An umbrella is of no avail against a Scotch mist.

 

An umbrella is of no avail against a Scotch mist.
--
On a Certain Condesceneion in Foreigners.

 

James Russell Lowell

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Actually I thought it was quite ironic that the product that I use to protect my couch from spilling my Scotch on it was called Scotch-guard. Sometimes, things just work out like that. "Do you have anything to protect from spilling Scotch on something?" (turns around) "Hmm, let me see....here, Scotch-guard" (Amazed!) Perfect, do you have any Vodka-guard? How about Sperm-guard? It's a busy couch.

 

Ron White

 

Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I’d take Scotch. It’s the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.

 

William Faulkner

 

Fred taught me a step because I said I can't let this experience be over without my learning something. He taught me the most wonderful Fred Astaire-like step, with an umbrella. It was a complete throwaway; it was almost invisible. It was in the way he walked. As he moved along, he bounced the umbrella on the floor to the beat and then he grabbed it. It was effortless and invisible. As a matter of fact, a few years later I was photographing Gene Kelly and told him that Fred Astaire had taught me this trick with an umbrella. And Kelly said, "Oh I'll teach you one," and he did, and the two tricks with the umbrella in some way define the difference between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and, in my view, demonstrate who is the greater of the two artists. With Gene Kelly, he threw the umbrella way up into the air, and then he moved to catch it, very slowly, grabbing it behind his back. It was a big, grandstand play, about nothing.

 

Fred Astaire

 

Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreamed at all.

 

Hans Christian Andersen

 

We were equally tired, in mid-century, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure.

 

John Fowles