Keep me alive! Patronize my books!

Sometimes he sleeps four-and-twenty hours at a stretch, by which means he saves three meals, besides coffee-house expense.
•Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748).

I was tired and sleeping on my idle bed and imagined all work had ceased. In the morning I woke up and found my garden full with wonders of flowers.
•Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (1913).

One day a fellow townsman asked me: “What do you do, Doc?” “Well, I write books.” “I know that, Doc, but what do you really do?” “Nothing.” He nodded. He was pleased and I was pleased.
•Walker Percy, “Questions They Never Asked Me” (1977).

Sometimes a prophetic vision comes to me, a beautiful vision of a millennium when Manhattan will go slow, when the American “go-getter” will become an Oriental loafer.
•Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (1937).

I have no vices—I never drink, gamble, or work.
•Valerie Solanas, Up Your Ass (1965).

I have been all my life apprenticed to this heavy business of idleness; and I am not yet master of my craft; the gods are too just to suffer that I should.
•Edward FitzGerald, letter to W.F. Pollock (1846).

I don’t like to do anything that interferes with my not doing anything!
•Charles Schulz, Peanuts (2.23.1967).

Then she asked him hoarsely: “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing—for the remainder of my life,” he answered meaningly.
•Saki, “The Treasure-Ship” (1914).

Hadn’t he read, in some magazine or other, that a man could save himself a lot of unhappiness just by staying in his room?
•Adolfo Bioy Casares, Diary of the War of the Pig (1969).

An object at rest cannot be stopped.
•Ben Edlund and Richard Liebmann-Smith, The Tick (1994).

Sources: Percy: in Signposts in a Strange Land (FSG, 1996); FitzGerald: quoted in Robert Graves & Omar Ali-Shah, The Original Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam (Doubleday, 1968); Saki: The Short Stories of Saki (Viking, 1942); Bioy Casares: trans. Gregory Woodruff & Donald A. Yates (Dutton, 1988); Tick: ep. 1.6, “The Tick vs. the Tick”; some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

Keep me alive! Patronize my books!

better to do nothing
than nothings—
•Coleridge, notebook (1802?).

In this truck is a man whose latent genius, if unleashed, would rock the nation, whose dynamic energy would overpower those around him. Better let him sleep?
•card displayed in the truck of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper (1970s).

There were five hundred things she wanted to do, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to move. The day lay before them like a still pond. She didn’t want to disturb the waters, not just yet.
•Cynthia Voigt, Bad, Badder, Baddest (1997).

How could you explain to him that everything still remained to be done and that the only decent thing to do was to step back in order to get a better start, let yourself fall down so that maybe you could get up again later?
•Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch (1963).

Myrna was, you see, terribly engaged in her society; I, on the other hand, older and wiser, was terribly dis-engaged.
•John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1979).

There was never an ill thing made better by meddling, that I could hear of.
•Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Merry Men” (1882).

Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should have respected myself, then. I should have respected myself because I should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed myself. Question: What is he? Answer: A sluggard; how very pleasant it would have been to hear that of oneself!
•Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864).

One person can make a difference, but most of the time they probably shouldn’t.
•Marge Simpson, “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge” (1990).

“Quhairto,” quod I, “sall I uprys at morrow?
For in this May few birdis herd I sing.”
•William Dunbar, “The Thrissil and the Rois” (1503).

Thales remained four years motionless and created philosophy.
Monks are not idlers, nor hermits sluggards.
To think of the shadow-world is a serious thing.
•Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862).

Sources: Coleridge: Seamus Perry, ed. Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection (Oxford UP, 2003); Sutcliffe: quoted in R.G. Jones, ed., The Mammoth Book of Murder (Carroll & Graf, 1989); Cortázar: trans. G. Rabassa (Pantheon, 1987); Stevenson: The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (Books, Inc., ca. 1937); Dostoevsky: trans. Constance Garnett in Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (Meridian, 1958); Dunbar: in James Kinsley, ed, William Dunbar: Poems (U Exeter, 1989); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
•DeQuincy, “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827).

Doing nothing ends in being nothing.—
•Coleridge, notebook (1797–98).

We make a mistake if we believe that only the violent passions like ambition and love can subdue the others. Laziness, for all her languor, is nevertheless often mistress: she permeates every aim and action in live and imperceptibly eats away and destroys passions and virtues alike.
•La Rochenfoucauld, Reflections (1665).

If you ask me which is the real hereditary sin of human nature; do you imagine I shall answer pride, or luxury, or ambition, or egotism? No; I shall say indolence; who conquers indolence will conquer all the rest.
•Johann Kaspar Lavater, Aphorisms on Man. Translated from the Original Manuscript of the Rev. John Caspar Lavater, Citizen of Zuric (1787).

They love idleness more than prayer; they love to possess more than to give; and they love sleeping more than praising, dozing more than watching. Woe be unto us!
•Kebra Nagast (C14?)

There are always men and women who prefer the triumph of evil, which is a thing they can forget, to prolonged resistance, which shatters their nerves. But the desire to escape an obligation, while very human, is not generally thought to be humanity’s noblest asset.
•Agnes Repplier, “Living in History” (1916).

The pleasure junks of destruction are four;
Procrastination, forgetfulness, sloth, and sleep.
•Thiruvalluvar, Tirukkural (undateable).

I am moost slowfull
For many yeres I haue dwellyd in a grete hows
and laye vnder the conduytes of the same
oute of the whiche felle vpon me alle the fowle waters
as pysse
dysshe water
and alle other fylthe that wonderly stanke
In so moche that al my flesshe was roten therof
and myn eyen al blynd
and the durt vnder my back was a foot hyghe
And yet by my grete slouthe I hadde leuer to abyde there
than to tourne me
and haue lyfte me vp
•Caxton, Esopvs (1484).

Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them.
•C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1941).

The sluggard says, “There is a lion outside!
I shall be slain in the streets!”
•Proverbs 22:13.

