A garland of quotations LXX
Culled from the finest inquisitors in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
What knowe I of the queene Nyobe?
•Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385).
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?
•Shakespeare, Hamlet (ca. 1600).
What has Ingeld to do with Christ?
•Alcuin, letter to Bishop Hygebald (797).
The beginning of the end,
How was it recognized?
•Qu Yuan, Tian Wen (c. 343-c. 277 BC).
Are you alone insensible to the beams that descend from Helios? Are you alone ignorant that summer and winter are from him? Or that all kinds of animal and plant life proceed from him? And do you not perceive what great blessings the city derives from her who is generated from and by him, even Selene who is the creator of the whole universe?
•Julian, letter to the Alexandrians (362).
Who has ever heard of prose designed to be an enigma?
•Babur, letter to Humayun (1528).
Can I have my dream back after you’re finished wiping your ass with it?
•David Peattie, letter to Frank Miller (1995).
What would the naturalist do without the hunter?
•R.M. Ballantyne, The Gorilla Hunters (1861).
Is it necrophilia if I’m dead too?
•Marc Hempel, “Rat of God” (1992).
Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and god? “Thou shalt” is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, “I will.”
•Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathurstra (1883).
Why should I feel another mans mistakes
More then his sicknesses or povertie?
In love I should: but anger is not love,
Nor wisdome neither: therefore gently move.
•Herbert, The Temple (1633).
References: Alcuin: quoted in H. Munro Chadwick, The Heroic Age (Cambridge, 1926); Qu: trans. Stephen Field, Tian Wen: A Chinese Book of Origins (New Directions, 1986); Julian: trans. Wilmer Cave Wright, Julian vol. III (Loeb) (Harvard UP, 1998); Babur: trans. Wheeler M. Thackston, The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor (Modern, 2002); Peattie: in Sin City: Silent Night (Dark Horse, Nov. 1995); Hempel: Gregory #2 (DC, 1992); Nietzsche: The Portable Nietzsche (Viking, 1966); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.