Aphorisms from the Sliver Poppy

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXI, Issue XVII, 24 October 1903, Page 56

Aphorisms from the Sliver Poppy

(By Arthur Stringer.) “Some people come out of a hook like a spaniel eut of water, scattering a shower of ideas over you.” “Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in, but hard to swallow.” “To make your heart, you must first break your heart.” "Life is only a vaudeville, with hunger and love for •topliners.”. “Humour is the tail to the kite of affection.” “Womankind is the upholstery of life, wearing the soonest where it is the softest.” “Every Klondike of achievement has its Chilkoot of adversity.” “To wear love’s brand you must stand love’s burn.” “After all, Rabelais’ religion and women are one and the same thing—a great perhaps.” “It is the ebb tide of love that shows the mud flats of the soul.” “This dog of a life —mongrel of joy and misery that it is.”

“A song in the heart is worth two in the book.” "Life without love, my child, is the axle of existence without grease.” "We are—only what we have been.” “ ‘My ideal,’ she answered, “is a man who would stand up against the whole, wide world—for a woman’s sake.’ ” “Our American husbands, you know, usually show more velvet than elaws.” “A great man? Impossible! He hasn’t a dozen enemies.” “A woman’s last love is always a rechauffe of her first.” “Art is the china of sentiment packed in the sawdust of sense.” “With a snub nosed Helen of Troy, my child, there would never have been a Trojan war.” “A cynic, is he? Then take all he says with an ounce of civet and a grain of salt.” “Some men are born businesslike, my dear, the same as they’re born bow-leg-ged ! ” “Women’s hearts never break nowadays but, oh, how often they wither!” “Our Manhattans of the mind always have their Boweries of the blood!” “The defeated heart,” sighed the woman in black, “has the habit of burying its own dead!” “These souls of ours are like railway bridges—they can be reconstructed even when the trains of trial and temptation are creeping over them!” i “It is the under crust of motive thai is the test of the moral pie!” “A husband’s jealousies, my dear, are the mushrooms on the beefsteak of mat- ’ rimony! ” “We Americans have never learned io irrigate the alkali out of our humour!” “In our age genius has to be picked green, like watermelons, so as not to spoil on the market!” “Good men,” she had onee said, “are like good roads—made to walk over!” “These liliputian temptations—they remind us that the threads which kept Gulliver down were very small threads, but there were so many of them!” It is a sorrowful day when the eyes of youth can gaze openly into the eyes of defeat!” “Upward through illusion and onward through error-—'that is life!” “He fretted at idleness, oppressed by tb.e gaieties of life when they chanced

to fall before the hour of the dinner gong and the Tuxedo coat!” “With the muse there must be no divided love!” “What is more desolate than moral Great Divide?” “We prefer our pessimists young and tender, like asparagus. Ten years older and what a bore even Hamlet might have been!” “To a good many Americans a life of hurry is the only life of ease.” “These bookish votnen — they are trimmed back and stunted for the sake of the fruit!” ; “Great men are rugged and lonely, like lighthouses, and, like lighthouses, they are very useful!” “Her flashing wit was a spade bayonet with which w hen not piercing her enemy she entrenched herself!” “Women accept the confusion of stalwart manhood as the profoundeet tribute to their own power!”