Flaubert soils the brook in which he washes.
Said the critic Saint-Victor of L’Éducation sentimentale.
M. Flaubert n’est pas un écrivain.
Said Le Figaro of Madame Bovary.
Why, this is very midsummer madness.
We live not as we will — but as we can.
Said Menander.
Cocteau, meeting Diaghilev for the first time, and asking what he might do to involve himself in ballet —
Astonish me, Diaghilev tells him.
Demodocus, the blind bard whose songs of the fall of Troy evoke tears in Odyssey VIII.
Could he have perhaps been the source of the legend that Homer himself was blind?
Languidezza per il caldo — Languidly, because of the heat.
Suggests Vivaldi’s notation over the Summer segment of The Four Seasons.
For several hundred years, more than half a millennium after her death, coins bearing Sappho’s likeness were minted on Lesbos.
In all the centuries since history began, we know of no woman who can truly be said to rival her as a poet.
Said Strabo, equally as long after her era.
Rheumatic fever, Robert Burns died of.
The report that to keep him from sitting with a book for sixteen hours a day, Edmund Wilson’s parents bought him a baseball uniform. Which he happily put on — and sat in with a book for sixteen hours a day.
By way of an inheritance, Carl Jung’s wife was one of the most wealthy women in Europe.
Anyone who would employ the word diarrheic to describe a book as exactingly crafted in every line as Ulysses has either never read eleven consecutive words or possesses the literary perception of a rutabaga.
Ulysses. Diarrheic, unquote. Dale Peck.
Somewhat similarly, Roddy Doyle. A complete waste of time — Finnegans Wake.
Though in his instance at least acknowledging that he had read only three pages.
America’s Emily Dickinson dime?
Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.
Once said Richard Brinsley Sheridan to a pretty girl.
My whole life is messed up with people falling in love with me.
Once said Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Even more incomprehensible than the two-century neglect of a painter like Vermeer — the three centuries in which the music of Monteverdi was all but forgotten.
January 10, 1957, Gabriela Mistral died on.
Tolstoy’s ruined teeth.
Gogol’s.
Admire a small ship, but put your cargo in a large one.
Hesiod said.
Savonarola, in one of his inflammatory sermons, directs his words at contemporary artists:
I tell you, the Virgin dressed herself as a poor woman. And you represent her as a whore.
This approximately one hundred years before he might have been able to view Caravaggio’s version of her death — effected with such prototypal naturalism that her feet are not clean.
A critic. Someone who meddles with something that is none of his business.
Gauguin says Mallarmé said.
In flight from the Gestapo while a member of the French Resistance, Paul Eluard at one point hid for two months in an insane asylum.
Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute was first produced in Paris precisely in the middle of a campaign against immorality.
And had to be advertised with the word Putain blacked out.
Homer. Euripides. Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Being the works that Milton, blind, most frequently asked to have read to him.
Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen.
The last one that Borges asked to hear before his death.
October 17, 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann died on.
Sit in thy cell — and thy cell shall teach thee all things.
Said Saint Anthony.
Who evidently sat in his own for as long as twenty years without once taking any sort of bath — or even washing his face.
Lauritz Melchior and Helen Traubel, for years two of the Metropolitan’s central Wagnerians — who expended endless ingenuity in forever attempting to make each other break up into onstage laughter.
Trying to think of a single book by a significant writer as transparently spurious throughout as A Moveable Feast.
Wine, the title of John Gay’s first published poem was.
In which he insisted that no one who drank only water could ever become an author.
One’s first glass of the day is a great event.
Acknowledged Thackeray.
Not drunk is he who from the floor
Can rise alone and still drink more.
Contributed Thomas Love Peacock.
Bo-ray pri ha-gofen.
A manual-winding pocket watch, Einstein carried.
Snivel in a wet hanky, D. H. Lawrence called Lord Jim.
At fifty-eight, two years before his death, Chaucer was sued over a debt of fourteen pounds.
And did not have the money.
Gide-ists. Rilke-ists. Fraudulent existential witch doctors. Pallid worms in the cheese of capitalism. Intellectuals.
Being among Pablo Neruda’s more kindly appellations for authors not concerned with politics.
Little more than a device for getting revenge upon those who are having a better time on earth.
Mencken called the Christian concept of immortality.
Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?
Inquired someone’s palindrome — after use of a bathroom at Faber and Faber.
Well over a century after Dostoievsky’s death in St. Petersburg, a great-grandson named Dmitri Dostoievsky still lived there — working as a tram driver.
Twenty-some years after Missolonghi, Teresa Guiccioli married a Parisian marquis — who was known to habitually introduce her as Ma femme, ancienne maîtresse de Byron.
August Comte married a prostitute.
Ibsen’s terror of even the smallest dog.
The morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before.
Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come.
Zurbarán died penniless.
The final entry re Frans Hals, dated September 1, 1666, in the records of the Haarlem Paupers’ Fund — listing four florins for a gravedigger.
An immense nausea of billboards, Baudelaire spoke of.
A century and a half ago.
Closing time in the gardens of the West, Cyril Connolly called it.
A century after that.
What can be the sufficient reason for this phenomenon? said Pangloss.
It is the Last Day! cried Candide.
A man may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
Said Samuel Butler.
Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.
Said Wittgenstein.
Versailles, Edith Wharton was buried in.
January 8, 1713, Arcangelo Corelli died on.
Blake’s bust in Westminster Abbey.
By Jacob Epstein.
Epstein is a great sculptor. I wish he would wash.
Said Pound.
The limpest of handshakes, Robert Graves said Pound had.
The mirror will not be looked into until you have returned.
Says a letter from the wife of an ancient Chinese poet.
Incapacitated by Alzheimer’s disease, de Kooning was once discovered about to spike his coffee with weed killer — presumably thinking it whiskey.
Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.
The only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to be, Johnson said.
Chloroform in print.