Pelion and Ossa. In Odyssey XI. In Georgics I. In Horace’s Odes III.
With small Latin and less Greek, Shakespeare found them for Hamlet where?
The thirteen extant letters of Plato.
Did Plato write any of the thirteen?
Gertrude Stein once delighted Picasso by reporting that a collector had been dumbfounded, years afterward, to hear that Picasso had given her her portrait as a gift, rather than asking payment.
Not understanding that that early in Picasso’s career, the difference had been next to negligible.
I don’t think anybody should write his autobiography until after he’s dead.
Said Samuel Goldwyn.
One author pilfers the best of another.
And calls it tradition.
Says a fragment of Bacchylides, ca. 450 BC.
Brooklyn, Leonard Bernstein is buried in.
February 22, 1913, Saussure died on.
Too lazy to copy down passages he thought he might later wish to quote, De Quincey often simply ripped them out of the book at hand.
Even when the book was someone else’s.
A photo of Lillie Langtry, as Rosalind in As You Like It, taken in 1882.
How can Novelist have fallen in love with someone dead since 1929?
Henry James, addressing Joseph Conrad: Mon cher confrère.
Conrad, addressing James: Mon cher maître.
Both, repeatedly, when in conversation, said Ford Madox Ford.
More than fifty relatives of Bach, whose names remain on record, were musicians.
Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
Guy Davenport’s account of a lunch with Thomas Merton — at which Merton devoured six martinis.
Spinach, fruit, water.
Having been Mahler’s unvarying diet.
Ethiopians have black sperm, believed Herodotus.
A sort of gutless Kipling.
Orwell called Auden.
Ernest Poole. Margaret Wilson. Julia M. Peterkin. Margaret Ayer Barnes. T. S. Stribling.
Being five of the first fifteen winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Caroline Miller. Josephine W. Johnson. Harold L. Davis.
Being the next three.
Ted Hughes’s father was one of only seventeen survivors from an entire regiment annihilated at Gallipoli.
No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more.
Said Seamus Heaney at the 1998 funeral of Hughes himself.
I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion, I loathe the country.
Says someone in Congreve’s The Way of the World.
I’m going. I find the company very uncongenital.
Says someone in a Gypsy Rose Lee mystery.
He had abroun hayre. His complexion exceeding faire — he was so faire they called him the Lady of Christ’s College.
Being Milton, as reported by John Aubrey.
Paavo Nurmi died partially paralyzed.
Paavo Nurmi.
The French government provides the Paris Opera a subsidy of roughly $135,000,000 each year.
The United States gives the Metropolitan Opera less than $1,000,000.
At eighteen, John Stuart Mill spent several nights in jail for having distributed birth control pamphlets in a London slum.
Delmore Schwartz, in his disturbed final years, hearing voices — and insisting that they were directed at him from the spire of the Empire State Building.
The Book of Margery Kempe, evidently the first autobiography in English by a woman.
Surely the first to have been dictated — by an illiterate author.
Martin Heidegger’s affair with Hannah Arendt — conducted in the main at a squalid hotel next to the Marburg railroad station.
Sainte-Beuve’s affair with Victor Hugo’s wife.
Teilhard de Chardin was forbidden by the Jesuits to publish any of his philosophical writings while he lived.
November 30, 1935, Fernando Pessoa died on.
Leuprolide acetate. Metoprolol. Hydrochlorothiazide. Atorva-statin. Aspirin. Salmeterol xinafoate. Flunisolide. Omeprazole.
Loperamide hydrochloride. Simethicone. Calcium carbonate.
Or is Novelist forgetting one or two.
It is really most unfortunate that she rules out copulation.
Said Lytton Strachey of Virginia Woolf ’s major novels.
Jeanne Eagels. As the original Sadie Thompson.
Irene Papas, as Antigone.
Irene Papas, as Helen.
Stainless maiden amid the stain of blood.
Lucretius calls Iphigenia.
You never hear of a novel-wright or a picture-wright or a poem-wright — why a playwright?
Asked W. S. Gilbert.
When the stove is clean enough I shall turn on the gas.
Wrote Anna Wickham — twelve years before she hanged herself instead.
Where the synecdoche of tessera made a totality, however illusive, the metonymy of kenosis breaks this up into discontinuous fragments.
Somewhere declareth Harold Bloom.
It may be essential to Harold Bloom that his audience not know quite what he is talking about.
Commenteth Alfred Kazin — pointing out other immortal phrasings altogether.
How many of you are there in the quartet?
The affecting ancient legend that when Pindar was a youngster, bees once coated his lips with honey while he slept.
Alprazolam.
Robert Pershing Doerr.
Pausing to remember that no fewer than eight characters in Hamlet — eight — die violently.
The Theatre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris.
Whose name the Nazis changed during the occupation because of her having been a Jew.
174517 —
Which Primo Levi could read tattooed on his left forearm from Auschwitz onward.
Light from the lighthouse at Alexandria, one of antiquity’s Seven Wonders, was visible from as far as twenty miles at sea.
Helmut Newton died in a car crash. At eighty-three.
Trying to conceive of having attended Georgia State College for Women in the mid-1940s.
And wondering who in heaven’s name there was for Flannery O’Connor to have a conversation with.
Paul Valéry’s wife was a niece of Berthe Morisot — and had in fact posed for Morisot any number of times.
Alexander Blok’s wife was the daughter of the chemist Mendeleyev.
Morningless sleep.
Epicurus called death.
Leonardo. Michelangelo. Botticelli. Raphael. Watteau. Claude. Van Dyck. Guido Reni. Pontormo. Poussin. Donatello. Reynolds.
Being but a handful among artists who never married.
An unpurchasable mind.
Shelley credited himself with.
Baudelaire, twice — in print — called upon Poe as a kind of patron saint to intercede for him during a prayer.
Malcolm Lowry, seemingly serious himself, told a friend he had once prayed to Kafka:
And he answered my prayer.
In addition to French, Delacroix read fluently in Greek, Latin, Italian, English, and evidently German.
Latin, French, Italian, and Flemish.
Rubens wrote letters in.
Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben.
Pigalle’s sculpture of a naked eighty-plus-year-old Voltaire — for which the body was posed for by a different elderly man altogether.
Saul Kripke had mastered advanced calculus before finishing grammar school.
In Omaha.
She Who Was Once the Helmet-Maker’s Beautiful Wife.
Readers who assume that the title Samson Agonistes means something about Samson in pain.
After the breakthrough by Marian Anderson and Mattiwilda Dobbs, the next two dominant black singers at the Metropolitan were Leontyne Price and Martina Arroyo. Arroyo was frequently mistaken for Price. I’m the other one, love, she told the Met doorkeeper who got it wrong one morning.