First Annual Numéro Cinq Aphorism Contest Official Judge’s Long List

Here is the first cut, the best, to my mind, of the entries. Some had to be eliminated, inevitably, despite all the wit and enthusiasm they exhibited. Nonetheless, I expect death threats. That’s why the judge’s name has been withheld.

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The most curious cat has no interest in the price of dog food.
Steven Axelrod
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Essays are fictions in which writers efface themselves, pretending they are not there, perhaps even believing it. Ideas are an essay’s themes, used to produce the illusion of substance; facts are the details the story teller selects to give the impression of reality. Its plot is the progression of its argument, which, as in fiction, moves to the consummation of some desire, or the destruction of another.
Gary Garvin
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Beware the aphorism: a leading cause of spontaneous aneurysm.
Jacob Glover
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Aph or isms – take your pick.
Julie Larios
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A loss of face requires more than plastic surgery to fix.
Natalia Sarkissian
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Sometimes silence is the best thing I’ve heard all day.
Cheryl Wilder
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When you wish upon a star, nothing happens — at least, so far.
Steven Axelrod
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Zoloft does more than Nietzsche could
to make you feel neither bad nor good.
William Hathaway
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You can tell a lot about a marriage by the hair growing in the husband’s ears.
C.M. Mayo
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In the egg of procrastination, there is the yolk of fun.
C.M. Mayo
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Everyone in journalism has written thirty pages of a novel. Except for the ones who have only written fifteen.
Steven Hart
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Drowning men don’t complain about smog.
Steven Axelrod
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People who live in glass houses understand the greenhouse effect.
Steven Axelrod
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Humility is sanity. Alternately, sanity is humiliating.
Gary Garvin & Julie Larios combined
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A mapped world is always small.
Nina Alvarez
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Writing, like sex, seems to make sense when you’re drunk, but it always gets complicated the next day if it’s any good.
Gwen Mullins
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Fuck the ineffable.
Gwen Mullins