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Duck-bill, n. Your account at your restaurant during the canvas-back season.
Ambrose Bierce
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Ambrose Bierce
Born: 1842
Born: June 24
Aphorist
Journalist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Meigs County
Ohio
Dod Grile
William Herman
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce
Ambrose Bierce
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Restaurant
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Canvas
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More quotes by Ambrose Bierce
Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.
Ambrose Bierce
DECALOGUE, n. A series of commandments, ten in number - just enough to permit an intelligent selection for observance, but not enough to embarrass the choice.
Ambrose Bierce
Magic: (n) The art of converting superstition into coin.
Ambrose Bierce
REPARTEE, n. Prudent insult in retort. Practiced by gentlemen with a constitutional aversion to violence, but a strong disposition to offend. In a war of words, the tactics of the North American Indian.
Ambrose Bierce
RESPITE, n. A suspension of hostilities against a sentenced assassin, to enable the Executive to determine whether the murder may not have been done by the prosecuting attorney. Any break in the continuity of a disagreeable expectation.
Ambrose Bierce
Christians and camels receive their burdens kneeling.
Ambrose Bierce
Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference
Ambrose Bierce
PENITENT, adj. Undergoing or awaiting punishment.
Ambrose Bierce
An immaterial but visible being that inhabited the air when the air was an element and before it was fatally polluted with factory smoke, sewer gas and similar products of civilization.
Ambrose Bierce
Homicide, /n./ The slaying of one human by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he died by one kind or another - the classification is for the advantage of the lawyers.
Ambrose Bierce
STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue.
Ambrose Bierce
Brain, v. [as in to brain]: To rebuke bluntly, but not pointedly to dispel a source of error in an opponent.
Ambrose Bierce
Crowned with leaves of the laurel. In England the Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign's court, acting as dancing skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal funeral.
Ambrose Bierce
Curiosity, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.
Ambrose Bierce
IMMORAL, adj. Inexpedient. Whatever in the long run and with regard to the greater number of instances men find to be generally inexpedient comes to be considered wrong, wicked, immoral.
Ambrose Bierce
OBLIVION, n. The state or condition in which the wicked cease from struggling and the dreary are at rest. Fame's eternal dumping ground.
Ambrose Bierce
INDIFFERENT, adj. Imperfectly sensible to distinctions among things.
Ambrose Bierce
PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.
Ambrose Bierce
A bird in the hand is worth what it will bring.
Ambrose Bierce
Slang is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage carts on their way to the dumps.
Ambrose Bierce