Sources: Coleridge: Seamus Perry, ed. Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection (Oxford UP, 2003); La Rochenfoucauld: trans. Leonard Tancock, Reflections or Aphorisms and Moral Maxims (Penguin, 1959); Kebra Nagast: Miguel F. Brooks, A Modern Translation of the Kebra Nagast (The Glory of Kings) (Red Sea Press, 1996); Repplier: in Eight Decades (Houghton Mifflin, 1937); Thiruvalluvar: trans P. S. Sundaram, The Kural (Penguin, 1991); Caxton: R.T. Lenaghan, ed., Caxton’s Aesop (Harvard UP, 1967); Proverbs: RSV; some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

May wide and towering heaven collapse upon me in all its
bronze and terror, catastrophe to the peoples of earth,
on that day when I no longer stand by my companions,
on that day when I cease to harry my enemies.
•Theognis (C6–5 BC).

Poor old Robinson Crusoe! poor old Robinson Crusoe!
They made him a coat of an old Nanny goat,
I wonder how they could do so !
With a ring-a-ting-tang, and a ring-a-ting-tang,
Poor old Robinson Crusoe !
•Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes (1877).

We were soon ready to return to the boat, but Ernest had a fancy for remaining alone on the island till we came back, and asked my permission to do so, that he might experience, for an hour or two, the sensations of Robinson Crusoe. ¶ To this, however, I would not consent, assuring him that our fate, as a solitary family, gave him quite sufficient idea of shipwreck on an uninhabited island, and that his lively imagination must supply the rest.
•Jonathan Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson (1812).

I must eat my dinner.
This island’s mine.
•Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611?).

You are ugly? Well then, my brothers, wrap the sublime about you, the cloak of the ugly. And when your soul becomes great, then it becomes prankish; and in your sublimity there is sarcasm.
•Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathurstra (1883).

One of the presidents of the Chambre, La Reynie, an ugly little old man, very seriously asked her [the Duchess of Bouillon] whether she had really seen the devil; to which the lady replied, looking him full in the face, “Oh, yes! I see him now. He is in the form of a little ugly old man, exceedingly ill-natured and is dressed in the robes of a Counsellor of State.” M. la Reynie prudently refrained from asking any more questions of a lady with so sharp and ready a tongue.
•Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841).

Another actor went to the house of a certain rich man who was sick, and enquired concerning his illness, and the sick man said to him, “Boils have broken out upon me in a loathsome place.” The actor said, “I do not see any in thy face,” meaning “thy face is a loathsome place.”
•Bar Hebraeus, The Laughable Stories (1280).

Think of the most disgusting thing you can think of.
It is beautiful in its way.
It has two legs.
It has a head of hair.
•Frederick Seidel, “Downtown” (2002).

O set us down together in some place
Where not a voice can break our heaven of bliss,
Where not but rocks and I can see her face,
Softening beneath the marvel of thy grace,
Where not a foot our vanished steps can track—
The golden age, the golden age come back!
•William Morris, The Earthly Paradise vol. I (1868).

In my eyes all things are, in the last analysis, equally vain and trivial. The only insult is in the assumption that I do not know this.
•Robert Graves, “A Journal of Curiosities” (9/28/29).

Sources: Theognis: Richard Lattimore, trans., Greek Lyrics (UChiP, 1995); Wyss: trans. unknown but (Dell, 1960); Nietzsche: The Portable Nietzsche (Viking, 1966); Seidel: Area Code 212 (FSG, 2002); Graves: But It Still Goes On (Cape & Smith, 1931); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

Curst be the Man who first a Simile made!
Curst ev’ry Bard who writes!—So have I seen
Those whose Comparisons are just and true,
And those who liken things not like at all.
The Devil is happy that the whole Creation
Can furnish out no Simile to his Fortune.
•Henry Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731).

He barely remembered because as always, the past was to the present as the rider to the horse, unimpressive and mean, though it cut with the whip, kicked with the spur.
•Paul Park, Soldiers of Paradise (1987).

We forget everything. What we remember is not what happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.
•Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (pub. 1973).

The past is inaccurate. Whoever lives long enough knows how much what he had seen with his own eyes becomes overgrown with rumor, legend, a magnifying or belittling hearsay. “It was not like that at all!” he would like to exclaim, but will not, for they would have seen only his moving lips without hearing his voice.
•Czeslaw Milosz, Road-side Dog (1997).

One generation of ignorance effaces the whole series of unwritten history. Books are faithful repositories, which may be a while neglected or forgotten; but when they are opened again, will again impart their instruction; memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. Written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it as passed away, is again bright in its proper station. Tradition is but a meteor, which, if once it falls, cannot be rekindled.
•Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775).

The verse can only communicate as a secret everybody already knows, or as an allusion to a body of knowledge the singer knows can never be recovered, and [Clarence] Ashley only makes things worse by singing as if whatever he’s singing about is the most obvious thing in the world.
•Greil Marcus, “The Old, Weird America” (1997).

Everyone knows this is fact, but no one wants to make a fool of himself and be taken in; so, on the gray canvas of reality, he zestfully sketches the mere form of this illusory festival. Miserable, unshaven fathers, shaking their complaining children by the shoulder trying to make them say it has been a pleasant Sunday.
•Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes (1962).

Not yet have we mortals learned everything from Zeus, but much is still hidden, of which Zeus will give us later if he so wills.
•Aratus of Soli, Phaenomena (C3 BC).

All things are troublesome, save to rule the gods:
Liberty is the privilege of Zeus.
•Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (C5 BC).

Let truth grope towards me.
•Robert Penn Warren, A Place to Come To (1977).

Sources: Marcus: from A Booklet of Essays, Appreciations, and Annotations Pertaining to the Anthology of American Folk Music (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1997); Abe: trans. E. Dale Saunders (Vintage, 1972); Aratus: quoted in Peter Green, Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age (UCA P, 1990); Aeschylus: trans. Geo. Thompson (Dover, 1995); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

Those Entertainments and Pleasures we most value in Life, are such as Dupe and play the Wag with the Senses. For, if we take and Examination of what is generally understood by Happiness, as it has Respect, either to the Understanding or the Senses, we shall find that all its Properties and Adjuncts will herd under this short Definition: That, it is a perpetual Possession of being well Deceived.
•Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1697).

I knew a man who was always full of glee, and on the whole to all appearance, the most merry man I ever saw. I went to see him once, and found him gloomy. I enquired the cause, and he said: “I have been alone, and have been obliged to look into myself; and cannot bear the sight.”
•Timothy Dwight, speech at Yale (1813).

SELF-PITY IS BETTER THAN NONE.
•Phyllis Diller, Phyllis Diller’s Marriage Manual (1967).

