A garland of quotations LIII

Culled from the finest iterations in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday

Truth is the anagram of an anagram. Anagrams = ars magna.
•Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum (1988).

God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience.
•Melville, Moby-Dick (1851).

Is it but a world of trouble—
Sadness set to song?
Is its beauty but a bubble
Bound to break ere long?

Are its palaces and pleasures
Fantasies that fade?
And the glory of its treasures
Shadow of a shade?
•Gilbert, The Mikado (1885).

I will be a ha’aye’i to the ha’aye’i.
•Frederik Pohl, Jem (1979).

I would have been Medea to your Medea!
•Ovid, Heroides (ca. 20 B.C.).

Master of all masters, get out of your barnacle and put on your squibs and crackers! For white-faced simminy has got a spark of hot cockalorum on its tail, and unless you get some pondalorum, high-topper mountain will be all on hot cockalorum!
•trad.

[Abd al-Rahman] placed dignitaries, whom [ambassadors] took for kings, for they were seated on splendid chairs and arrayed in brocades and silks. Each time the ambassadors saw one of these dignitaries they prostrated themselves before him imagining him to be the caliph, whereupon they were told, “Raise your heads! This is but the slave of his slaves!” ¶At last they entered a courtyard strewn with sand. At the centre was the caliph. His clothes were coarse and short: what he was wearing was worth no more than four dirhems. He was seated on the ground, his head bent; in front of him was a Koran, a sword and fire. “Behold, the ruler,” the ambassadors were told.
•Muyi al-Din Ibn al-Arabi (C13).

The disappointed man speaks.—“I listened for an echo and I heard only praise—.”
•Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886).

O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
•Poe, “A Dream Within a Dream” (1849).

“It is the law.”
“What?”
“That a nothing should torment a nothing; for I am a nothing. It is all a dream—we dream that we dreamed we dream.”
•Melville, Pierre (1852).

We have a harmless, necessary Cat
To catch our Mouse and predatory Rat.
    We grieve to say that every little while
She catches Kittens or some Things like that.
•Harry Persons Taber, The Rubáiyát of the Commuter (1905).

References: Ovid: Florence Verducci, Ovid’s Toyshop of the Heart (Princeton UP, 1985); Muyi: quoted in Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam (Random House, 2004); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.