John Drybred is a retired journalist who worked for his hometown daily newspaper in Lancaster, PA. He has published aphorisms, quips, and assorted one-liners in the Wall Street Journal, Saturday Evening Post, New York Times News Service, National Enquirer, Catholic Digest, Quote Magazine, (Bob) Orben’s Current Comedy and, he adds, “several other now-defunct humor newsletters once subscribed to by comedians, disc jockeys, political and corporate speech writers. Also wrote for comedians performing at local comedy clubs serving locals and tourists to the surrounding Amish country [in Pennsylvania] and wrote for nationally recognized cartoonists.” Mr Drybred has also published in Reader’s Digest, where, in fact, his affection for the form began—on the “Quotable Quotes” page. “Through an intense interest, and a lot of trial and error (still proceeding),” he says, “I was able to publish a few nuggets from among untold tons of silt, learning along the way that widespread subjectivity among readers results in one person’s silt being another person’s nugget.” Panning through Mr. Drybred’s sayings turns up plenty of nuggets, especially of the chiasmus type, in which a reversal of terms reveals an unexpected meaning (as in Mae West’s “It ain’t the men in your life that matter, it’s the life in your men”). Mr. Drybred accomplishes this linguistic and logical pirouette with aplomb, always landing on his feet even as he turns the expected meaning on its head.

You don’t know if you’re coming or going till you decide whether or not you’ll go back for what you forgot.

We’re in an information economy in which there isn’t much of an economy and about which we don’t have enough information.

Someone’s beauty is often the only thing you’ll take lying down.

The time to take a stand is when you’re walking on eggs.

Answers are elusive to the exact degree and at the identical speed as they are pursued by questions.

The cell phone is the Swiss Army Knife of the Digital Age.

Who tells you it’s a matter of opinion usually thinks there’s something the matter with yours.

They’re trying to put the middle class to bed with a shovel.

To make good money today, you need to be a CEO or a counterfeiter.

The reason for it all is to enable us to wonder if there’s a reason for it all.

You usually have to do over what you were doing when you overdid.

The best thing you can do is believe you can do.

Old habits die hard, like the habit of trying hard not to die.

You get to where the only new ground you’ll break will be in a cemetery.

There isn’t anyplace in it with an economy worth thinking the world of.

How much you drink can determine whether trouble is brewing or brewing is trouble.

What you need most in the free world is money.

If a tree that money does grow on falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does the money talk?

 

If you can’t do one other thing, do two.

You’re never too old to wish you were young.

It’s easier to keep a straight face after Botox paralyzes it.

Try not to fall in the drink. Or after it.

Creative accounting is putting your eggs in whichever basket fits your need to have them counted as egg salad, eggs benedict, or eggnog.

Hip waders are needed for listening to any candidate for or holder of public office.

As they age, humans can lose density in every bone in their body except the crazy bone.
Discoverers of the God particle have the devil to pay.