Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Ring Lardner, fully Ringgold "Ring" Wilmer Lardner

American Sports Columnist and Short Story Writer

"The family you come from isn’t as important as the family you’re going to have."

"A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor."

"They gave each other a smile with a future in it."

"Although he is a very poor fielder, he is a very poor hitter."

"Are you lost, Daddy? I asked tenderly. Shut up, he explained."

"An optimist is a girl who mistakes a bulge for a curve."

"He looked at me as if I were a side dish he hadn't ordered."

"How can you write if you can't cry?"

"I never seen a good one that didn?t."

"No one, ever, wrote anything as well even after one drink as he would have done with out it."

"Shut up,' he explained."

"I've known what it is to be hungry, but I always went right to a restaurant."

"Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty"

"Some like them hot, some like them cold. Some like them when they're not to darn old. Some like them fat, some like them lean. Some like them only at sweet sixteen. Some like them dark, some like them light. Some like them in the park, late at night. Some like them fickle, some like them true, but the time I like them is when they're like you."

"The only real happiness a ballplayer has is when he is playing a ball game and accomplishes something he didn't think he could do."

"The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong - but that's the way to bet."

"They?s no use kiddin? ourself anymore, said Tommy Haley. He might get down to thirty-seven in a pinch, but if he done below that a mouse could stop him. He?s a welter; that?s what he is and he knows it as well as I do. He?s growed like a weed in the last six mont?s. I told him, I says, If you don?t quit growin? they won?t be nobody for you to box, only Willard and them. He says, Well, I wouldn?t run away from Willard if I weighed twenty pounds more."