Michael Gurnow Quotes

“Few things in this world evoke scrotum-shriveling fear in a man like a group of frowning women, enraged to the point of atypical silence, ambling toward him with an obvious agenda.”
― Michael Gurnow, Nature's Housekeeper

“The NSA is correct, 1984 is now.”
― Michael Gurnow, The Edward Snowden Affair: Exposing the Politics and Media Behind the NSA Scandal

“I had married an environmentalist and didn’t know it.
I knew without having to look that there was no tree hugging indemnity clause even in the fine print of our marriage certificate. But we’d been manacled together in the Catholic Church. I wondered if I could get some leverage with the religious institution if I pinned my wife with the label of nature-worshipping Wiccan or possibly even Druid.”
― Michael Gurnow, Nature's Housekeeper

“At least Ozymandias had a statue erected in his name. If I were to have died at that moment, the only thing I had managed to erect in my honor was a shrine to China’s manufacturing capabilities.”
― Michael Gurnow, Nature's Housekeeper

“If owning frivolous articles of excess were indeed the trappings of malevolence, my home was ready to play host to the Axis powers.”
― Michael Gurnow, Nature's Housekeeper

“I'd somehow managed to get an executive stuck in a tree. Instead of a saucer of milk and 'Here kitty, kitty, kitty,' someone might want to bring a hedge fund and a recording of George Bush promising 'No new taxes.”
― Michael Gurnow, Nature's Housekeeper

“As soon as the first piece of foliage came within blade’s reach, my student started frantically swinging the machete like he was defending his virtue from a trove of drunken, handsy woodland elves. 'I feel like I’m in the movie Predator,' he said as he decapitated a flower.”
― Michael Gurnow, Nature's Housekeeper

“My wife simply quoted, 'For better or worse.' It was only then that I realized the phrase was not multiple-choice.”
― Michael Gurnow, Nature's Housekeeper

“I had not been prepared for my employer’s approach to vehicular navigation, which was a simple case of being unable to tell the difference between a very large, multi-windowed van that could accommodate a mobile disco and a Formula One racer.”
― Michael Gurnow, Nature's Housekeeper

“April is the cruelest month.' So begins T.S. Eliot’s 1922 masterpiece, a 434-line poem titled 'The Waste Land.' Until my employment as a trail maintenance worker, this had simply been a line on a page, albeit a line fraught with metaphorical import and potential. Now I saw it for what it was—a big fat lie—because Eliot grew up in St. Louis and no one forgets what a Missouri summer is like. If the Nobel laureate had been truthful with himself, the opening verse would start out, 'June’s a bitch.”
― Michael Gurnow, Nature's Housekeeper

“In the course of all of the compass-spinning twists, roller coaster hills, and sphincter-contracting turns, I hadn’t noticed that we had stopped at the top of a very large ridge. The beginning of the trail was not pleasant, inviting, or even remotely civil; it was recreational molestation at its best.”
― Michael Gurnow, Nature's Housekeeper

“My wife also contributed to my poison ivy education. She taught me women have an aversion to 'red, bumpy men' and are not the least bit aroused by any part of the male anatomy which happens to be infected. However, this was not a problem. My infestation was so severe, the act of scratching produced orgasmic waves of delight that made me consider scheduling weekly au naturel pilgrimages through lush, rolling fields of the devil vine.”
― Michael Gurnow, Nature's Housekeeper

“Bodybuilding is about accountability: Unlike so many things in the 21-century which can be argued around—I got fired because of X, she dumped me because of Y, I would have done this if it weren’t for Z—your body is an undeniable testament to your success or failure in the sport.”
― Michael Gurnow

“The blame for the overturning of Roe v Wade does not fall upon the overzealous, vindictive evangelical—either in a pew or judge’s robe—anymore than it does the bruised-knee legislator and his Plus-1, the campaign-financing lobbyist: All are boorish cultural phenomena, buoyed by society’s currents, political inertia determining their every direction. Instead, history will shake its head in disappointment at those who stood idly by and did nothing.”
― Michael Gurnow

“It follows if sexual naiveté and inexperience is virtuous, being apt at—or even having more than the most rudimentary knowledge of—sex is indicative of being a bad Christian. In this respect, ignorance and inability are honorable traits as opposed to easily remedied shortcomings but, then again, Christianity’s foundation rests on the precept that knowledge is the first, i.e., Original, and foremost wrong, i.e., Sin.”
― Michael Gurnow

“Politicians are granted a certain degree of partisan leniency by their electorate, meaning their constituents will accept legislation they do not entirely agree with if, and only if, they are convinced withdrawing support would strengthen the opposition.”
― Michael Gurnow

“If a person prevents someone from going to the grocery store to buy the ingredients for a pie, the net result is the same should a pastry chef drop dead midway through making a pie: There is no pie. Viewed under this light, there is no distinction between crustum prohibeo and crustum interruptus.”
― Michael Gurnow

“A child is the price of having sex in post-Griswold America.”
― Michael Gurnow

“Church leaders have little to offer their congregants in the way of practical sex advice. This is why 'preacher' and 'sex god' are never synonyms.”
― Michael Gurnow