't know then." -Lisa Dallape (Bruce Springsteen)

Original (sort of) catch phrases and quips:

"Three guesses and the first two don't count." -Betti DeMeules
"That's too bad, spelled T-U-F-F." -Betti DeMeules
"Running attacks and other fleshy delights." -Larry Kutner
"Time is a good thing, otherwise evolution would have done away with it." -Charlie Wyman
"Lady Macbeth was a sonamulist." -Fred Gorin
"Moby Dick is not a social disease." -Elaine Braun
"Where ever you go in life, there you are." -Charlie Greer
"The Ordevician chestnut blight." -Elise Porter [There were no chesnuts in the Ordevician -- because the blight got them all!]
"Some day you will realize that he is just a...Pugamuffin!" -Alina Shumsky (advice to the lovelorn).
"To paint the kangaroo" -Lindy Guttman (euphamism for making out)
"It's such a far out heavy thing, man; you really get involved, man." -Charlie Greer
"The trouble with men is that they forget how easily they can be replaced by six inches of rubber and wiring." -Yvette Cook
"The frackers!" -Bob Kirk
"Don't urinate in my ear and tell me it's raining." -Charles Elton
"Assumption is the mother of disaster." -George W. Porter's 4th Law
"The garbage always needs taking out." -George W. Porter's 5th Law


The wit and wisdom (??) of sociologists and sociology students I have known:

"The nature of human nature is that it is not fixed." -Larry Busch
"The ability to experience the experienceable has an inverse relationship to age. As the labeling process goes on you loose the ability to experience: "a hardening of the categories." -Dwight Billings
"A language is merely a dialect with an army and a navy."
"Perhaps ethnomusicologists should study political science and sociologists learn to sing." -John Stephenson
"Being married is fine if you like living in an institution." -Michael Brooks
"Never trust your life to one rubber band." -Carol Straus
"You got up on the wrong side of the pattern variables." -Dwight Billings
"That's the nature of knowledge -- it is very fragile." -Tom Llewellyn
"There are no limits to injustice." -Brent Tuthill
"We cannot comprehend everything at one time." -Stephen King (no not him, another one)
"We are the people your parents warned you about when you left home for college." -Keith Crew
"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him internalize group norms." -Keith Crew
"You can lead a man to Weber but you can't make him think." -John Pitt
"Early to bed, early to rise, won't get you into the power elite." -Keith Crew
"To sell a few used truths." -Dwight Billings
"It's straight forward." -Tony Capon
"Dr. Capon, if you say it's straight forward one more time, I'm going to climb across this desk and rip your face off." -Robyn Friedline
"A woman who waits to marry has to keep her weight down and her breasts up." -Raymond Shuster
"Don't screw across power lines." -Lori Garkovich
"B. B. King can make a guitar wail and moan, and corporate America can get a dollar bill to do almost anything." -Patrick Shumate
"The man should wrap that rascal or keep it in his pants." -Suzanne Dean

Aside from the sociologists and sociology students most of the people mentioned above are now (many decades later) respectable lawyers, psychologists, physicians, and scientists (ha!).