"I'm a butcher, not an artist!" -David Auer

and from the SWIL Archives:

"OFFICIAL TREASURER'S REPORT:'
  Hi guys.  No money yet."
               --SWILnews v1n6

"Jim gently carried a motion from the floor to the table, to wit 'Who
thinks consensus is icky?'  A consensus was not reached on this point,
so it was voted that we hereafter vote."
               --SWILnews v1n7

"We need publicity for _Dark_Star_.  Suggestions: give SWIL members 3x5
filing cards to flash at bystanders."
               --SWILnews, 1/27/80

"Sherry suggested that SWIL should have a halloween party and was
promptly saddled with responsibility for it."
               --SWILnews v4n4

"Sects, sects, sects!  That's all you religion majors ever think
about!"
               -- Garth (but Ibn&ns to whom)

"Poetry consists of would-be cliches."
               -- Michael, NOT on rec.arts board

"You stimulate the chicken soup somehow and it starts to emit light."
               --Brian Taylor

"...hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist.  It
is just like pathways over the land.  For actually there were no paths
originally, but when many people traveled one way, a road was made."
               --Lu Hsun, "My Old Home", tr. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang

"And NOW everything's a fucking fork."
               -- Paul Bogorad

"repodek memograpgh.]"  --David Auer

"...it's a sort of a beautiful picture, in a pathetic way..."  --Conrad
Bender, on "The General", a short story by Pa Chin.

"...members of the `whatever' faction (so-called for their belief that
`whatever Mao Zedong said was true and whatever Mao did was
correct')..."  --Collier's Encyclopedia, 1987, v.6, p. 320 or so.

"Boredom is the scourge of the twentieth century" alternatively:
"Boredom is the curse of modern man."  --Leif Kirschenbaum after being
informed that he had another 1 1/2 hours before the van left for
Philcon.

"It is not hard for a man to follow justice, but it is harder for him
to keep it up."  --from _The 47 Ronin_, a.k.a. _Chushingura_

"When I get younger, I want to be just like you."
               --Ellie Weiss

"We were boys together; at least, I was."
               -- _Iolanthe_

"Yes, it is a weakness, but the weakness is so STRONG!"
               -- _Iolanthe_, on love

"The CIA was POed at the FBI's MO in dealing with a UFO in NYC.  DC HQ
OKed an ICBM with LSD, in hopes of ODing the UFO.  More details at 11,
this has just been the initial report."
               -- the Gunderson Corporation

"Tune in next week for the Adventures of Paranoia Man, as he takes on
his arch enemy,  EVERYBODY!"
               -- The Gunderson Corp.

"Just because I'm a freshman doesn't mean I'm brainless."  --Leif

"Silverware makes you feel good."
 --girl in documentary, _16_in_Webster_Groves_

"I almost felt GUILTY that I had nice clothes to wear when all these
poor people didn't -- it's almost like Communism!"
 --different girl, same film

"Should I shave my head?  I mean, it might not be the right thing to
do."   --Danna somebody, in Education class, on problems of adolescence

"I am by far a deviant form of everything from my high school."
       --Danna again

"There's the old expression: if you don't give your kids something to
rebel against, they'll become yuppies."  --and again Danna

"...He died by cutting his own throat in resignation."
      -- footnote to "An Old Tragedy in a New Age" by Lao She

"If you don't eat it we'll have to give it to Dave Bishop!!"
      -- the spirit form of Jessica Hines and Geoff Hopcraft

"A formalist is someone who can't believe something unless it's
meaningless."
      -- quoted in _5000_BC_, by Raymond Smullyan

"Let's try and run, we know THAT'S good."
      -- jim, in a fringeworthy campaign under attack by zillions of
              unpleasant white things.

