Oedipus Rex did not win first prize in the dramatic competition in the year when it was first presented.
Any contemporary philosopher who ventured to compare himself with Leibniz could at best wind up wishing he had a quiet corner to go die in, said Diderot.
William Wycherley married a second wife, far younger than he, at seventy-five.
And died eleven days later.
George Herbert died of consumption.
The most odious of small creeping things, Landor called critics.
A walk? What on earth for?
Asked Auden at someone’s country home.
Dizzy Dean had less than a fourth-grade education.
But a post-doctoral sense of the joys of that game, said Marianne Moore.
Hemingway, on Ezra Pound’s indictment for treason:
If Ezra has any sense he should shoot himself. Personally I think he should have shot himself somewhere along after the twelfth canto although maybe earlier.
Disraeli said he had read Pride and Prejudice at least sixteen times.
The straight line predominates in nature.
Ingres once said.
Only curved lines are to be found in nature.
Ingres once said.
Maud Gonne was six feet tall.
Akhmatova was five feet eleven.
Jessica Mitford died of brain cancer.
Ellen Glasgow was buried in the same coffin as the exhumed remains of her two favorite dogs.
Venus Pudica. Venus Anadyomene.
Absolute reason expired at eleven o’clock last night.
Think how many royal bones
Sleep within this heap of stones.
— Wrote Beaumont re Westminster Abbey.
Roger Martin du Gard died of a heart condition.
Arthur Honegger died of a heart condition.
Henry James ill-advisedly took an author’s curtain call on the opening night of his play Guy Domville.
And was hissed.
The Hebrew in Exodus 34:29–30 translates literally to say that after Moses came down from Sinai for the second time, the skin on his face sent forth beams, meaning it shone—
A mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate said he was horned.
Ergo Michelangelo. And cetera.
Rameau died of typhoid fever.
Lovis Corinth.
Rilke wrote standing up.
Lewis Carroll wrote standing up.
Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up.
Robert Lowell and Truman Capote wrote lying down.
Writer is sitting.
Jens Peter Jacobsen died of tuberculosis.
Balzac often worked for sixteen or eighteen hours consecutively, generally beginning at midnight.
Awash in coffee.
Gibbon died of infectious complications from hydrocele.
Contemporary architecture is basically a bore.
Writer sometimes also talks to himself.
As did Yeats.
As did Yeats even walking the streets of Dublin.
Mad as the mist and snow.
Writer sitting and/or talking to himself being no more than renewed verification that he exists.
In a book without characters.
As noted, not being a character but the author, here.
We are and we are not.
Said Heraclitus.
Even with innumerable obvious likes and/or dislikes and certain self-evident preoccupations.
How frequently was Anon. a woman?
Marcel Duchamp died of prostate cancer.
Already condemned by lung cancer, Duke Ellington died of pneumonia.
The word ghetto originally meant foundry.
Until the Jews of Venice were forced to live on an island that had previously been the site of one.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
Heraclitus additionally said.
Thales, solving the height of the pyramids:
Simply by measuring their shadows precisely when his own shadow matched his height.
The legend that as a young man Leonardo was so strong he could straighten a horseshoe with his bare hands.
Robert Capa was killed by a land mine in Vietnam.
Fray Luis de Léon, returning to his Salamanca classroom after five years of imprisonment by the Inquisition:
As I was saying. .
Hey, Dad, hot this for me, please?
A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity, Johnson said.
Disgusting eating habits, there or elsewhere, Boswell says Johnson had.
Roald Dahl died of leukemia.
There can be no doubt that there is something peculiar in the condition of the English retina.
Said Taine, viewing a first exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art.
I hear a white horse on the way.
G. K. Chesterton died of heart failure.
Hilaire Belloc died, senile, at eighty-three, when he set his clothing on fire by spilling coal from a grate.
Hardy’s father was a stonemason.
Turner’s mother died mad.
Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
On radio, the opening lines of Verlaine’s Chanson d’automne:
Being the signal to the European underground that the D-Day invasion was underway.
Jane! Jane! Jane!
Filippo Lippi died of quinsy.
Account for Joan of Arc.
According to Vasari, ordinary citizens in Florence were so impressed by a Madonna of Cimabue’s that it was actually carried in a procession from his workshop to Santa Trinità.
Heralded by trumpets.
It is an aspect of probability that many improbable things will happen.
Aristotle says Agathon said.
A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.
Aristotle himself added, re tragedy.
Wittgenstein had nephews fighting on both sides in World War II.
Meyerhold was executed by the Soviets.
He dug a grave of the same length as Pakhom’s form from head to heels — three Russian ells — and buried him.
Rubén Darío died of cirrhosis of the liver.
Diderot died of coronary thrombosis while sitting at dinner.
I used to say to them, Go boldly in among the English, and then I used to go boldly in myself.
Said Joan.
He could not get rid of the idea that he was damned, and he would have drowned himself if he had not been prevented by force.
Says a chronicle from the monastery where Hugo van der Goes was a lay brother.
He was known to drink, which made things worse.
Says the same.
This is even a disquisition on the maladies of the life of art, if Writer says so.