Just how and why this cluster found its way here is too long a story. They surely belong with favorite quotations.
One day in 1755 the celebrated actor Charles Macklin boasted to Samuel Foote that he could repeat virtually any speech after a single hearing. Thus tempted, Foote challenged Macklin to repeat the following passage:
So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street pops its head into the shop. “What! no soap?” So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.
(http://www.anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=6870)
‘Son,’ the old guy says, ‘no matter how far you travel, or how smart you get, always remember this: someday, somewhere,’ he says, ‘a guy is going to come to you, and show you a nice brand-new set of cards on which the seal is never broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that a jack of spades will jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. But son,’ the old guy says, ‘do not bet him, for as sure as you do you are going to get an earful of cider.’
Damon Runyon (The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown)
(http://www.amsta.leeds.ac.uk/~pmt6jrp/personal/oldquotes.html)
After all, one can’t complain. I have my friends. Somebody spoke to me only yesterday. And was it last week or the week before that Rabbit bumped into me and said ‘Bother !’ The Social Round. Always something going on.
A.A.Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore speaking)