Quotes & Jokes by Paula Poundstone / page 2

73 quotes

Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas.

It is my wish to die of unique causes, perhaps in a high-speed tricycle crash, a bizarre stapling incident, or as a result of inadvertently sucking my brains out through my ear while trying to untwist the vacuum hose.

The pleasure of the mulch pile is incomprehensible. I wouldn't care if they just hauled the mulch to the landfill somewhere. Obviously, grass clippings are biodegradable, but when they're bunched together at the landfill, they become badly influenced by other garbage.

I did auditions at a club called the Comedy Connection. They wanted nothing to do with me. But one night they were doing a night of all women comics, and they invited me to do that.

When we save the rain forest, the polar bear, and Al Gore, we should party so hard that Canada calls the cops on us for noise.

I've decided that perhaps I'm bulimic and just keep forgetting to purge.

My Mom said she learned how to swim when someone took her out in the lake and threw her off the boat. I said, 'Mom, they weren't trying to teach you how to swim.'

I talk to a lot of librarians, and there's always a steady drumbeat of how libraries are places of community. But a lot of them have also recently - and just in the nick of time - refurbished, because during this economic downturn, people have a tendency to borrow instead of buy.

I was born in Alabama, but I only lived there for a month before I'd done everything there was to do.

I made mistakes and I broke the law and I'm more than willing to pay a price for that. But there's a price beyond that that my children have paid, and that's not what was supposed to happen.

Speaking of happy successes, after years of struggling to lose those few extra pounds every mother puts on during adoption, particularly when the doctor orders bed rest, in 2004 I sent my assistant to the Gap in dark glasses with a fake ID to purchase my first pair of "Easy Fit" jeans.

I was court-ordered to Alcoholics Anonymous on television. Pretty much blows the hell out of the second A, wouldn't you say?

It's funny that we think of libraries as quiet demure places where we are shushed by dusty, bun-balancing, bespectacled women. The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy and community. Librarians have stood up to the Patriot Act, sat down with noisy toddlers and reached out to illiterate adults. Libraries can never be shushed.

When every high school graduate can spell the word, 'inauguration,' let's put lampshades on our heads and listen to his speeches until Obama's voice gives out.

It is the best part of the night. The classic interactive lines are 'Where are you from? What do you do for a living?' I almost always get something interesting.