Week 3
“My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is.”—Ellen DeGeneres
I love humorous quotes and this one by Ellen DeGeneres is a favorite. The secret to humor is surprise, the twist at the end that you didn't see coming. You read the beginning of the joke and your mind fills in the expected rest: the woman lost weight, she's healthier, she bench presses her grandchildren. The last half of the joke makes a U-turn and completely changes the story. Ellen is a master at this technique. This quote is listed as her "most liked" quote on Goodreads.
Did you know they have quotations on Goodreads? I had no idea. It's a terrific resource. You can search by keyword tags and see new quotes. If you have an account, you can see those quotations saved by your friends and create your own list. You can see ones by book authors that you have read. I tend to go looking for quotations on certain subjects, so it was an unexpected joy to read a handpicked list of quotes that had some connection to me personally.
Since readers are typing in their own quotations, you will find some variations. (In fact, this quote I chose from Ellen DeGeneres is listed twice with slight changes in the text such as "hell" instead of "heck" and the ages in numerals instead of spelled out.) When I worked as a librarian, verifying quotes was one of the most aggravating challenging types of questions. From that perspective the Goodreads database might not be the most authoritative source, but it certainly is a fun one!
Photo source: Photo of Northern Territory by Bidgee at Wikimedia, 2007. See the original version.