For years I’ve been writing down gems of expression when I encountered
\nthem. There’s no obvious way to organize such a gallimaufry, since the
\nitems come from the full range of my interests and enthusiasms. To
\nqualify for admission, the item has to have tickled some particular fancy
\n(partic<\/i>ularly nasty weather…) and also has to have done the
\ntickling when I had a piece of paper and a pen handy, and felt like
\ncopying it out. And the item has to have survived the vicissitudes of
\nyears of hoarding and cackling over the wit on bits of paper and 3×5
\ncards. A solitary vice, usually, though from time to time I’ve regaled
\nothers with subsets of the corpus.<\/p>\n
\nPerhaps putting these into a (potentially) hypertext format will inspire
\nme to evolving an organization that’s useful. Some have lost their
\nsources and attributions, and laying them out may inspire me to find them
\nonce again. Many are tips of icebergs, caudal appendages (thereby hangs
\na tale…), Pandora’s Boxes. Some are rocks out from under which can
\nslither some VERY odd things.<\/p>\n
\nIn this iteration of the page I’ll add new material at the top (formerly it was Lovingly Ordered)<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are,\u201d said Twain, \u201ccertain sweet-smelling, sugarcoated lies current in the world which all politic men have apparently tacitly conspired together to support and perpetuate\u2026 We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express, and another one — the one we use — which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy.\u201d
Lewis Lapham, Winter 2014 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly<\/center><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nIn the troubled sea of the world\u2019s ambition, men rise by gravity, sink by levity… <\/p>\n
Lewis Lapham, Winter 2014 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly<\/center><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nThe music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There\u2019s also a negative side.
Hunter S. Thompson, as cited by Amanda Palmer<\/center><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nAt this point in my life, I either buy hay or experiences
Eleanor River, who raises sheep<\/center><\/p>\n
\nsays the protagonist’s tutor:<\/p>\n
I am a student of language, Mr. Healey. You write with fluency and conviction, you talk with authority and control. A complex idea here, an abstract proposition there, you juggle with them, play with them, seduce them. There is no movement from doubt to comprehension, no breaking down, no questioning, no excitement. You try to persuade others, never yourself. You recognise patterns, but you rearrange them where you should analyse them. In short, you do not think. You have never thought. You have never said to me anything that you believe to be true, only things which sound true and perhaps even ought to be true: things that, for the moment, are in character with whatever persona you have adopted for the afternoon. You cheat, you short-cut, you lie. It’s too wonderful. <\/p>\n
(Stephen Fry The Liar<\/b> pp35-36)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n…the important difference between curves that go whoosh
\nversus those that go doink doink doink…<\/p>\nMatthew Allen<\/a>, via Bruce Sterling<\/center><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n\nWe are all prisoners in the aspic of our time.<\/p>\n
Terry Pratchett, in an interview in The Guardian<\/i><\/a>, 12 December 2009<\/center><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nTo fashion stars out of dog dung, that is the Great Work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Alexandra David-Neel, quoting a Bhutanese naljorpa<\/i> [‘holy man’]<\/center> <\/p>\n
\nThe French philosopher Gaston Bachelard once observed that,
\ndespite our persistent belief to the contrary, our ignorance is rarely a
\nblank slate waiting to be written upon. Instead, it has the assured grip
\nof deeply felt, fully formed (if unarticulated) assumptions which –no
\nmatter how hard we try to shake them– prove dismayingly durable, even
\nregarding the simplest things.<\/p>\nJohn Thorne, Simple Cooking<\/b>
\n55:2 (Sept-Dec 1997)<\/center><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n…a pig through a python…<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nOf a librarian:<\/p>\n