"He comes up with some really good ideas, then ruins them by writing
about them."
      -- jed, on piers anthony

"It's God the Father I play -- not
God the boiling point of water!"
      -- _JB_, A. MacLeish

"What about the ends? That's as good a place to start as any."
      -- Tom Bradley

"It's kind of a musical witticism."
      -- Matt Barlow, Music11

"I wanna stand on a pulsar and see if I fall off."
      -- Bruce Hahne

"Bea's Hotel.  Transient rooms."  --sign near Oakland Amtrak station

"Suppose you pour a poison into... ummm... my ear... which causes me to
desire to squeeze everything - and the first thing I see is a trigger."
                            -- C. Raff, Phil 1A

"There's never a burnt Marsh-Wiggle around when you need one."
      -- Alex, falling under Prof. Sununu's sleep spell.

"Indeed, I had discussed the subject in Boston before my departure with
Professor Szent-Gyorgi, the Hungarian biochemist, . . . ."
      -- Norbert Weiner, _Cybernetics_ (1948), p. 33

"I was going to cut off my nose to spite my face.  We figured that way
you could drain your sinuses by going like this:" [bends head forward]
      --Jonathan Wald

"Chemists will tell you that Falstaff . . . is a lot like Shell
ketones."
      -- Shell Chemical ad, _Scientific_American_, October, 1957,
         inside front cover

"Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm just in an incredible amount of pain."
      --Ruth and Rob, 12/10 dinner

"The sysop of one of those boards, Rob, welcomed me into an entire
world of telecommunications that I was unaware until then existed."
      -- USENET, soc.motss # 2969

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease."
      -- LaRouchefoucauld, quoted by Howard Pierce on USENET,
         soc.motss # 3047

"2026117"
      -- Morgan

"...that there are some privacy rights hidden in the 9th Amendment just
waiting to come out..."  --the Senator from New Hampshire on that new
game show, Senate Confirmation Hearings

"These were famous men, even in an age when, ah, when celebrities were
not known."  --Judge Kennedy on the writers of the Constitution, same show.

"Is Dave Bishop still Satan?"
"Not any more, because he's in the Navy!!!"
      --graffiti from Beardsley

"I think anyone who commits suicide over money almost deserves it."
--Bee (after the Great Crash of '87)

"...like a great beer he had been decorated many times..."
      --Donald Barthelme, "Brain Damage"

"Libya's professional wrestling is fixed."
      --In John Krinsky's Hunter HS ('87) yearbook

"God made soybeans; Man made tofu."
      --Ibn&ns

"Knowledge of the humanities ... must be harnessed to science and
technology if the latter are to remain creative and humane, just as the
humanities need to be informed by science and technology if they are to
remain relevant to the human condition."  --from _A Nation at Risk_, the
report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1981.

"I don't think you have to be poor to be enthusiastic."
      --Lisa Smulyan, arguing against low pay for teachers

"Ever notice how much better lunch is when they use real food?"
      --someone on MASH

"The average astronomer is growing older at a rate of about six months
per year"
      -- in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, V.98

"That's the second time this person's used me for food"
     --Someone I promised not to quote

"Well, it's not quite virgin material, but it hasn't been slept on yet"
  -- Fred Orthlieb in Engineering Materials class

"Revolution and dissent NOW!"
"Tomorrow.  I have a paper to write."
"Revolution first, then dissent."
"Why can't we have NORMAL graffiti?"
   -- from a Trotter bathroom.

"We will represent acceleration in red, because differentiating things
makes them redder."
      -- from a Jet Propulsion Laboratories sample tape from their
         "Mechanical Universe" series

"We all know that beautiful things are often unreal; we find examples
in the rainbow in the sky, and in our dreams at night."
      -- from "Three Men and One Woman," by She Ts'ung-wen,
         tr. Kai-yu Hsu

"I don't *need* superlatives; I'm Foxbat!"
      -- Foxbat, the slightly megalomaniac villain from _Champions_

"Failure to die when killed is a *serious* infraction of the rules."
      -- The '87 Pterodactyl Hunt Rules

[In reference to her family's varied religious background:]  "I am a
religious mutt."
      -- Clara Cohen, 12/21/87

"Time flies like a bird.
Fruit flies like a banana."
            -Groucho Marx

"The problem with the toilets flushing has been rectified...  We'll
take off as soon as the pilots finish the paperwork."
      - maintenance man on airplane, 12/21/87