“If either of you saw my ankles,” she said, when she was safely elevated, “say so, and I’ll go home and destroy myself!”
•Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

This ys my peyne, wythoute red,
Alway deynge and be not ded.
•Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess (1368?).

How may this be, that deth and lyf, bothe tueyne,
Sall bothe atonis in a creature
Togidder duell, and turment thus nature?
•James I, The Kingis Quair (1424).

If Tertullian came to the window of heaven to rejoice in the sight of the damned, as he said he’d do, he might have seen my leg across his line of vision through the sunlight. That was how I felt.
•Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953).

Verily, we are shoeless in Gehenna.
•Mike Baron, Nexus #23 (1986).

O firm Philosophy! display the tide
   Of human misery, and oft relate
   How silent sinking in the storms of fate,
The brave and good have bow’d their head and died.
   So taught by Thee, some solace I may find,
   Remembering the sorrows of mankind.
•William Lisle Bowles, Sonnets, Elegiac and Descriptive (1786).

To those who face akimbo its distress:
“Do people like me?” No. The slave amuses
The lion: “Am I to suffer always?” Yes.
•Auden, “The Sphinx” (1938).

Source: Dwight: President Dwight’s Decisions of Questions Discussed by the Senior Class in Yale College, in 1813 and 1814 (Jonathan Leavitt, 1833); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

You burn down the London Theater: one!
You burn down the big empire: two!
•Roaring Lion, “Ba Boo La La” (1938).

The well-contrived system at once becomes a chaos.
•William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws (1791).

We walked gaily over a carpet of flowers which concealed from us the abyss.
•Comte de Ségur, Memoirs (1824).

She wondered that the sun could shine so brightly, that flowers could flaunt such dazzling colors, that sweet airs could breathe, and little children play, and youth love and hope, and a thousand intoxicating influences combine to cheat the victims from the thought that their next step might be into an abyss of horrors without end.
•Stowe, The Minister’s Wooing (1859).

How melancholy lie
The broken shards and left behind,
The frustrate and unfit,
Who sought the infinite and kind,
And found the infinite.
•Arthur Colton, “When All the Brooks Have Run Away” (1907).

                                        If
I have to believe in something,
I believe in despair.
•Philip Schultz, “Blunt” (1997).

There are five “Keys of the Unseen” known to none but God. Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow. Nobody knows what will happen in the womb. No soul knows what his deeds will earn him tomorrow. No soul knows in what land he will die. Finally, nobody knows when the rain will come.
•Muhammad al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari (846).

Only in a secret place
May human love perfect itself.
•Rexroth, The Dragon and the Unicorn (1952).

How to keep—is there any, any, is there none such, nowhere known, some bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty,…from vanishing away?
•Hopkins, “The Leaden Echo” (1879).

“I’ve been punished enough,” said Lydgate.
“When you say that,” said Carruthers Chung, “that is a sure sign that you have not been punished enough.” The telephone rang. “But you will be punished enough,” promised Carruthers Chung.
•Burgess, Devil of a State (1961).

Sources: Ségur: quoted in Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (Harper Collins, 1997); Colton: Harps Hung Up in Babylon (Henry Holt, 1907); Schultz: Failure (Harcourt, 2007); al-Bukhari: from Neal Robinson, ed., The Sayings of Muhammad (Ecco, 1998); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

No, not those. These!

On thy life, O Queen! answer me this: Who is the fierce thief who, armed with a poisoned dagger, steals only from the fairest what is sweetest, and is himself robbed of all that he steals, yet, robber though he be, there is not a church in the land to which he has not given candles?
•Charles G. Leland, The Book of One Hundred Riddles of the Fairy Bellaria (1892).

Dere is boht the hony that is licked of the thorne.
•The Proverbs of Hending (ca. 1300).

In my quiver—are the olive-oil and the bee;
Are, like the bee, both the sweet and also the sting.
•Nizami Ganjavi, The Sikandar náma,e bara, or Book of Alexander the Great (1194).

Ha! the honey of your eyes is approaching, but the bee is near, therefore look on with caution.
•Kalidasa, The Malavikágnimitram (C4?).

And thenne the Bee prayd hym in this manere
God almyghty I pray the that thow wylt gyue to me and graunte
that who so euer shal come for to take awey my hony
yf I pryke hym
he may sodenly deye [die]
And by cause that Iupyter loued the humayn lygnage he sayd to the Bee
Suffyse the[e]
that who so euer shalle goo to take thy hony
yf thow pryke or stynge hym
Incontynent thow shalt deye
And thus her prayer was tourned to her grete dommage
For men ought not to demaunde of god
but suche thynges that ben good and honest
•William Caxton, The Historye of Reynard the Foxe (1481).

Things being at their worst begin to mend.
The bee when he hath shot his sting into your hand
May then play with your eyelid.
•John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1613).

I have, however, seen with my very own eyes how wasps are enchanted. It is the only magic I have seen in my entire life. I was then a 12 or 13 year old boy. There was a pioneer’s farm hand in Kvivkjovk (Lulle Lappmark) who had learned the trick from the pioneer on Pewawre. He recited and mumbled something that I did not understand or pay attention to. But the end sum was that the wasps became docile like lambs. He tore the wasp nest into pieces without the wasps doing him any harm. They seemed to be totally Schack matta “checkmate” (“dead”). They crawled on their legs, unable to fly. What tricks he may have used I really don’t understand, but he insisted that it happened through enchanting alone.
•Lars Levi Læstadius, Fragments of Lappish Mythology (1840-45).

You call it anything you please, but it’s witchcraft—the power
’At Sifers has o’ handlin’ bees!—He’ll watch ’em by the hour—
Mix right amongst ’em, mad and hot and swarmin’!—yit they won’t
Sting him, er want to—’pear to not,—at least I know they don’t.
•James Whitcomb Riley, The Rubaiyat of Doc Sifers (1897).

A kiss is but a kiss now! and no wave
Of a great flood that whirls me to the sea.
But, as you will! we’ll sit contentedly,
And eat our pot of honey on the grave.
•George Meredith, Modern Love (1862).

God made the bees,
The bees make honey;
We do the work,
The teacher gets the money.
•trad.

