“Why' is a crooked letter and can't be made straight.”
Source: The Gunslinger
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Stephen King 733
American author 1947Related quotes
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), Proposition 6.
Variant translations: Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built.
From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
Never a straight thing was made from the crooked timber of man.
Source: Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose
“Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?”
The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), Apology
Context: Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.
“Straight down the Crooked Lane,
And all round the Square.”
A Plain Direction http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15652/15652-h/15652-h.htm#poem_135, st. 1.
1820s
Joan of Arc (Harmondsworth, Penguin, [1981] 1983) p. 263.
“Crooked cards and straight whiskey,
Slow horses and fast women.”
“God draweth straight lines but we call them crooked.”
The Common School Journal, Vol. V, No. 18 (15 September 1843)
“For experience teacheth me that straight trees have crooked roots.”
P. 311 http://books.google.com/books?id=3xRbAAAAMAAJ&q="for+experience+teacheth+me+that+straight+trees+have+crooked+roots"&pg=PA311#v=onepage
Euphues and his England
This is the voice of our conscience, telling us of the righteousness of God. And since conscience is the perfect interpreter of life, what it tells us is no question, no riddle, no problem, but a fact — the deepest, innermost, surest fact of life: God is righteous. Our only question is what attitude toward the fact we ought to take.
We shall hardly approach the fact with our critical reason. The reason sees the small and the larger but not the large. It sees the preliminary, but not the final, the derived but not the original, the complex but not the simple. It sees what is human but not what is divine.
We shall hardly be taught this fact by men.
"The Righteousness of God" (1916) in The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928) as translated by Douglas Horton; this passage begins with a quote of Isaiah 40:3-5; often quoted alone has been the phrase following it: "Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life."