Helen, marvelling at Joyce’s capacity for self-protection,
\noften wondered at her choice of career. It had something to do with
\norder, she decided; Joyce mistrusted books for their content, but liked
\nthe way they could be marshalled. The readers were simply an
\nunlooked-for hazard.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nPenelope Lively, Passing On<\/b>, 63<\/center><\/p>\n
\n\nGeorge Burney was asked at the age of 93 what sex was like. He replied
\n‘like playing billiards with a rope’.<\/p>\n\nFrom a Polish hotel menu: Salad a firm’s own make; limpid red beet soup
\nwith cheesy dumplings in the form of fingers; roast duck let loose; beef
\nrashers beaten in the country people’s fashion.<\/p>\n\nJonathan Swift: What is the conscience but a pair of breeches which while
\nit serves as a cloak both for lewdness and nastiness, may be readily let
\ndown in the service of either?<\/p>\n\nAdlai Stevenson: Flattery is alright if you don’t inhale.<\/p>\n
\n(from John Murray’s A Gentleman Publisher’s Commonplace Book<\/b>)<\/center><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n\nPatrick O’Brian on Pudding<\/b><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n[James A.H. Murray] liked to tell the story of a dream he
\nclaimed to have had of Dr. Johnson. Johnson was speaking of his
\nDictionary and Boswell, in an impish mood, asked “what would you say,
\nSir, if you were told that in a hundred years’ time a bigger and better
\ndictionary than yours would be compiled by a Whig?” Johnson grunted. “A
\nDissenter?” Johnson stirred in his chair. “A Scotsman.” Johnson began
\n“Sir…” but Boswell persisted “–and that the University of Oxford would
\npublish it.” “Sir,” thundered Johnson, “in order to be facetious it is
\nnot necessary to be indecent.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\nK.M. Elizabeth Murray
\nCaught in the Web of Words<\/b>, 188<\/center><\/p>\n
\nA French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of
\nthe French language that in it words occur in the order in which one
\nthinks them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nLudwig Wittgenstein Philosophische Untersuchungen<\/b> I, 108e<\/center><\/p>\n
\n<\/a> <\/p>\n
New Englanders respect
\nprivacy and practicality;
\nthey cultivate their social conscience in their own ways and are
\nsuspicious of experts;
tend to distrust public displays of emotion but
\nsavor the private indulgences of the senses;
honor wit over
\nrhetoric;
prefer understatement to pleasantries;
encourage
\ncharacter over opportunism;
are suspicious of dogma;
discuss
\ntheir consciences and vote their prejudices;
prefer the yarn to
\nthe sermon and the abrasive to the sonorous;
often mistake
\neducation for morality;
tend to confuse art with
\ndecoration;
pretend to understand the difference between luxury
\nand comfort;
feign to fathom the eloquence of silence;
find
\nsignificance in boundaries;
negotiate neighbors with reason and
\nrelatives with tolerance;
are eager to plunder a practical idea
\nbut remain standoffish near an emotion.<\/p>\n(from Donald
\nJunkins “New England as Region and Idea: looking over the tafferel of
\nour craft” Massachusetts Review<\/b> XXVI 2&3 pp
\n202-203)<\/center><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n\nI brought virtually no context to the record. I simply took it home, put
\nit on, and had my life changed.<\/p>\nI heard a sound I’d never heard before,
\nbut which, for some reason, I connected to. It was what Herman Melville
\ncalled the shock of recognition<\/a> –and for me that
\nshock has always been the realization that you have recognized something
\nnothing could have led you to expect to recognize. The question turns out
\nnot to be what-makes-the-music-great, but why you recognized its greatness
\nwhen, all things considered, you shouldn’t have understood it at all, or
\neven stumbled upon it in the first place…<\/p>\n(from Greil Marcus
\n“When you walk in the
\nroom”, in The Dustbin of History<\/b> [E169.04 .M365 1995], pg. 144)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\non pedestrian research:
“…the onanistic pursuit of academic simulacritude”<\/p>\n(Garth Boomer in Goswami and Stillman Reclaiming the Classroom<\/b>, 6)<\/p>\n
\nYou know where we come from here –whence we derive, I mean.