Sources: Hending: quoted in Skeat, Early English Proverbs, Chiefly of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, with Illustrative Quotations (Clarendon, 1910); Nizami: trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke (W.H. Allen, 1881); Kalidasa: trans. C.H. Tawney (Thacker, Spink & Co., 1891); Caxton: jocularly reformatted from N.F. Blake, ed., The History of Reynard the Fox (Oxford UP, 1970); Læstadius: trans B. Vahamaki (Aspasia, 2002); trad.: from Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Oxford UP, 1960); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

Alas! if you had not heard him of seen him for yourself you would find him hard to imagine. I have never seen his like among the race of Narts. His like is simply not to be found in Nart land. He is larger than the Narts. When he walks, you think that many people are walking.
•Hadaghatl’a Asker, Nartxer vol. 1 (1968).

One live lion is better than a hundred masks.
•Tsangnyön Heruka, The Life of Milarepa (1488).

I’d rather be rich than stupid.
•Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts (1992).

I think for my part one half of the nation is mad—and the other not very sound—
•Tobias Smollett, The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762).

God keep me from the Divinity of Yes & No too, the Yea Nay Creeping Jesus, from supposing Up and Down to be the same Thing as all Experimentalists must suppose.
•William Blake, letter to George Cumberland (1827).

I understand it’s lucky whether you believe in it or not.
•Niels Bohr in conversation (1955).

Superstition brings bad luck.
•Raymond Smullyan, 5000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies (1983).

The Hell Law says that Hell is reserved exclusively for them that believe in it. Further, the lowest Rung in Hell is reserved for them that believe in it on the supposition that they’ll go there if they don’t.
•Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, The Honest Book of Truth (1965?).

Since early Romanticism, limit experiences of an aesthetic and mystical kind have always been claimed for the purpose of a rapturous transcendence of the subject. The mystic is blinded by the light of the absolute and closes his eyes; aesthetic ecstasy finds expression in the stunning and dizzying effects of (the illuminating) shock. In both cases, the source of the experience of being shaken up evades any specification. In this indeterminacy, we can make out only the silhouette of the paradigm under attack—the outline of what has been deconstructed. In this constellation, which persists from Nietzsche to Heidegger and Foucault, there arises a readiness for excitement without any proper object; in its wake, subcultures are formed which simultaneously allay and keep alive their excitement in the face of future truths (of which they have been notified in an unspecified way) by means of cultic actions without any cultic object. This scurrilous game with religiously and aesthetically toned ecstasy finds an audience especially in circles of intellectuals who are prepared to make their sacrificium intellectus on the altar of their needs for orientation.
•Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernism (1985).

When he burst into laughter, Badanoquo, the son, asked his father, “O my father! You are about to die now. I am going to throw you into the abyss. What gives your heart such delight?” ¶ “I am laughing, my son, because now, at this moment when you are about to throw me into the abyss, I am wondering what your heart will feel when the time comes for a boy to be born to you to throw into this abyss,” he replied.
•Vladimir Meremkulov and Shota Salakaja, Nater’a Narty (1975).

Sources: Hadaghatl’a & Meremkulov / Salakaja: in John Colarusso, ed., Nart Sagas of the Caucasus: Myths and Legends from the Circassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs (Princeton UP, 2002); Heruka: trans. Lobsang P. Lhalungpa (Arkana, 1984); Blake: quoted in Peter Ackroyd, Blake (Knopf, 1996); Bohr; Ravenhurst: quoted in Malaclypse the Younger, Principia Discordia (Loompanics, 1979); Habermas: trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (MIT Press, 1990); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

Only 99¢!

But what he was forecasting was a life not in which happiness would have limits, but in which unhappiness would be a legitimate choice.
•David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts (2007).

Enoch being informed by Adam the world was to be drowned and burnt, made two pillars, one of stone to withstand the water, and one of brick to withstand the fire, and inscribed upon them all known knowledge.
•J. W. Willis Bund, annotations to Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and A Letter to a Friend (1869).

There was an inundation of the Tiber and a comet appeared; also a child was born with two heads and a woman gave birth to quintuplets. In Arabia a crested serpent was seen, larger than the usual ones, which ate itself from the tail to the middle.
•Historia Augusta (C4?).

My friend, I saw the sun walking about on Friday night
People stirred in wave after wave thinking this marked the Apocalypse;
For the sun to be seen at night!—and they all collapsed on the ground in terror.
•Abu Nuwas, Diwan (ca. 800).

During that [period of] peace the Gates of the North will be opened and those hosts of nations will come forth who were imprisoned there, and the earth will shake before them. And men will be frightened, and they will flee and will hide in mountains and in caves and tombs, and they will die from fear and from hunger, and there is none to bury them. And they will be devoured before their fathers when they see them because these nations that will come forth from the North eat the flesh of men and drink the blood of animals and eat the creeping things of the earth and mice and snakes and scorpions and all the unclean reptiles that creep on earth and the bodies of unclean animals and the abortions of sheep. And they will slaughter children and will give [their flesh] to their mothers and force them to eat the bodies of their sons.
•The Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius (c. 650).

For forty days and forty nights
He wade thro red blude to the knee,
And he saw neither sun nor moon,
But heard the roaring of the sea.
•Child #37A (coll. 1882).

Ascended is the cloudy flame,
The mount of thunder dumb;
The tokens that to Israel came,
To me they have not come.
•Housman, More Poems (coll. 1936).

                                       Since the flooding,
everything’s a blur. Was was all there was and was was what we were.
•Diane Seuss, “The White Rabbit was before” (2021).

Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.
•Gwendolyn Brooks, “Boy Breaking Glass” (1967).

And on an Arab steed the wild Khan rides
Who goes to Baktschi Serai which night hides.
•Adam Mickiewicz, “Baktschi Serai by Night” (1826).

Some people just naturally attract no more attention that the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.
•Gracie Allen, How to Become President (1940).

Sources: Augusta: trans. Anthony Birley, Lives of the Later Caesars (Penguin, 1976); Abu Nuwas: quoted in Philip F. Kennedy, Abu Nuwas: A Genius of Poetry (Oneworld, 2005); pseudo-Methodius: in Paul J. Alexander, The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition (U CA P, 1985); Seuss: Frank: Sonnets (Graywolf, 2021); Brooks: In the Mecca (Harper & Row, 1969); Mickiewicz: trans. Edna Worthley Underwood in Sonnets from the Crimea (Paul Elder, 1917); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

New book! All thrills! Try it!

I will have a notice on my door “NO HAWKERS TRADERS OR PHILISTINES.”
•Sue Townsend, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984).

