A garland of quotations LXIX
Culled from the finest new acquisitions in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
The world was full of poetry and I was enjoying myself.
•Isaac Asimov, “Can You Prove It?” (1981).
The shepherd, who makes so pretty a picture carrying home the lamb, is only carrying it home for dinner.
•Robert Louis Stevenson, “Will o’ the Mill” (1878).
As ten millions of circles can never make a square, so the united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to falsehood.
•Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1773).
In the worst night of my waking fever, I remember well how my puzzled brain tried repeatedly to work out a quadratic equation which no amount of transposition would enable me to solve. Existence in the narrow borderland which intervenes between sanity and insanity in such cases is always a fearful experience.
•Garnet Wolseley, A Soldier’s Life vol. II (1904).
Next to no wife and children, your owne are the best pastime, anothers wife and your children worse, your wife & anothers children worst.
•Nevves from any whence. Or, old trvth vnder a svpposall of Noueltie. Occasioned by diuers Essayes, and priuate passages of Wit, betweene sundrie Gentlemen vpon that subiect (1616).
All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves must fade and perish;
Such is our rude mortal lot—
Love itself would, did they not.
•Shelley, from Posthumous Poems (1824).
Death is for beasts, it is not the lover's destiny.
•Yunus Emre (c. 1300).
In this lock-up I’m confined;
If I stay long I’ll lose my mind.
Two days and nights I’ve paced the floor,
As many others have before.
•Arthur M. Winfield, The Rover Boys at School (1899).
In the Countess Salm’s letters she said, “Ludi never was made to work—he hates it.” That is the difference between Ludi and the rest of us, who merely hate it.
•Franklin P. Adams, Half a Loaf (1927).
“Bless my heart,” cries my young, volatile reader, “I shall never have patience to get through these volumes, there are so many ahs! and ohs! so much fainting, tears, and distress, I am sick to death of the subject.”
•Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple (1790).
References: Asimov: Banquets of the Black Widowers (Doubleday, 1984); Stevenson: The Merry Men (Books Inc., c. 1937); Yunus Emre: quoted in Talat S. Halman, Turkish Legends and Folk Poems (Dost Yayınları, 1992); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.