"We feted Mary nude."
      -- Where else?  A Donna Jo sample sentence from fall's Ling 1

Physicists are just mathematicians who use philosophy to cheat.
                       James "look what they did to my major!" Deane

"But God is a neuter pronoun!"
         -- Geoff, adding a new dimension to a common Swarthmore theme

"Mary didn't murder her husband because she loved him."
        -- Donna Jo Napoli, Semantics class, 1/23/88

[From the same source-- and yes, these are potentially valid:  think
     about them!]:
"Everybody loves a lover" + "John loves Bertha" --> "Stacy loves Bill".
"You have a dog" + "Your dog had pups" --> "Your mother is a bitch".

"Do you have brain damage?"  -computer geek in Sun Lab
"Yes."                       -Garth Snyder  (really, no joke)

" 'Oh', he said, 'I`m with the Dogwood Monarchist Society.  We`re not
political.'"
      -- Vincent Manis, USENET soc.motss

"You may be a mighty king, but you're sitting in oobleck up to your chin."
                                                -Dr. Seuss

"Those are all little brain cells that have, like, lost their mommy."
      --bee

"...which are good for our economy, except last time they led to the
Great Depression."
               --jen, about protection tariffs

"Why don't you try that with something that won't die when you drop it?"
"I will; where's Mikala?"
               --ibn&ns, but we were talking about JUGGLING
                 gosh, I've never been ibn&ns before.
                 how can you be sure of that?

"We're all supposed to think he's brilliant because he can write
something ambiguous."
"Yes, well, ambiguity is the last refuge of a small liberal-arts
college..."
               --Chris Cobb and Laura Augustine on (Kafka?)

"'...it's not so much the lies, it's the absence of the truth,' he said."
       - Philly Inquirer (don't know who they're referring to, though)

"The trouble with Italian food is, three or four days later you're
hungry again."
      -- I have no idea who.

"Have you ever noticed that when you write a fraction, the numerator
and denominator do not go in the same place?  No!  There is _space_
between them."
      -- Mr. Shimamoto, topologist, on a handout

"Some people like to draw each inertial force in red, as a reminder
that they are dealing with a force of a different color."
      -- Footnote in an E12 textbook

"When the baud rate gets too high for the equipment used, it is said to
be 'baudy', which results in a lot of bad words."
      -- Notes taken in E14

"Graphs are simply objects which have many, many uses."
      - C. Grinstead, Math 9, 2/10/88

"I am a thirty-five-year-old woman.  I am at the peak of my sexual
capacity.  It gets lonely at the top."

"Intel architectures build character" -from the Net (see Elliott
                                               for translation)

"Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident."
               --Julie's shirt.

"If the wall doesn't give way, the meter stick could vaporize a good
deal of the solar system."
               -- A dramatic moment in Relativity

"The contradiction here isn't really a contradiction."
               -- Jeremy Brest explains Algebra

"We have to give working mothers a break.  All you can really do is
think your kids are the greatest, love them deeply, have as much fun
with them as you can, and raise them to go to college so they'll earn
lots of money and be able to afford a therapist."
               -- Sandy Duncan

"In this piece, the trumpet mouthpieces are played without the rest of
the instrument.  It makes the fingering a lot easier."
               -- Peter Schickele, on the Carson show.

"But Alexander the Great had a problem - he died.  Sort of cramped
his style."
              -- A guest lecturer in Religion 4

"Fish can't faint.  Fish'll die."
               --Jenny Yeoh

"I'd really like to do this more often."
"What?"
"Get a bunch of people together and turn off the light."
               --Michael and Diana, doing Ling homework

"It is not the case that I've stopped beating my wife."
"That's exactly the same as my retainer!"
               --an exciting moment in Linguistics

"Why is the King of Denmark different from The Lone Ranger?"
               --Donna Jo Napoli

"The small room is just like death."
               --Vicki Maturo

"I'm glad that the men I am around are longer than average."
               --Lane Wilder

"The Earth is just a silly ball,
To them, through which they simply pass
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall,
Or photons through a sheet of glass."   -John Updike
I *LIKE* that.