What was a gifted man to do after Napoleon? How could organisms bred for the electric air of revolution and imperial epic breathe under the leaden sky of middle-class rule? How was it possible for a young man to hear his father’s tales of the Terror and of Austerlitz and to amble down the placid boulevard to the countinghouse? The past drove rats’ teeth into the gray pulp of the present; it exasperated, it sowed wild dreams.
•George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (1971).

To be sure, if you turn back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
•Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969).

There is nothing more awful than imagination devoid of taste.
•Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (1829).

Kitsch is the element of evil in the value system of art.
•Hermann Broch, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch” (1950).

Kitsch is an imitation of life, a masquerade in which we don disguises to fool ourselves. We put our hands over our eyes and ask, “Guess who?”
•Curtis F. Brown, Star-Spangled Kitsch (1975).

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! ¶ The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! ¶ It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
•Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).

As an easily digestible substitute for art, Kitsch is the ideal food for a lazy audience that wants to have access to beauty and enjoy it without making too much of an effort.
•Umberto Eco, Apocalypse Postponed (1964).

Does man love Art? Man visits art, but squirms.
Art hurts. Art urges voyages—
and it is easier to stay at home,
the nice beer ready.
•Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Chicago Picasso” (1967).

For example: how can I love passionately without becoming sentimental? And yet! What does it matter whether or not I am becoming sentimental?
•Mircea Eliade, Mayitreyi (1933).

Hence, vulgar and stupid beliefs can be held with a refined and enlightened meaning, known only to him who holds them.
•Leonard Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (1904).

Sources: Goethe: in Peter Hutchinson, ed., Maxims and Reflections (Penguin, 1998); Broch: quoted in Patrizia C. MacBride, “The Problem of Kitsch: Hermann Broch and Robert Musil on Art and Morality” in Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature vol. 29, #2 (2005); Kundera: trans. M. H. Heim (Harper, 1991); Eco: trans. Anna Cancogni in The Open Work (Harvard UP, 1989); Brooks: In the Mecca (Harper & Row, 1969); Eliade: trans. Catherine Spencer as Bengal Nights (UChiP, 1995); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

New book! All thrills! Try it!

This would be a swell place if it weren’t for that Great One.
•anonymous, Donald Duck in The Lost Jungle City (Big Little Book) (1975).

Unas is he who eats men, feeds on gods.
•anonymous carving, Pyramid of Unas, antechamber, east wall (c. 2345 BC).

The words of Herakles when he was not
Allowed to be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries:
“I was initiated a long time ago.”
•anonymous, P. Mil. Vogl. I 18 (C 2).

Meethinkes their ghoasts comes gaping for reuenge,
Whom I haue slaine in reaching for a Crowne.
Clarence complaines, and crieth for reuenge.
My Nephues bloods, reuenge, reuenge, doth crie,
The headlesse Peeres comes preasing for reuenge,
And euery one cries, let the tyrant die.
The Sunne, by day shines hotely for reuenge.
The Moone by night eclipseth for reuenge.
The stars are turnd to Comets for reuenge,
The Planets chaunge their coursies for reuenge.
The birds sing not, but sorrow for reuenge.
The silly lambs sit bleating for reuenge.
The screeking Rauen sits croking for reuenge.
Whole heads of beasts come bellowing for reuenge.
And all, yea all the world I thinke,
Cries for reuenge, and nothing but reuenge.
But to conclude, I haue deserued reuenge.
•anonymous, The True Tragedy of Richard the Third (1572?).

We do not believe that the poet exists, who could succeed in making war, as a present event, interesting to the imagination.
•anonymous, The Eclectic Review, New Series VI (1816).

Some lost legs, and some lost arms,
        derry, etc.
And some did lose their blood;
But Robin Hood he took up his noble Bow,
And is gone to the merry green Wood:
        hey down etc.
•anonymous, “Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham” (1695?)

He so bravely behaved himself that at every stroke he cut off a joint, loth he was to touch the life of any, but aiming at their legs and arms, he lopt them off so fast, that in less than a quarter of an hour, there was not one in the company but what had lost a limb, the green grass being stained with their purple gore, and the ground strew’d with legs and arms, as ’tis with tiles from the tops of the Houses after a dreadful storm.
•anonymous, The Pleasant History of Thomas Hickathrift (1780).

She that’s afraid of the grass must never piss in a meadow.
•anonymous, The History of Mother Bunch of the Weste (1793).

THE
JEOPARDY
OF LIFE
IMMENSELY INCREASED
without such a simple precaution as
ENO’S “FRUIT SALT”
•anonymous advertisement poster (1897).

This is what I expected but
not so soon.
•anonymous epitaph, Westerville, NY (1872).

Sources: Unas: in Miriam Lichtheim, ed., Ancient Egyptian Literature vol. 1 (U CA P, 1975); Herakles: quoted on a piece of paper I once found that attributed it to Achille Vogliano, ed., Papiri dell’ Universita degli Studi di Milano vol. 1, although clearly someone translated it?; Eclectic: quoted in Willard L. Sperry, Wordsworth’s Anti-Climax (Harvard UP, 1935); Robin Hood; Hickathrift & Bunch: in George Laurence Gomme, ed., Chap-Books and Folk-Lore Tracts first series, I & III (Villon Society, 1885); Eno’s: in Fed E. Basten, ed., Great American Billboards: 100 Years of History by the Side of the Road (Ten Speed Press, 2007); Westerville: in Gail Peterson, ed., The Last Laugh: A Completely New Collection of Funny Old Epitaphs (Hallmark, 1968); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

Buy this book for your kid!

Buy this book for yourself!

Oh why did I awake? when shall I sleep again?
•A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad XLVIII (1896).

What happens to people who start life each morning with a small shock of alarm from their so aptly named alarm clock? Every day they become a little more conditioned to violence, and a little less accustomed to delight.
•Milan Kundera, The Farewell Waltz (1972).

The men were brokers, juggled stocks,
Played a hard game in market hives.
With hearts as merciless as clocks
They timed the death of distant lives.
•Maxwell Bodenheim, ”Upper Family” (1942).

In Eskimo Land it’s ten o’clock!
In Elephant Land it’s twelve o’clock!
On Mars it’s thirty seven o’clock!
In Dum Dum land it is big hand on the twelve and little hand on the four!
•The Friendly Ghost, Casper #215 (1981).

