Georges Simenon’s — whose autobiography speaks of as many as a thousand.
That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.
Says a Flaubert letter.
Yeats evidently knew no music.
The word serendipity.
Coined by Horace Walpole, in a 1754 fairy story.
August 22, 1904, Kate Chopin died on.
August 17, 1935, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
George Eliot’s instantaneous anger over any sort of anti-Semitic reference or joke.
Molière was on stage, performing in the role of the hypochondriac in his own last play Le Malade imaginaire, when he was stricken by the bursting blood vessel that caused his death a day later.
I hope I never get so old I get religious.
Quoth Ingmar Bergman.
Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over.
Like their grandly perspicacious uncles — who groused that Monet had done those damnable water lilies nine dozen times already also.
When a head and a book collide, and one sounds hollow — is it always the book?
Asked Lichtenberg.
Owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.
Milton labeled critics.
Ménière’s disease, Swift suffered from.
Erysipelas, Herman Melville.
Chopin’s phthisis — which left him weighing less than one hundred pounds.
They told me I was everything; ’tis a lie — I am not ague-proof.
Realizes Lear.
The central railway-station platform of destinies.
Blaise Cendrars called early twentieth-century Bohemian Paris.
Virginia Woolf ’s suicide, for which she filled her pockets with stones before walking into the Ouse.
Wondering if anyone has ever noted how many stones — and what they might possibly have weighed?
Sleet falling;
Fathomless, infinite
Loneliness.
Verlaine was at most eight or nine feet away when he famously fired three shots at Rimbaud with a revolver — fortunately no more than wounding him in the wrist with the first and missing completely with the next two.
The painter of painters.
Manet called Velazquez.
A German equivalent of Tubby, Schubert’s nickname was, among his friends.
Not to be born is far best.
Wrote Sophocles.
Not to be born at all would be the best thing.
Wrote Theognis, at least a half-century earlier.
Richard Feynman’s conviction that as the perspective grows more and more distant, James Clerk Maxwell will loom ever larger as the single towering eminence of the nineteenth century.
The one truly great political figure of our age.
Einstein called Gandhi.
Dostoievsky’s graduation from an engineering institute.
Achieved only after having first failed elementary algebra.
A cobbler makes a greater contribution to society than does a Homer or a Plato.
Asserted Proudhon.
Katherine Mansfield was dead at thirty-five.
March 7, 1944, Emmanuel Ringelbaum died on.
Ballplayers on the road live together. It won’t work.
Said Rogers Hornsby re the signing of Jackie Robinson.
I only wished to tell people honestly: Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live!
Said Chekhov, late along.
Tirso de Molina, who wrote the first dramatic version of the Don Juan legend — in which he allows someone to ask the stone Commendatore if there are taverns in the underworld.
And can poets down there still win prizes?
John Ruskin’s insistence that he could never live in America — a country so miserable as to possess no castles, as he put it.
Freud’s addiction to cocaine.
Sherlock Holmes’.
Contemporary college students — college students — who when asked to identify Joan of Arc have supposed her to be a character in the Biblical story of Noah and the flood.
Or indeed Noah’s wife.
The first hospital in Europe was opened in Paris in the seventh century AD.
At least four hundred years after such things existed in Hindu India.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
America is now given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.
Determined Hawthorne, in 1855.
The greatest achievement for a woman is to be as seldom as possible spoken of, said Thucydides.
Who mentions not one of them in his history.
Johnson’s Lives of the Poets — which mentions none either.
Yasser Arafat was reported not to have read one book in the last forty years of his life.
But to have spent innumerable hours enrapt by Tom and Jerry cartoons.
The man who has seen a truly beautiful woman has seen God.
Said Rumi.
a pretty girl who naked is is
worth a million statues
Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, John Cowper Powys died in.
By her own count, Vigée-Lebrun produced six hundred and sixty-two portraits.
Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.
Wrote Dickens.
Butterfly, my child.
Puccini spoke of her as.
William Faulkner. Seated on a park bench near City Hall in today’s Oxford, Mississippi — in bronze.
Thomas Eakins was once accused of incest with a sister.
And a niece.
Henry Roth acknowledged the same with a sister — and for over a period of years.
Contemplating several of Turner’s early watercolors, a prospective buyer implies that he has recently seen better.
Which has to mean you’ve been looking at Tom Girtin, Turner tells him.
Wondering if there can be any other ranking twentieth-century American poet whose body of work contains even half the percentage of pure drivel as Wallace Stevens’.
Novelist’s calendar, which he leafs through idly to verify something he already suspected — that he has been out to dinner a grand total of three times in the entire past year, and then only when taken by some book person with an expense account.
The unceasing preoccupation with marriageableness and/or the economics of same in Jane Austen.
Suicide is more respectable, Emerson said.
Rarely remembering that the first translation from ancient Greek any of us learn to quote is of Pythagoras.
Kierkegaard’s mother had originally been the family maid, whom his father married after the death of an earlier wife. There is not one word about her in anything Kierkegaard ever wrote, his journals included.
Henry Fielding’s wife’s maid — whom he likewise married after the wife’s death.
Rembrandt’s — who became his mistress.
Handel spent almost fifty years in London — and to the end spoke only broken English.
The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the et cetera.
Hideous, Hume condemned much of Spinoza as.
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
Said Voltaire — describing opera.
Unlike most Italians, Joe DiMaggio never reeks of garlic.
Life magazine matter-of-factly took note of in 1939.
Not to add that he keeps his hair slick with water instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease — unquote, additionally.
And so to Mrs. Martin and there did what je voudrais avec her, both devante and backward.
Reads an entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary for early June, 1666.
An earlier tenant in the same London building where Sylvia Plath would commit suicide — had been Yeats.