"It's 1a.m.  Do you know where your hands are?"
               --A quote from the coffeehousae that wouldn't quit.

"It's 3 a.m.  Do you know where your face is?"
              --Guess.

"Taste plays second fiddle to hearing and sight."
               --Karen Katz

"The animal knows, of course.  But it most certainly does not know that
it knows."
               --Teilhard de Chardin, quoted in the February
                 issue of _Artificial_Intelligence_
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog know One Great Thing"
                           -some famous(?) ancient Greek

"Language is one of the best windows on the mind.  It may be an opaque
window, but..."
               --Donna Jo again

"It are TOO we."
               --Bee

"It isn't just I, it's he and she that do it, too."
"Most things are me."
"You don't ask, 'How deviant are you from the unusual?'  You ask, 'How
deviant are you from the usual?'"
"What Michael has done, now, is change the world."
               --Donna Jo again and again and again and again.

"Susie most certainly does NOT regret that she has no last name because
she does."
               -- . . . and again . . .

"Remember back in 1978 when Nixon took away TWO HOURS for the oil
companies?"
               -- Rudy Rucker, _The_Fourth_Dimension_ (1985)

"My cousin worked for the Franklin Mint.  He's the one who coined the
phrase 'genuine authentic reproduction.'"
               -- AJ in Christian Scriptures (it related somehow)

'coined'?  AARGH!

"Simon, Garfunkel, and Jesus."
               -- AJ again

"Every city breeds its own kind of thug -- New York has its muggers;
Chicago has gangsters; and Metropolis has brilliant masterminds trying
to take over the world."
               -- a special about superman last night

"The Anglican answer to cholera:  muscular Christianity."
               -- "The Day the Universe Changed"  (PBS, 9pm mondays)

"There were about as many Jesuses in the ancient world as there are in
baseball today."
"That's quite a few."
"That's right."
"And they're all short stops."
"That's right."
               -- AJ and EB in Formative Judaism

"[That statement] was obviously wrong, so it must go back to Jesus."
               -- AJ again, Formative Judaism again

"The crushing failure of the American Fundamental Group Team in Calgary
has stunned the nation.  Panic has overtaken the land, carrying with it
shock waves of such force that our democracy would surely have crumbled
by now had it not been for the foresight of ABC television to focus on
ice hockey insted.  Nonetheless, haunting questions remain:  Are
Americans inadequately trained to effectively compute big-time
fundamental groups, or is it just that our skis are too big?  And where
was Jabbar?"
               -- Another Don Shimamoto topology handout

"Activity will let you do amazing things."
               -- a psycholinguistics prof. candidate

"What you said about the verb 'to be' is interesting, because I just
got back from California."
               -- same source

"Raff looks like my father."
"He looks like my pet duck."
              --two students in Modern Phil seminar

"You have to remember that this is Hegel, and Hegel is weird."
              --Braulio Munoz

"By that time I was so smashed."
              --Munoz again.  the context makes it funny.  He was
describing his experience on the stage at a lecture hall (listening to
the lecture) at Oxford.

"Sparticus is up on a cross and Tony Curtis looks up and says 'I love
you, Thparticuth!'"
               -- AJ (who else?)

"...Was it awful -- being a prostitute and paying taxes and things?"
               -- the Spike

"But all theater is reality.  AND all reality is ... theater!"
               -- ditto

"It's a dude, man -- it's cool!"
"'It's a dude, man, it's cool'?"
"We're from California -- we can say anything we want."
               -- Gunner Bob and Richard Bob

"This album is available world-wide, including in the lobby."
               -- Richard Bob

"We don't speak the stuff -- tastes good, though."
               -- Gunner Bob, about French

"All these songs are done without a safety net."
               -- Richard Bob
               all above from the Bobs concert, of course.

