Mae West: A New Book

MAE WEST shows up on the best sheets. In this case, the freshly printed sheets lie between the covers of a new book: Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists by James Geary [Bloomsbury, 437 pages].
• • Discussing this new release in the Washington Post, journalism Michael Dirda praised this new compendium of wise words in "short, sharp shocks."
• • According to Michael Dirda, The aphorism is the prose equivalent of a memorable line of poetry, a bit of worldly wisdom or self-understanding reduced to a short, sharp shock: "It is a rule of God's Providence that we should succeed by failure" (John Henry Newman). In The World in a Phrase, his 2005 history of the form, James Geary laid down his "Five Laws of the Aphorism: It Must Be Brief, It Must Be Personal, It Must Be Definitive, It Must Be Philosophical, and It Must Have A Twist."
• • Need some examples? Here are three, honestly chosen at random, from Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists:
• • "Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before." (Mae West)
• • "To live is to lose ground." (E.M. Cioran)
• • "The only things one never regrets are one's mistakes." (Oscar Wilde)
• • Anyone who enjoys such quotations with an attitude probably owns — — or should acquire — — The Viking Book of Aphorisms, compiled by W.H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger, and The Oxford Book of Aphorisms, edited by John Gross. They remain invaluable and irreplaceable collections. But their emphasis is on the great maxims of the past, and they are organized by theme — — that is, chapters proffer a hodge-podge of epigrammatic observations, by various authors, about love, ambition, or human suffering (to name three popular subjects). . . .
— — excerpt — —
• • Source: Book review from The Washington Post
• • Critic: Michael Dirda
• • Published on: 21 October 2007 [page BW10]
• • In this unedited extract from Dirda's recent column, it is more than pleasing to see that a quote by Mae West rises to the top.
• • The quote is in a film scene from "Klondike Annie" [1935-36].
• • If you're going to quote, quote from the best.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West.