The Clock strikes one that just struck two—
Some schism in the Sum—
A Vagabond for Genesis
Has wrecked the Pendulum—
•Emily Dickinson, #1569 (c. 1883).

I know that you can’t put the clock back. But there is one thing you can do. You can stop that clock. You can smash that clock.
•Nathanael West, A Cool Million (1934).

Giovanni went over to the clock, removed both of its hands, and wrote NOW across the clockface.
•Camden Benares, Zen without Zen Masters (1977).

Though their kiss went on for what could have been hours, so little did it have to do with clock time, she was already miles away down those rails before their lips even touched.
•Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (2006).

See, in mid heaven the sun is mounted; hark,
The belfries tingle to the noonday chime.
’Tis silent, and the subterranean dark
Has crossed the nadir, and begins to climb.
•A.E. Housman, Last Poems XXXVI (1922).

What I want is more; I am no seeker. I want to create for myself a sun of my own.
•Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882).

Sources: Kundera: trans. Peter Kussi as The Farewell Party (Knopf, 1976);
Bodenheim: in John Hollander, ed. American Wits (Library of America, 2003);
Dickisnon & Nietzsche: op. cit., o.c.; some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

The erratic presence or absence of a gall-bladder comes to notice in sacrificial victims. Thus, in a certain district of the Chalcidian settlement in Euboea the sheep have no gall-bladder, whereas in Naxos practically all the quadrupeds have so large a one that when foreigners are offering sacrifice they get quite a shock, supposing that this is some sign from heaven meant for themselves, instead of a natural phenomenon.
•Aristotle, On Animals (ca. 330 BC).

His slow feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are washed in the blood of the lamb. God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen, martyr, war, foundation of a building, sacrifice, kidney burntoffering, druids’ altars. Elijah is coming. Dr John Alexander Dowie restorer of the church of Zion is coming.
          Is coming! Is coming!! Is coming!!!
          All heartily welcome.
•James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
•Wilfred Owen, “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young” (1918).

God says, “You can do what you want, Abe, but
The next time you see me coming you better run.”
Well, Abe says, “Where do you want this killing done?”
•Bob Dylan, “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965).

I found a silver needle,
I put it into my arm.
It did some good,
Did some harm,
But the nights were cold,
And it almost kept me warm.
•Leonard Cohen, “The Butcher” (1969).

’T is man’s perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.
•Emerson, “Sacrifice” (1867).

However, as Confucius pointed out when rebuking a disciple who proposed abandonment of the wasteful and senseless practice of sacrificing a sheep on the first day of every month, a meaningless gesture of courtesy is better than no courtesy at all.
•Sôseki, I Am a Cat III (1906).

“The learned say that your lights will one day be no more,” said the firefly to the stars.
•Tagore, Stray Birds (1913).

Gnaw me down to the ground, O Goat:
Nevertheless my fruit shall survive
To make libation at your sacrifice.
•Eunos of Askalon, from The Greek Anthology.

I, too, have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, and shall be there often yet; and not only rams have I sacrificed to be able to speak with a few of the dead, but I have not spared my own blood.
•Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human vol. II (1879).

Sources: Aristotle: trans A.L. Peck (Loeb) (Harvard UP, 1993); Owen: in Tim Kendall, ed., Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (Oxford UP, 2013); Sôseki: trans. Aiko Ito & Graeme Wilson (Tuttle, 2002); Eunos: in Dudley Fitts, ed. Poems from the Greek Anthology (New Directions, 1956); Nietzsche: The Portable Nietzsche (Viking, 1966); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

I feel so bad today
that I want to write a poem.
I don’t care: any poem, this
          poem.
•Richard Brautigan, “April 7, 1969” (1970).

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind,
•Macaulay, “Milton” (1825).

A famous anecdote has it that when W. H. Auden was a student at Oxford, his tutor asked him what career he planned to pursue. He explained that he wanted to be a poet, and was met with the kind of patronizing smile all poets know so well. “You don’t understand,” Auden retorted, “I mean to be a great poet.”
•Adam Kirsch, “Ambition and Greatness” (2005).

The art of poetry is the art of knowing people and language equally well.
•Paul Fussell Jr., Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (1965).

Poetry, in the past, endeavored to be real, but to do so had to reduce itself to a convention which alone ventured to read the strange stuff of poetry into the reality of things. Where the convention was missing, it was furiously denied that any poetry existed. But what is poetry but a vehement negation of all convention?
•Bataille, Manet (1955).

But try to be original, to keep aff a’ that ever has been said afore, for fear o’ plagiarism, or in ambition o’ originality, and your poem ’ill be like a bit o’ ice that you hae taken into your mouth unawares for a lump o’ white sugar.
•Burns, quoted in Agnes Repplier, Points of View (1891).

All poetry is a confession, and the premises of any confession are one’s confidence in the listener and the candor of the speaker. Rhyme’s original sin is its air of deceit.
•Borges, “A Profession of Literary Faith” (1926).

Writin’ poekry is the hardes’ thing I knows of on account of so many words don’t sound alike.
•E.C. Segar, Thimble Theatre 9/4/32.

But oh, mesdames, if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and tetrameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!
•Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848).

“This is why we call poetry Kvasir’s blood, or dwarf’s drink or intoxication, or some sort of liquid of Óthrörir or Bothn or Són, or dwarfs’ ship, because it was that mead which ransomed them from death on the skerry, or Suttung’s mead or Hnitbjörg’s sea.” ¶ Then Ægir spoke: “It seems for me that to call poetry by these names obscures things.”
•Snorri Sturluson, Edda (ca. 1220).

Sources: Brautigan: Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt (Delacorte, 1970); Macaulay: Critical and Historical Essays vol. 1 (Everyman’s, 1907); Kirsch: quoted in David Orr, Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry (Harper Collins, 2011); Bataille: trans. Wainhouse & Emmons (Skira, 1955); Borges: in Eliot Weinberger, ed., Selected Non-fictions (Viking, 1999); Snorri: trans. Jean I. Young, The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson: Tales from Norse Mythology (Bowes & Bowes, 1954); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

I have never learnt the art of binding myself to any of the wheels on which the Ixions of these days are turning round and round. I missed it somehow in a bad apprenticeship, and now don’t care about it.—
•Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

I never hear of prisons broad
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars
Only to fail again!
•Dickinson, #77 (c. 1859).

