The Quote Garden ™

“I dig old books.” ™

Est. 1998







Find Your Way HOME Site Map Search About Contact Terms Privacy



Quotations about Phones

Related Quotes Teenagers Driving Manners Money Speaking

We shall one day navigate the air as the sea—rain will be made to pour on the desert, and it will be cultivated and blossom as the rose—bread shall yet be made of stones in the street—the man of a hundred years shall yet be in his prime—men will yet take a little instrument from their waistcoat pocket and communicate with a friend a hundred miles away without wires, as if they spoke face to face. ~James Gillingham (1838–1924), The Seat of the Soul Discovered or the World's Great Problem Solved, with Objections to the Same Answered, second edition, 1870





The bathtub was invented in 1850 and the telephone in 1875. In other words, if you had been living in 1850, you could have sat in the bathtub for 25 years without having to answer the phone. ~Bill DeWitt, 1972





The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink. ~Fran Lebowitz





Middle age: When you're sitting at home on Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you. ~Ogden Nash





Even when it is not used with malice aforethought or for the purpose of elevating the breeze in your vicinity it is an exhausting instrument. If you pass a friend in the street you can say, "How do you do?" and let it go at that without being expected to stop and thrash the matter out to the last symptom. But if you have an impulse to swap a fleeting greeting per telephone you can't say "How do you do?" and hang up. The telephone tradition demands that you lean with one elbow on the wall or both on the table and strain every nerve to be bright. Face to face with the other party you would merely be yourself and, however painful that might be, no offence would be taken. But there is something about the telephone for social purposes which causes you to behave in a manner which would brand you as "nuts" in normal circumstances. To add to the pain of social telephonetics, neither party to the ordeal is ever willing to ring off. Both keep on saying, "Yes—oh, yes," "True, true," "That is so," "Quite," while both vainly try to think up some remark that will close the song and dance without leaving a wound that the years will fail to heal. ~Kenneth Alfred Evelyn Alexander (c.1890–1953), "Telepholunacy: Word Without End," in The New Zealand Railways Magazine, 1940 April 1st





Here's to you!

Cheers to you,

Telephone!

Rancor

And

Spite

And a mighty

Sight

Of

Tender sighs

And

Business lies

Have come

And gone

Along your

Copper highway.

~Henry Stanley Haskins, "The Telephone," in Life, 1904





I'd rather sit down and write a brief note than call someone up. I hate telephones. ~Henry Miller, Q&A with Digby Diehl, 1972





Cell phone: a private convenience that has become a public nuisance. ~Richard E. Turner (1937–2011), The Grammar Curmudgeon, a.k.a. "The Mudge," "Cell Phone-itis and Other Technological Diseases," May 2004





T ELEPHONE , n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance. ~Ambrose Bierce





You—thing of

Rubber and

Steel

And

Revolving

Wheel and

Diaphragm,

You're only a

Sham.

You haven't a

Tongue

Or a

Lung,

And yet you

SPEAK!

You haven't

An ear, and

Yet you

HEAR!

~Henry Stanley Haskins, "The Telephone," in Life, 1904





If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting? ~Stephen Levine





Sometimes I long for a lazy camp

Five hundred miles from home,

Where the eagle flies in the clear blue sky

And the grizzly bear does roam,

A snow white peaklike giant stands

In the midst of the tall pine trees,

Away from the constant ring of the phone

For ever calling me...

~J.H. Stallings (b.1874), "Zanjero"





I got an answering machine for my phone. Now when I'm not home and somebody calls me up they hear a recording of a busy signal. ~Steven Wright, A Steven Wright Special, 1985, stevenwright.com





Cell phones are the latest invention in rudeness. ~Terri Guillemets, "Shopping for what?", 2005





Anytime I see someone blocking the aisle in the supermarket while talking on a phone, I want to ram that person with my shopping cart. ~Richard E. Turner (1937–2011), The Grammar Curmudgeon, a.k.a. "The Mudge," from "The Curmudgeon Sounds Off: Cell Phone-itis Revisited," July 2005





Everybody in society these days just walks around with their heads down, staring at their phones. Chiropractors must be making a fortune! ~Keith Wynn, @Darxist_Marxist





How come wrong numbers are never busy? ~Author Unknown





I'd play every day if I could. It's cheaper than a shrink and there are no telephones on my golf cart. ~Brent Musburger





Words from the past: "It's a clever idea, Mr. Bell, but don't wire us, we'll wire you." ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com





Confound a telephone, anyway. It is the very demon for conveying similarities of sound that are miracles of divergence from similarity of sense. ~Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889





It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone. ~Mark Twain, unverified, quoted in Caroline Thomas Harnsberger, Mark Twain at Your Fingertips, 1948, cited as "source undetermined at date of publication" [I've tracked this down to a claim that it's from a letter from Mark Twain to the editor of New York World, 1890 December 23rd, but I haven't been able yet to verify. —tg]





I don't answer the phone. I get the feeling whenever I do that there will be someone on the other end. ~Fred Couples





As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you. ~Fran Lebowitz, Social Studies



Page Information:

www.quotegarden.com/telephones.html

Last saved 2020 Aug 30 Sun 19:30 PDT

Find Your Way HOME Site Map Search About Contact Terms Privacy



