Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night.
Says the King James translation of Psalms 91:5.
Thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night.
Says Miles Coverdale’s earlier version.
A designated area for booksellers existed in the central market in Athens as far back as in the fifth century BC.
The report from that same era to the effect that Aeschylus gave up writing after members of an audience were killed when a tier of wooden benches collapsed during a performance of his work.
At least one of Modigliani’s sculptures was carved from a discarded construction-site stone — because he could not afford to pay money for something better.
Jean-Baptiste Lully’s confessor once refused to grant him absolution unless Lully agreed to destroy the score of a recent opera, which the confessor believed blasphemous. Lully let the work be burned and was properly shrived.
With an extra copy safely set aside.
Neither Graham Greene nor Evelyn Waugh ever learned to drive a car.
I always said God was against art and I still believe it.
Said Edward Elgar — while impatiently awaiting acclaim.
All artists are bores.
Unquote. Clement Greenberg.
By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we anathematize, execrate, curse, and cast out Baruch Spinoza, the whole of the sacred community assenting —
This trivial and vulgar way of union; it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.
Declaimed Sir Thomas Browne — about sex.
Organized Christian denominations and their individual congregations:
Chain stores and their retail outlets, Thorstein Veblen called them.
Duke Ellington and Miles Davis are buried in the same Bronx cemetery.
Chopin was buried in Père Lachaise in Paris — but with Polish earth later sprinkled on the grave.
— There shall be no man speak to him, no man write to him, no man show him any kindness, no man stay under the same roof with him, no man come nigh him.
The greatest novel ever written.
Kingsley called Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
November 6 or 7, 1944, Hannah Senesch was executed on.
As his once extraordinary fame in France’s literary world faded, Chateaubriand also became extremely hard of hearing.
He only thinks he is deaf because he no longer hears himself talked about, Talleyrand said.
Virgil was five years older than Horace.
Wondering when and where the last casual streetcorner conversation in Latin might have taken place.
Norma loquendi.
The rumor that Frieda Lawrence’s lover after Lawrence’s death, whom she asked to transport Lawrence’s ashes from France to New Mexico, indifferently dumped them — and substituted no one knows what before the Taos reburial.
Mouse-poor, Robert Graves describes John Clare as having been.
Drunk as a mouse.
Chaucer somewhere writes.
A sub-human species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time.
General George S. Patton compassionately described Jewish concentration-camp survivors as.
Picasso. Cézanne. Matisse. Braque. Bonnard. Renoir.
All of whom painted portraits of Ambroise Vollard.
Cartier-Bresson. Brassaï. Man Ray. Lee Miller. Robert Doisneau. Robert Capa. David Douglas Duncan. Cecil Beaton.
All of whom photographed Picasso.
George Washington’s will called for the freeing of his slaves.
As had Aristotle’s for the freeing of most of his — 2,100 years earlier.
More’s Utopia, in which women are granted full and equal rights to education with men — dated 1516.
Pulmonary fibrosis, Marlon Brando died of.
Don’t keep talking to me about nature, said Corot. All I see out there are Corots.
A 1940 letter from Béla Bartók, new in New York, about attempting to go by subway from Forest Hills, in Queens, to lower Manhattan —
And spending three mystified hours underground before sneaking shamefacedly home — his words — without ever achieving his destination.
Turner’s eternal stovepipe hat.
Eliot’s bowler.
Saul Bellow’s fedora.
A precious, priestly, hothouse darling.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch dismissed Hopkins as.
Revolting, the London Times called Millais’ Christ in the House of His Parents.
The occasion, soon after Vladimir Horowitz became Toscanini’s son-in-law, on which Toscanini leaned from the podium and patted him on the head at the end of a performance.
Green eyes, the self-portraits indicate van Gogh had.
It has been possible for a long time to conceive of a poet who has never written a poem.
Leslie Fiedler once said.
Debussy never learned which side won World War I.
Old enough to have started coming upon likenesses on postage stamps of other writers he had known personally or had at least met in passing.
Anthony Trollope was once told by an acquaintance that one of his recurring serialized characters had become boring.
Trollope killed her off in the next installment.
The misfortunate, otherwise unknown first-century BC Roman Egnatius — remembered because of a poem in which Catullus accuses him of cleaning his teeth with urine.
The only excuse for the suffering that God allows in the world — is that he does not exist.
Stendhal said.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s addiction to morphine.
And/or ether.
Is there one major Dostoievsky novel in which no one commits suicide?
Dostoievsky gave me more than any thinker, more even than Gauss.
Einstein said.
Former Naval Person —
Winston Churchill’s code name having been in World War II.
Colonel Berger —
Malraux’s, in the Resistance.
Kipling, who was forty-two, remains the youngest author to win the Nobel Prize.
Camus was forty-four.
July 17, 1967, John Coltrane died on.
Aspen, Colorado, Mina Loy died in.
Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, kept a twenty-year diary that was evidently devoted almost entirely to the evisceration of his character.
Hardy burned every word of it at her death.
A second wife, Florence, once accused him of not having spoken to anyone outside of their house in twelve days. Hardy insisted he had.
He had said good morning to the manure-cart driver.
O body, mass of corruptions, what have I to do with thee?
Asked Augustine.
The proper study of mankind is books.
Said Aldous Huxley.
Benoit Mandelbrot.
Benoit de Sainte-Maure.
Émile Zola’s certainty that after a hundred years Les Fleurs du Mal would be no more than a footnoted curiosity in literary history.
Maugham’s — that there was nothing to be found in Mallarmé but pretense and platitudes.
The identity of the Immortal Beloved.
Keep hold of my arm, they must make room for us, not we for them.
Shortly after its publication, Robert McAlmon informed Joyce that he planned to throw his copy of Ulysses out the window. Joyce told him not to:
Socrates might be passing in the street.
E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot.
Said Katherine Mansfield.
The early Shakespearean Betterton, distressed over foreign intrusions onto the late seventeenth-century London stage:
By squeaking Italians and capering monsieurs, end quote.
Shakespeare’s birthday, Turner was born on.
More greatness in this man than in any other born in our times.
Vasari saw in Donatello.