¶And therefore men nede not doubte ne drede hym that auanceth hym self for to do that that he can not doo/ For god kepe the mone fro the wolues/
•Caxton, Esopvs (1484).

Watching the shied core
Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,
Shows less and less of luck, and more and more

Of failure spreading, back up the arm
Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,
The apple unbitten in the palm.
•Philip Larkin, “As Bad As a Mile” (1964).

The Linear B tablets contain many names of gods: about half were to go on living as Olympian gods, the other half were lost. We know nothing about them: there are mere names that appear alongside those of Zeus, Poseidon, Hera. As if the Olympian gods had once been far more numerous and now carried around with them the shadows of their lost brothers and sisters.
•Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1988).

There is a kind of snobbery of failure. It’s a club, it’s the old school, it’s Skull and Bones…
•Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (1946).

Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn’t prove there was no America.
•Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953).

He’s not a loser, he’s simply lost.
•Jhonen Vasquez, JTHM: The Director’s Cut (1997).

There was once a fountain, he said, in one of the public squares called Il fuente del toro, the fountain of the bull, because the water gushed from the mouth of a bull’s head, carved of stone. Underneath the head was inscribed:

El frente del toro
Se hallen tesoro.

(In front of the bull there is treasure.) Many digged in front of the fountain, but lost their labor and found no money. At last one knowing fellow construed the motto a different way. It is in the forehead (frente) of the bull that the treasure is to be found, said he to himself, and I am the man to find it. Accordingly he came late at night, with a mallet, and knocked the head to pieces; and what do you think he found?
“Plenty of gold and diamonds!” cried Sancho eagerly.
“He found nothing,” rejoined mine host dryly; “and he ruined the fountain.”
•Washington Irving, “The Journey” (1832).

No author should be considered as having failed until he starts teaching others about writing.
•Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010).

Sources: Dickinson: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little Brown, 1976); Caxton: R.T. Lenaghan, ed., Caxton’s Aesop (Harvard UP, 1967); Larkin: The Whitsun Weddings (Faber & Faber, 2010); Calasso: trans. Tim Parks (Knopf, 1993); Irving: The Alhambra (Twayne, 1983); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

Thieves and lovers must avoid the moonlight
•Kalidasa, The Malavikágnimitram (C4?).

With his venom

Irresistible
and bittersweet

that loosener
of limbs, Love

reptile-like
strikes me down
•Sappho (C6 BC?).

Love has as few problems as a motor car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road.
•Franz Kafka to Gustav Janouch (ca. 1921).

Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it. Also like the measles, we take it only once. One need never be afraid of catching it a second time.
•Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886).

When two beings fall in love with one another and begin to suspect that they were made for each other, it is time to have the courage to break it off; for by going on they have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
•Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1843).

“Always talking of her now!” said Thorgils; “and yet thou wouldst not have her when thou couldst.” “That was more the fault of witchcraft,” answered Cormac.
•Kormáks Saga (c.1250)

Ralph, it appeared, had completely forgotten numerous of his lectures in which he had labeled love as “nothing but a perfumed animal instinct.”
•Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (1912).

At times I wonder
    if people in the ancient past
        like myself tonight
Found it difficult to sleep
    due to longing over love

It is not these days
    alone that this holds true
        in those former times
Lovers even went so far
    as to weep in grief aloud
•Kakinomoto Hitomaro, Manyōshū (coll. 760).

    I am not yet two-and-twenty, and I am weary of life. O,
Loves, why do you treat me so, why set me on fire?
    For when I die what will you do then?
    Play with your dice as before, thoughtless Loves!
•Asklepiades (C4 BC).

And I am two-and-twenty
    And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.
•A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896). 

Sources: Kalidasa: trans. C.H. Tawney (Thacker, Spink & Co., 1891); Sappho: trans. Mary Barnard, Sappho: A New Translation (UCLAP, 1958); Kafka: quoted in Janouch, Conversations with Kafka (Praeger, 1953); Kierkegaard: trans. David and Lillian M. Swenson (Princeton UP, 1959); Kormáks: trans. J. Stefansson & W.G. Collingwood as The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald (Wm. Holmes, 1901); Hitomaro: trans. Harold Wright, Ten Thousand Leaves: Love Poems from the Manyōshū (Overlook, 1985); Asklepiades: trans Edward Storer in The Windflowers of Asklepiades and the Poems of Poseidippos (Egoist, 1920); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

When the world was not, there was still this reality. When the world is destroyed, this reality is not destroyed.
•Jōshū, Recorded Sayings (coll. c. 950?).

My role on this planet is to unearth the vestiges of a defunct civilization, to reconstruct a whole world out of the garbage of this society, because we are not going towards the apocalypse, we are in the apocalypse.
•Roger Chomeaux, artist’s statement (ca. 1975).

Not only the Guarani but all the Nature is old and weary of life. How often the medicine-men, when they went to meet, in dream, Nanderuvuvu, have heard the Earth imploring him: “I have already devoured too many crops, I am filled from it, and I am exhausted. Do make an end of it, my Father!” The water also beseeched the Creator to let it rest, disturbed no longer, and so the trees…and so all the rest of nature.
•Curt Nimuendajú, “The Legends of the Creation and Destruction of the World As the Foundations of the Religion of the Apapocuva-Guarani” (1914).

We are no longer surprised that the nature of men, being mortal and ephemeral, compels them to perish. We see that rivers run dry, and we hear that even the highest mountains are reduced in height. Sailors report sighting Etna from a shorter distance than it used to be visible from. The very same thing is said about Parnassus and Pierian Olympus. Those who are credited with having investigated the nature of the world in more detail say that the cosmos itself is being destroyed.
•Aelian, Varia Historia (C3).

From time to time, as a result of floods, plagues, failures of crops or other similar causes, there occurs a catastrophic destruction of the human race, in which all knowledge of the arts and social institutions is lost.
•Polybius, Histories (C2 BC).

In the beginning God created numerous worlds, destroying one after the other as they failed to satisfy Him. All were inhabited by man, a thousand generations of whom he cut off, leaving no record of them.
•Robert Graves & Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths (1963).

The preachers announced the end of the world, but Salvatore’s parents and grandparents remembered the same story in the past as well, so they came to the conclusion that the world was always about to end.
•Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (1980).

