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Maybe I’m being illogical. I like word games, anagrams, palindromes, verbal puzzles: why are they okay and straight puns abhorrent? I think because in a straight pun, all the cleverness and wit has been used to poke a hole through the very idea of language, the possibility of communicating unambiguously with words—and that’s too dismaying to be funny to me.

— Spider Robinson Callahan's Lady (1989)

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More quotes by Spider Robinson

Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased — thus do we refute entropy.

If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.

God is an Iron (1977)

As Bob Dylan forgot to say, "To live outside the law, you must be lucky."

Callahan's Key (2000)

Terror leaves you when you despair; once you let yourself hope again it returns redoubled.

Callahan's Lady (1989)

As the poet tells us: once a king, always a king—but once a night is often sufficient.

Callahan's Lady (1989)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Spider Robinson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.