"Ernie, those sheep are tap-dancing!"
               -- a nostaligc moment of PBS

" . . . [Palm Beach, where] price tags mean nothing and the rich are
always in heat, where pampered animals are openly worshipped in church
and naked millionaires gnaw brassieres off the chests of their own
daughters in public."
               -- who else but Hunter S. Thompson?  (As quoted in
                  _The_American_Spectator_, April 1988, p. 43)

"Far from having been profligate, the nation wasted its substance in
riotous saving."
               -- William T. Forster on the cause of the Depression,
                  as quoted in Schlesinger, _The_Age_of_Roosevelt_,
                  vol. 1, ch. 23

"My God," said one GOP congressman, "if it goes to the President, we've
lost two hundred years of American political history and we're Instant
Togo."
               -- _Newsweek_, April 30, 1973, p. 17

"Amongst others, I was then encountered on my passage from Westminster
to Whitehall, by a big tall gentleman, who thrusting me rudely from the
wall, and looking over his shoulder on me in a scornful manner, said
these words: _Geography_is_better_than_Divinity_, and so passed along."
               -- Peter Heylyn, _Cosmographia_, preface; as quoted in
                  Woolridge & East, _The_Spirit_and_Purpose_of_Geo-
                  graphy_, facing title page.

"You'll need this while you're with Mrs. Mitchell."
               -- Fred LaRue to Alfred C. Baldwin, presenting him with
'                 a snub-nosed .38 (as quoted in Lukas, _Nightmare_,
                  ch. 7 (p. 193))

"Many students are experiencing death for the first time."
               -- Letter to the editor, _Newsweek_On_Campus_,
                  March 1988

"The future isn't what it used to be for Bob Dole and Pat Robertson."
               -- Dan Rather on his Super Tuesday Special

"Pentacost is on the same day as a Jewish holiday.  It's a major
holiday, but Jews today don't know that because it comes after the end
of the school year."
               --  AJ

"Just picture Paul walking around in red tights with a big 'J' on his
chest."
               -- who else? (re: SuperJew)

"Data, don't babble."
      -- Picard, on ST:TNG

"I'm paranoid.  Trust me."
               Elliott the droog

"Fun-loving A.I.D.'s are a mixed blessing."
       -- Alex

"S&M!  Well, not necessarily."
               -- Vicki Maturo

"...And we know that Venus is as hot as hell -- literally -- and has no
oceans."
               -- Isaac Asimov, giving advice to young sf writers.

"So Green has the style-the smile, the handshake, the intonation.  He
could be a politician, if only he lacked the substance."
              --The Village Voice, 3/15/88, p. 19, on the new
                Chancellor of New York public schools.

"All I know is, if I was God at that moment, I would've done something
different."
               -- she made me promise not to use her name.

"The only safe way to get a sensation is to bite into a York Peppermint
Patty."
               -- a comedian, about AIDS

"No one knows what happened to the original tablets -- maybe Josephus
took them to Egypt.  Maybe he buried them in a cave.  Maybe
Nebuccanezzar stole them.  Maybe Steven Speilberg has them."
               -- AJ, as usual

". . . and _espionage_ comes from somewhat later French from Old
Italian (from some loose-lipped or heavy-bladdered eyeballer of
Germanic persuasion.)"
               -- The Humezim, _A_B_C_Et_Cetera_.  [Anybody who can
                  figure this one out will get a free bagel with
                  liquid oxygen.]

"sabotage (Fr. _sabot_, a wooden shoe, + -age) damage done to machinery
by wooden shoes."
               -- Webster's Something-or-other edition Dictionary

"And then he goes throught lots of trials and tribulations -- after
all, this is the Bible."
               -- AJ

"Sarah, like most good women in the Bible, can't get pregnant."
               -- AJ

"You know you never defeated us on the battlefield," said the American
colonel.
The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this for a moment.  "That may be
so," he replied, "but it is also irrelevant."

             --Conversation in Hanoi, April 1975, between chiefs of the
American and North Vietnamese negotiating teams.  From _On Strategy:
The Vietnam War in Context_, by the American Colonel, Harry Summers,
Col. of Infantry, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College.

