Literary Birthday – 19 August – Ogden Nash

Ogden Nash was born on 19 August 1902 and died on 19 May 1971.

Ogden Nash Quotes

1. Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore, And that’s what parents were created for.
2. Middle age is when you’ve met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
3. Progress is a fine thing, but it’s gone on long enough.
4. To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you’re wrong, admit it; Whenever you’re right, shut up.
5. You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
6. Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave when they think that their children are naïve.
7. People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.
8. When grandparents enter the door, discipline flies out the window.
9. Middle age is when you’re sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you.
10. There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all.
11. I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.
12. Too clever is dumb.

Ogden Nash was an American poet best known for his witty and playful light verse. He wrote more than 500 poems during a career that spanned four decades. He used clever wordplay, unexpected rhymes, and comic observations to turn everyday subjects into memorable poems. Nash published his first collection, Hard Lines, in 1931. He went on to publish 20 volumes of poetry, including The Bad Parents’ Garden of Verse (1936), I’m a Stranger Here Myself (1938), and Everyone but Thee and Me (1962). His poetry often played with language and traditional rhyme schemes. He was known for deliberately stretching or inventing rhymes and using surprising turns of phrase, giving his poems a distinctive comic style. His daughter, Linell Nash Smith, later compiled a collection of his work, The Best of Ogden Nash.

Source for Image: ABC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: The Complete Author Birthday Calendar