Sunday, October 14, 2007

Rules One and Two

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the argument that life is serious, though it is often hard and even terrible. Since everything ends badly for us, in the inescapable catastrophe of death, it seems obvious that the first rule of life is to have a good time, and that the second rule of life is to hurt as few people as possible in the course of doing so. There is no third rule."
--Brendan Gill

3 comments:

  1. Or they could be called Rules to live by. Count me in--and thanks for posting this. It made my Monday.

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  2. Years ago, after Brendan Gill had passed away, I tore this paragraph out of the New Yorker, and it has hung on my bulletin board above my desk for many years. Last night at dinner the boys and I were chatting about Al Gore, global warning, and general gloom and doom. I though this was a fitting comment to add to the end of our conversation.

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