And now, a quote from the weekend's debate:
"There's that little philosopher wanna-be who wants to be in the Army
and can't."
            --a Princeton debater

". . . And there's more where THAT came from!"
               -- Jim Deane's suggested motto for Starfleet Security
                  (sounds like the name of a bank, no?)
"Wonderful!"
      -me, about that last quote and comment.

"Remember, hypothetical persons never take the personal 'a'."

            --Profesora Cruz

"Before the sun was what it is now, it was...something else."

             --John Gaustad

"My fingers aren't going the right way, but I think it's octahedral."

             --Hannah Elsing on Chemistry.

"If you wait until there are grammers, all this stuff becomes much
easier to write down."

             --Professor Klingsburg

"So spacetime is just a filing cabinet.  It's kind of boring."
                               -John Boccio

"If the spirit is willing, I can make a revolution with a bunch of
three-legged burros."
                               - Ruby Archuleta

"Never try to stare down a Medusa."
                               - Anon.

"We don't believe in tape recorders."
 '
             --ZZ Top

"Once you define the fourier series, it repeats itself. Period."
               --Professor Dunn (unintentionally)

"Trust in haste, regret at leisure."
"Who do you trust?"
"Mind that parcel; eagle eyes could save a life."
"Suspicion breeds confidence."
"Don't suspect a friend -- report him!"
      --signs from _Brazil_

"It's amazing that it keeps going at night."
                -- Jenny, about the Atlantic Ocean

"Student personal accounts are available to students for any personal
work they wish to do. These accounts are NOT to be used for academic
work of any kind."
               -- HELP ACCOUNTS, on your favorite computer

"To fit all the universes on the page, the asymptotically flat regions
have been compressed..."
               -- Gravitation and Spacetime, p. 336

"What do Jimmy Swaggart and Jimmy Bakker have in common?  They're both
Children of a Looser God."     --a nurse at the Blood Drive

"He's writing a book about the good that priests do.  It's called
_Ministers Do More Than Lay People_."          --Saturday Night Live

"Let's start with a sphere."
               -- Topology film, showing a picture of a tetrahedron

"Okay, now let's change all those numbers to letters so we can add them
up."
               -- Prof. Grinstead, in the Real Analysis seminar,
                  March 31 '88

"Existence is so slippery sometimes"
           --E. Weiss

"You can talk back.  This is real -- this is live."
               -- Paul Phillips

"It's a love song we wrote to each other.  Early in our relationship,
fortunately."
               -- Paul again

"I mean, we could've left, too, but we stuck around."
               -- Ron this time, after a two-hour sound check

"What is it?"
"Sexual Minorities Pride Week."
"Oh, how ambiguous."
               -- Paul

"He's since left his wife and is living in West Hollywood.  Music is
so powerful."
               -- Ron

"I've found that planes are a great place for conciousness raising.
You've got a captive audience -- I mean, where can they go?"
               -- Ron

"For once unplug those little creative minds and make like sheep like
the rest of us."
               -- Paul, trying to lead a sing-along

"I would like to suggest that you vote for the minority person of your
choice."
               -- Paul, making a subtle political point

"If I were a lesbian, I'd have a crush on her.  Actually, I think I do
anyway."
               -- Ron, about Lucie Blue Tremblay

"It's a scream-along."
               -- Paul (introducing "Emotional Roller Coaster")

"It's for all of you in manic-depressive relationships.  Actually, it
could make you swear off relationships in general."
               -- Ron, about the same

"You never seem to amaze me."
               -- Ron, to Paul

All from the Romanovsky & Phillips concert Wed.  Don't you all wish
you'd gone?

"No stars, no work."
               --James Deane, in a variation of "No workee, no eatee."
("No workee, no E.T."?)

"He loves himself, and has no rival."
              -- written in the yearbook blurb about a member of the graduating
                 class of Pharmacy College in 1931.

"And Saul said, What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in the
ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?"
               -- I Samuel 15:14