A garland of quotations LXXVIII
Culled from the finest contrarians in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
With the Gnostics, we find ourselves in the fantastic world of dreamers. They all sleep in the same room, but their dreams do not touch each other.
•Jean Guitton, Great Heresies and Church Councils (1963).
Set…is usually depicted in human form with the head of an animal which has not yet been identified; in later times the head of the ass was confounded with it, but the figures of the god in bronze which are preserved in the British Museum and elsewhere prove beyond a doubt that the head of Set is that of an animal unknown to us. The Set animal is not the okapi, as some Egyptologists think; the opinion of naturalists has settled this question.
•E.A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead: The Hieroglyphic Transcript and English Translation of the Papyrus of Ani (1895).
A degradation…in the gold staters originally struck by Philip II, then copied and recopied as far afield as Gaul and southwestern England, till the quadriga and charioteer on the reverse became a meaningless jumble of lines and blobs.
•Peter Green, Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age (1990).
He shall have chariots easier than air,
That I will have invented; and ne’er think
One shall pay any ransome, and thyself,
That art the messenger, shalt ride before him
On a horse cut out of an intire Diamond.
That shall be made to go with golden wheels,
I know not how yet.
•Beaumont and Fletcher, A King and No King (1611).
Course, I don’t like dictators none myself,
But then, I think the whole country, it ought to be run by
Electricity.
•Woody Guthrie, “Talking Columbia” (1947).
I should have every thing to fear if tyrants were to read my book; but tyrants never read.
•Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (1764).
For sparing of a little cost
Full oft time a man hath lost
The large coat for the hood.
•John Gower, Confessio Amantis (1393).
A cheer went up, for it was recognized that these are lousy times
to be living in, yet we do live in them.
We are the case.
•John Ashbery, Girls on the Run (1999).
Best to believe our fates are our own, even if the evidence denies it.
•Michael Moorcock, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (1976).
I wasn’t very funny tonight. Sometimes I’m not. I’m not a comedian, I’m Lenny Bruce.
•Lenny Bruce, Jazz Workshop, SF (1961).
References: Bruce: quoted in Phil Berger, The Last Laugh (Limelight, 1985); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.