Nelson, at Trafalgar. Who had a horseshoe nailed to the mainmast of the Victory before the battle.
Niels Bohr — who kept one above a door in his vacation home.
Niels Bohr.
I would rather have a drop of luck than a barrel of brains.
Allegedly said Diogenes.
Franco Zeffirelli’s Taming of the Shrew. In which Zeffirelli’s name in the credits was larger than Shakespeare’s.
Please return this book. I find that though many of my friends are poor mathematicians, they are nearly all good bookkeepers.
Read Walter Scott’s bookplate.
January 14, 2005, Victoria de los Angeles died on.
Ivor Gurney, who was both wounded and gassed at Passchendaele, spent the last fifteen of his remaining twenty years in a mental institution — convinced that the war was still going on.
Italo Calvino died after a cerebral hemorrhage suffered while sitting in a garden.
A portable fatherland, Heine called the Torah.
From a letter of Petrarch’s, ca. 1352, in which he mentions having been reminded of some task or other by the town clock:
By this recent invention we now measure time in almost all of the cities of northern Italy.
Eliot’s second marriage, in 1957, took place in the same Kensington church where Jules Laforgue had been married seventy-one years earlier — which Eliot claimed not to have known beforehand.
How can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?
Asked the principal headline in the London Daily Mirror after the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004.
G. E. Moore was known to appear at his Cambridge classroom in bedroom slippers.
Father, dear father, come home with me now!
The clock in the steeple strikes one.
I don’t go upstairs two nights out of seven without taking Washington Irving under my arm.
Said Dickens.
Actually, the door to Novelist’s roof is connected to an alarm. Workmen unable to locate the building superintendent now and again trip it. No one pays any attention, however.
Jean Giraudoux spent two very brief periods, when young, as an instructor at Harvard.
And for years thereafter kept a Harvard pennant above the bed in his Paris apartment.
The writer Bret Easton Ellis, who imparted to a New York Times reporter that he had been reading the Bible — but then seemed uncertain as to whether in the Old Testament or the New.
Were the stories about Moses or Jesus?
Jesus. I think.
The frequent blind beggars in Euripides, particularly in plays now lost.
The crutch and cripple playwright, Aristophanes called him.
August Strindberg’s mother had been a barmaid.
The marriage of Roberta Peters and Robert Merrill — which lasted three months.
The Greatest Novel Reader in the World.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning suggested her own epitaph could well be.
Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose. At twenty-seven.
Sir Thomas Bodley, who organized the Oxford library subsequently named the Bodleian, permitted the inclusion of no such idle bookes and riffe raffes — unquote — as writings for the current theater.
Including of course those of his almost exact contemporary Shakespeare.
Allen Ginsberg’s insistence that he was once accosted by the apparitional voice of William Blake — immediately after masturbating.
How now! Whose mare’s dead?
The extraordinary fame of Menander in antiquity — to the point where he is even quoted by Saint Paul.
Robert Graves’ claim that as an infant at Wimbledon he had been occasionally patted on the head by Swinburne — he himself being wheeled by his nurse, Swinburne en route to his pub.
Theodore Watts-Dunton’s wife’s claim that when the monumentally alcoholic Swinburne was finally weaned away from brandy, he initially drank port because Tennyson did, then burgundy because of the Musketeers in Dumas, and at last ale — because of Shakespeare.
What a pleasant party, Plutarch records someone commenting to Timon of Athens.
It would be, if you were gone, Timon responds.
If there is anyone here I have forgotten to insult, I apologize.
Announced Brahms, exiting somewhere — 2,300 years later.
Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad.
No battleship has yet been sunk by bombs.
Said the caption on a photograph of the USS Arizona in the program for the 1941 Army-Navy football game — eight days before Pearl Harbor.
Ovid’s banishment from Rome by Augustus — which meant that his books were automatically removed from the city’s libraries as well.
The similar banning of Virgil’s and Livy’s three decades later — by Caligula, who simply did not like them.
May the devil bung a cesspool with his skull.
Requested John Millington Synge, re a dim-witted reviewer.
One of us was once in love for eight days with a woman of fairly easy virtue, and the other for three days with a ten-franc whore. Altogether, eleven days of love between the two of us.
Being Edmond and Jules Goncourt, elucidating their relationships with the opposite sex.
Longfellow published his first poem at thirteen.
Bryant wrote Thanatopsis at seventeen — and after publication several years later was to hear it called a hoax.
No one, on this side of the Atlantic, is capable of writing such verses, insisted Richard Henry Dana.
Never having realized that there originally once was an actual troublemaking Irish family named Hooligan.
Or a military officer named Shrapnel.
The John Cage composition entitled 4'33"
.
In which the performer sits at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds — and plays nothing.
Cervantes was fifty-eight when Part I of Don Quixote was published.
And sixty-eight at Part II.
Finding the earliest hints of a theory of evolution in Anaximander.
In the sixth century BC.
I never knew a writer’s wife who wasn’t beautiful.
Said Kurt Vonnegut.
Has Novelist ever known many who could not contrive some way to keep the pot boiling during fallow stretches?
General Mikhail T. Kalashnikov.
Joseph Ignace Guillotin.
Sir Rudolf Bing was once robbed of a cheap watch he wore only for sentimental reasons. Zinka Milanov was infuriated:
The General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera does not display a twenty-dollar wristwatch!
The mugging in which Giuseppe di Stefano, at eighty-three, was quite badly injured — while being stripped of a gold chain he had been given by Maria Callas.
It was Beckett’s wife who took the call informing them that Beckett had won the Nobel Prize. Her first reaction, even as she turned to tell him:
Quelle catastrophe!
Toledo, Judah Halevi was born in.
Córdoba, Maimonides.
Saint Benedict, essentially the founder of moderate monastic rule.
Whose earliest regulations as an abbot were so harsh that the monks tried to poison his wine.
In the dense mist
What is being shouted
Between hill and boat?
Beethoven’s brief period as a pupil of Hadyn’s:
I never learned anything from the man.
There is no such thing as abstract art, said Picasso.
You always have to start somewhere or other.
Inconceivable nonsense.
Tchaikovsky called Das Rheingold.
Machiavelli’s interminable visits to prostitutes — described in unexpurgated detail in his correspondence.
Graham Greene’s — so compulsive that a biographer was able to reproduce a cryptic list, in Greene’s handwriting, of a favorite forty-seven.