Such things have often happened and will happen and how can these be signs of the end of the world.
•Julian, fragment 1 (ca. 360).

Caesarea and Jerusalem:
If a man should tell you they are both in ruins, do not believe it.
That they are both inhabited, do not believe it.
That Caesarea is in ruins and Jerusalem inhabited,
or Jerusalem in ruins and Caesarea inhabited—believe it.
•Megillah, 6a.

Jerusalem was, New England is; they were, you are, God’s own, God’s covenant people; put but New England’s name instead of Jerusalem.
•Samuel Wakeman, Sound Repentance the Right Way to Escape Deserved Ruine (1685).

Sources: Jōshū: trans. James Green, The Recorded Sayings of the Zen Master Joshu (Shambhala, 1998); Chomeaux: quoted in Marcus Schubert, Outsider Art II: Visionary Environments (Kyoto Shoin, 1991); Nimuendajú: quoted in Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (Harper Colophon, 1975); Aelian: trans. N.G. Wilson, Historical Miscellany (Loeb) (Harvard UP, 1997); Polybius: trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Penguin, 1979); Julian: trans. Wilmer Cave Wright, Julian vol. III (Loeb) (Harvard UP, 1998); Megillah: Nahum N. Glatzer, Hammer on the Rock: A Midrash Reader (Shocken, 1977); Wakeman: quoted in Tudor Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel (Orion, 2003); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

Our every meeting
With each other
Is an omen.
•Archilochus, fragment 104 (ca. 648 BC).

As they were passing through the leafy woods the Sheriff crossed himself, saying, “God save us this day from that naughty varlet, Robin Hood!” ¶ “Amen, so be it,” said jolly Robin, who was leading deeper and deeper into the forest.
•Louis Rhead, Bold Robin Hood and His Outlaw Band: Their Famous Exploits in Sherwood Forest (1912).

DEAR CLARK KENT, if you know what I mean…
•Joseph Torchia, The Kryptonite Kid (1979).

I’m not a split personality,
But if I were, I’d send another me.
•Del Shannon, ”I Wish I Wasn’t Me Tonight” (1966).

The maid, who had come in with more saké, said, “We’re in luck. We have the real impersonator tonight.”
Her remark puzzled Suezō. “You mean there are real impersonators and fake impersonators?”
“Yes.”
•Ōgai Mori, The Wild Goose (1913).

There is a secret core in everyone
not even Gabriel can know by trying to know.
•Rumi, Divan-Shamsi Tabriz (ca. 1247).

It is the “hidden” (chamusweka) that is “dangerous” or “noxious” (chafwana). Thus, to name an inauspicious condition is halfway to removing that condition; to embody the invisible action of witches or shades in a visible or tangible symbol is a step towards remedying it. This is not so very far removed from the practice of the modern psychologist.
•Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969).

Thus is man that great and true amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds; for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible; whereof Moses seems to have left description, and of the other so obscurely, that some parts thereof are yet in controversy.
•Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643).

The point of these accounts is that the task is perfectly fulfilled when the quest is prosecuted up to the stage of seeking what is not sought (but stops short of that). For first principles are not sought, since they are present and to hand; and if what is present is sought for, it becomes hidden and lost. When, however, a man seeks what is sought (and that only), he is not accused of falling short in the seeking of what is sought.
•Al-Ghazali, Deliverance from Error and Attachment to The Lord of Might and Majesty (ca. 1107).

So Jacobites must speak in children’s rhymes,
As Preachers do in Parables, sometimes.
•Timothy Tox, Pennsylvaniad (1708).

Sources: Archilochus: trans. Guy Davenport in 7 Greeks (New Directions, 1995); Mori: trans. Burton Watson (U MI P, 1995); Rumi: John Moyne & Coleman Barks, eds., Unseen Rain: Quatrains of Rumi (Shambala, 2006); Al-Ghazali: trans. W. Montgomery Watt, The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazali (Kazi, 1982); Tox: obv. really Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (Henry Holt, 1998); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

Gold is found in the bed of the stream, not floating along with the ripples of its surface.
•Not in the Curriculum: A Book of Friendly Counsel to Students (1903).

It is the controller of Nature alone, that can bring light out of darkness, and order out of confusion. Who is he that causeth the mole, from his secret path of darkness, to throw up the gem, the gold, and the precious ore?
•James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).

What does the lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek mean to a doctor but a “break” that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn’t he simply view he professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn’t he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?
•Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883).

Feeling is deep and still, and the word that floats on the surface
Is as the tossing buoy, that betrays where the anchor is hidden.
Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.
•Longfellow, Evangeline (1847).

Underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn’t any underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn’t any underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn’t any underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn’t any underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn’t any underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn’t any underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn’t any underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn’t any underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn’t any underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn’t any underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn’t any
•Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch (1963).

He looks up
as if he were already adamantly elsewhere
   exerting that power of denial
   the soul is famous for,
the ability to say, “None of this is real:

Nothing that happened here on earth
and who I thought I was,
and nothing that I did or that was done to me
was ever real.”
•Tony Hoagland, “Arrows” (1998).

At a certain moment, we cannot but hope, the ordinary markers of success will show themselves to be fraudulent, irrelevant, diversionary. All those cheating hucksters, those athletes and lovers, those trusted businessmen and competent professionals, those good fathers, good husbands, and good providers will hang their heads in shame while the rest of us stand forward, unapologetic at last.
•Paul Park, All Those Vanished Engines (2014).

He had been about to say, more or less: God does not really mean the world literally; it is a metaphor, an analogy, a figure of speech that He has to resort to for some reason or other, and it never satisfies Him, of course. We are not supposed to take Him at his word; it is we ourselves who must come up with the answer for the riddle He sets us.
•Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities II (1932).

Thou shalt not trespass where the loveliest lies,
Nor use the holiest place for common prayer,
As surely as God liveth, to the eyes
Of him who lifts the veil, He is not there.
•Arthur Colton, “The Thrush” (1907).

Abraham saw signs of God and believed. Now the only sign is that all the signs in the world make no difference. Is this God’s ironic revenge? But I am onto him.
•Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961).

Sources: Cortázar: trans. G. Rabassa (Pantheon, 1987); Hoagland: Donkey Gospel (Graywolf, 1998); Musil: trans. Sophie Wilkins (Vintage, 1996); Colton: Harps Hung Up in Babylon (Henry Holt, 1907); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.