A garland of quotations LX

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

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realizes that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
•E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (1973).

Rome rose with the idiom of Caesar, Ovid, and Tacitus, she declined in a welter of rhetoric, the diplomat’s “language to conceal thought,” and so forth. ¶The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.
•Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934).

Howbeit then, but it is long to relate, ’tis weariness of mind, ’tis confusion of the senses, ’tis tediousness to hearers, ’tis superfluity of narration to go over the same things twice.
•The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel (c. 1100).

It’s a Renaissance Man who has three things to ‘say’ about life; usually it’s one or two things.
•Martin Amis, in John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (1985).

About the year 1830 there appeared, in one of the states of the American Union bordering on Kentucky, an impostor who declared that he was the Son of God, Christ, the Saviour of mankind, and that he had reappeared on earth to recall the impious, the unbelieving, and sinners to their duty. He protested that if they did not mend their ways within a certain time, he would give the signal, and in a moment the world would crumble to ruins. These extravagant pretensions were received with favour even by persons of wealth and position in society. At last a German humbly besought the new Messiah to announce the dreadful catastrophe to his fellow-countrymen in the German language, as they did not understand English, and it seemed a pity that they should be damned merely on that account. The would-be Saviour in reply confessed with great candour that he did not know German, “What!” retorted the German, “you the Son of God, and don’t speak all languages, and don’t even know German? Come, come, you are a knave, a hypocrite, and a madman. Bedlam is the place for you.” The spectators laughed, and went away ashamed of their credulity.
•J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890–1910).

Tom Moore tells a pleasant story (one of the many pleasant stories embalmed in his vast sarcophagus of a diary) about a street orator whom he heard address a crowd in Dublin. The man’s eloquence was so stirring that Moore was ravished by it, and he expressed to Sheil his admiration for the speaker. “Ah,” said Sheil carelessly, “that was a brewer’s patriot. Most of the great brewers have in their employ a regular patriot who goes about among the publicans, talking violent politics, which helps to sell the beer.”
•Agnes Repplier, “The Chill of Enthusiasm” (1912).

All horses on the racecourse of Tralee
    Have four more legs in gallop than in trot—
    Two pairs fully extended, two pairs not;
And yet no thoroughbred with either three
    Or five legs but is mercilessly shot.
I watched a filly gnaw her fifth leg free,
Warned by a speaking mare since turned silentiary.
•Robert Graves “Grotesques” (ca. 1944).

Elias did everything the swan had said, but instead of chopping off the head of the stag, he chopped off the head of the innkeeper’s wife. He rode away as fast as he could after sending the servant back home. From now on he was going to be on his own.
•Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, “Twelve Tortoises.” (ca. 1861).

O Lord of Caves
if you are light,
there can be no metaphor.
•Allama Prabhu, vacana 972 (C12).

References: Cioran: op. cit.; Dá Derga: op. cit.; Repplier: Americans and Others (Houghton Mifflin, 1912); Graves: Collected Poems (Doubleday, 1966); von Schönwerth: The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales (Penguin, 2015); Allama Prabhu: A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva (Penguin, 1973); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.