Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey’s line is a decoy, the kind he loved: polite, dry, and wired to explode in the reader’s hands. “To take my work seriously” sounds like a modest disclaimer, but the phrase “height of folly” sharpens it into a reprimand. He isn’t begging to be dismissed; he’s mocking the cultural reflex that treats solemnity as the price of admission to “serious” art.

Gorey’s books traffic in impeccable surfaces - Edwardian manners, crosshatched interiors, prim little captions - while quietly staging death, disappearance, and cosmic indifference. The humor isn’t a safety valve; it’s the delivery system. By refusing seriousness, Gorey refuses the critic’s usual tools: biography as key, moral as takeaway, trauma as explanation. It’s a preemptive strike against interpretation that over-domesticates the weirdness, reducing his menace to metaphor or his absurdity to allegory.

There’s also a queer, camp savvy here: play as a form of control. Gorey cultivated a persona of amused remove, and this sentence keeps the audience off-balance. If you insist on solemn meaning, you become the butt of the joke. If you accept the “folly,” you earn entry into his preferred mode: a world where dread wears lace cuffs and catastrophe arrives with impeccable punctuation.

The subtext is liberating and cruel: stop asking art to behave. The context - mid-century respectability, literary gatekeeping, the rise of academic seriousness - makes the quip feel like a manifesto smuggled in as a shrug. Gorey isn’t denying depth; he’s insisting that depth can show up in costume.