\nWe are clerks, medieval clerks leading this mental life that is natural
\nand healthy only to men serving a transcendental idea. But have we that
\nnow? And what, then, does all this thinking, poring, analysing, arguing
\nbecome –what but so much agony of pent-up and thwarted action? The
\nceaseless driving of natural physiological energy into narrow channels of
\nmentation and intellection –don’t you think it’s dangerous? Don’t you
\nthink we could be a dangerous, unbalanced caste once the purposes have
\ngone and the standards are vanishing? Don’t you think it?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n(Michael Innes, Death at the President’s Lodging<\/b>, 80)<\/center><\/p>\n
\nAnyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as
\nthe strawberries knows nothing about grapes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nPhilippus
\nParacelsus [1493-1541]<\/center><\/p>\n
\nOh, how he hated grant proposals. The hollow promises; the
\nvaunting celebration of past success; the self-advertising emphasis on <\/p>\nimportance<\/i> and significance<\/i>; the absence of understatement;
\nthe omnipresence of exaggeration; the servile allegiance to tradition,
\nformula, and established procedure; the utter predictability of every
\nother sentence; the implicit greed of the genre…<\/p><\/blockquote>\nDavid Carkeet Double Negative<\/b>, 31<\/center><\/p>\n
\nDo not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there
\nis no path and leave a trail.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnon., in Pickover
\n1994:255<\/center> <\/p>\n
\nSeveral from Smilla’s Sense of Snow<\/b>:<\/p>\n
Language is a hologram (146)<\/p>\n
\nEvery attempt to compare cultures with the intention of determining which
\nis the most developed will never be anything other than one more bullshit
\nprojection of Western culture’s hatred of its own shadows. (188)<\/p>\n\nI’ve always been fascinated by the melancholy shamelessness with which
\nDanes accept the enormous gap between their common sense and their
\nactions… (218)<\/p>\nPeople hold their lives together by means of the clock. If you make a
\nslight change, something interesting nearly always happens. (57)<\/p>\n\nOne of the signs that your life needs cleaning up is when your posessions
\ngradually, overwhelmingly consist of things that you borrowed a long
\ntime ago but now it’s too late to give them back because you’d rather
\nshave your head than confront the bogeyman who is the rightful owner…
\n(115-116)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nA university is a reading and discussion club.
\nIf students knew how to use the library, they wouldn’t need
\nthe rest of the buildings. The faculty’s job, in great part,
\nis to teach students how to use a library in a living way.
\nAll a student should really need is access to the library
\nand a place to sleep.<\/p>\n
\nJohn Ciardi, in Ciardi Himself<\/b>, 1989<\/p>\n<\/center><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nThey had in fact nothing to wish for, but the marriage of
\nColonel Brandon and Marianne, and rather better pasturage for their
\ncows.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility<\/b>,
\n374-5<\/center> <\/p>\n
\nYou can’t let the little pricks generation-gap you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Molly, in William Gibson’s Neuromancer<\/b>, 59<\/center><\/p>\n
\nScribbling while driving is to dance before the sleeping tiger.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
J. Baldwin<\/center><\/p>\n
\nThe spread of specialized deafness means that someone who
\nought to know something that someone else knows isn’t able to find it out
\nfor lack of generalized ears.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nKenneth Boulding 1956:198<\/center><\/p>\n
\nHe is an English professor, Renaissance, and as is the case
\nwith a good many academics, his essential kindness is somewhat damaged by
\nwit. And a finished reserve.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nCarol Shields, The Box Garden<\/b>, 100<\/center> <\/p>\n
\nA new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its
\nopponents, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation
\ngrows up that is familiar with it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nMax Planck<\/center><\/p>\n
\nThe existence of the relationship is not rendered noticeably
\nless puzzling by the discovery of its mathematical expression.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nMarshall 1969:105<\/center><\/p>\n
\nThe data, unfortunately, did not share our enthusiasm for the
\nhypothesized pattern.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nLeik and Matthews 1968<\/center><\/p>\n
\nSo flexible is the concept that it may be employed at any
\nlevel from that of acorns [Winston, 1956] or pieces of dung [Mohr, 1943]
\nto that of the universe itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nStoddart
\n1967:534<\/center><\/p>\n
\nFor fools admire and like all things the more which they
\nperceive to be concealed under involved language and determine things to
\nbe true which can prettily tickle the ears and are varnished over with
\nfinely sounding phrases.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nLucretius<\/center><\/p>\n
\nWild reindeer can be more easily domesticated than wild
\nhorses, owing to their taste for human urine; this makes it possible to
\nteach them to stay near the camp.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nLattimore
\n1940:327fn<\/center><\/p>\n
\n…’the uninhabited parts of the world, where the heathen
\ndwell’, to quote from an apocryphal sermon by a Church of England
\ndivine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nLattimore 1962:27<\/center><\/p>\n
\nAlexander in his discussion of similar difficulties (1940:42)
\nremarks that one informant became deaf during the interview and one
\ndied.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nPickford 1956:214<\/center><\/p>\n
\nAnother sort there be who, when they hear that all things
\nshall be ordered, all things regulated and settled, nothing written but
\nwhat passes through the custom-house of certain Publicans that have the
\ntonnaging and poundaging of all free-spoken truth, will straight give
\nthemselves up into your hands, make ’em and cut ’em out what religion
\nyou please: there be delights, there be recreations and jolly pastimes
\nthat will fetch the day about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year
\nas in a delightful dream. What need they torture their heads with that
\nwhich others have taken so strictly and so unalterably into their own
\npurveying? These are the fruits which a dull ease and cessation of our
\nknowledge bring forth among the people. How goodly and how to be wished
\nwere such an obedient unanimity as this. what a fine conformity would it
\nstarch us all into! Doubtless a staunch and solid piece of framework, as
\nany January could freeze together.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nJohn Milton,
\nAreopagitica<\/b><\/center><\/p>\n
\nRevelation came to Luther in a privy
Crosswords have been
\nsolved there
Rodin was no fool
When he cast his
\nThinker
Cogitating deeply
Crouched in the position
Of a man at
\nstool.<\/p>\n(from Auden’s The Geography of the House<\/i><\/a>, but for many years just a remembered fragment) <\/center> <\/p>\n
\nHerbert Spencer:<\/p>\n
Evolution is an integration of matter and
\nconcomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an
\nindefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent
\nheterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and
\nintegrations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nParodist:<\/p>\n
A change from a nohowish, untalkaboutable
\nall-alikeness to a somehowish and in general talkaboutable
\nnot-all-alikeness by continuous somethingelseifications and
\nsticktogetherations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nJones 1994 The Language of
\nGenes<\/b><\/center><\/p>\n
\nWe know
\nwhat a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be
\ndisguised in helpless embryos –in fact, the world is full of hopeful
\nanalogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities. (82)<\/p>\n\nThe troublesome ones in a family are usually the wits or the idiots. (298)<\/p>\n
\nThe soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of
\npoisonous toadstools, and no eye can see whence came the seed
\nthereof. (401)<\/p>\n\n…it is a little too trying to human flesh to be conscious of expressing
\none’s self better than others and never to have it noticed, and in the
\ngeneral dearth of admiration for the right thing, even a chance bray of
\napplause falling exactly in time is rather fortifying. (452)<\/p>\nGeorge Eliot, Middlemarch<\/b><\/center><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nAnyone who has ever moved will agree:<\/p>\n
The Age of Property
\nholds bitter moments even for a proprietor. When a move is imminent,
\nfurniture becomes ridiculous… Chairs, tables, pictures, books, that
\nhad rumbled down to them through the generations, must rumble forward
\nagain like a slide of rubbish to which she longed to give the final push,
\nand send toppling into the sea. But there were all their father’s books
\n–they never read them, but they were their father’s, and must be kept…
\n(141)<\/p>\n\n“…Only some rubbish about furniture. Helen says it alone endures while
\nmen and houses perish, and that in the end the world will be a desert of
\nchairs and sofas –just imagine it!– rolling through infinity with no
\none to sit upon them.” (151)
\nForster, Howard’s End<\/b><\/center><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n