Concluded Alfred Noyes in the same regard.
Can I get there by candle-light?
Yes, and back again.
As his deafness progressively increased, Beethoven banged harder and harder on pianos. And made a total ruin of several.
Strabo’s Geography, dated 7 BC. Which states that the world is round and that one could reach India by sailing westward from Spain.
Plutarch read ceaselessly. Whether eating, having his haircut, being shaved, or even riding horseback, he says.
Shelley’s habit of reading everything aloud, whatever the circumstances so that his friend Hogg finally once yanked a book from his hands and flung it out a window.
For the first several centuries, the Mass in the Roman church was conducted in Greek, not Latin.
Rather than in shorthand, Henry James’s dictation at Lamb House was taken by his secretary on a Remington typewriter.
The universe was created on October 26, 4004 BC. At 9:00 AM.
Announced Archbishop Ussher, in 1645.
The death of Hector occurred on August 28, 1185 BC. Declared an equally perspicacious scholar.
Abu Said, a Sufi poet and saint.
Who sat in a recess in a chapel and said Allah! continually for seven years.
Beverly Hills, California, Sergei Rachmaninoff died in.
As did Bruno Walter.
Saint John of the Cross was exceptionally short and slight.
Half a friar, Saint Teresa of Avila playfully spoke of him as.
A half-bottle, Toulouse-Lautrec called himself because of his own stunted growth.
Washington had Tom Paine’s The Crisis—These are the times that try men’s souls — read to his troops.
Lafayette was nineteen when Washington made him a major general.
The value of a classical education, according to a mid-nineteenth-century dean of Christ Church, Oxford, one Thomas Gaisford:
That it enables us to look down with contempt on those who have not shared its advantages.
Oh, isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?
Says Polly Garter.
We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.
Said Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Fetch up Nell Gwyn, he says. They fetch her up. Next morning, Chop off her head! And they chop it off.
Outside of the family and attendants, Victor Hugo was the last person to see Balzac on the evening of his death:
The nurse and the servant stood in a kind of horrified silence as they listened to his dying rattle. An overpowering, sickening odor was wafted from the bed. Unquote.
Martha Washington could barely read or write.
Theodora Bosanquet.
The best work of the best poet.
Dryden called the Georgics.
The apocryphal notion that after four years on the Sistine ceiling scaffolding, Michelangelo could read only by holding pages above his head.
Kierkegaard’s father was fifty-seven when Kierkegaard was born.
Who could be more oppressive than the landlords?
Asked Saint John Chrysostom.
Ca. 400 AD.
These new composers seem to be satisfied only if they can produce the greatest possible tonal disturbance.
Said a critic of Claudio Monteverdi.
In 1603.
Dead! Dead! And never called me mother.
Evidently several life preservers were flung overboard only moments after Hart Crane’s suicide leap into the Gulf Stream. A boat was lowered and circled for an hour or more, before the freighter sailed on.
Adriaen Brouwer. Who was found dead outside a tavern at thirty-two.
But by whom Rembrandt had bought eight paintings. And Rubens as many as seventeen.
Lermontov. Whose first fame accrued to a poem condemning Pushkin’s death in a duel.
And who four years later was killed in a duel himself.
Where did Author learn that Boris Pasternak borrowed the name Zhivago from the manufacturer’s identification on a Moscow manhole cover?
Aware that the myth begins with the infant Oedipus being abandoned on a mountainside.
Not always remembering that in archaic Greece exposing unwanted children was common practice.
An honorary degree of Thomas Mann’s from the University of Bonn was formally rescinded when he condemned the Nazi regime and went into exile.
I find it impossible to take him seriously as a major writer and have never ceased to be amazed at the number of people who can.
Said Edmund Wilson of Kafka.
J. Edgar Hoover lived with his mother until her death when he was forty-three.
Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown.
Stephen Crane’s judgment that War and Peace should have been one third its length:
It goes on and on like Texas.
William Byrd. John Dowland. Thomas Campion.
The suggestion that most editors are failed writers.
To which Eliot: So are most writers.
Odious vermin, Henry Fielding called critics.
The first time Osip Mandelstam was arrested by Soviet authorities, Stalin himself phoned Pasternak to indicate that Mandelstam would be released. Pasternak then asked if he and Stalin might meet for a chat. A chat about what? Why, about life, about love, about death—
Stalin had already hung up.
There are more than 530 miles of bookshelves in the Library of Congress.
Most of Homer is trash, determined Walter Savage Landor.
Who felt the same way about Dante.
Two thousand years before Shakespeare, Aeschylus apparently acted in his own plays also.
And may have directed them as well.
No man has a right to set himself up as a lecturer at $50 per night who cannot for one minute take his eyes from his manuscript.
Said a Rockford, Illinois, newspaper about Melville.
Was Apollinaire the first to call it cubism in print?
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where.
Oskar Kokoschka’s life-size effigy of Alma Mahler.
Which he sometimes slept with.
A cursed, conceited, wily heathen.
Being Aristotle as viewed by Luther.
Pontormo, who studied under Leonardo, Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea del Sarto.
Vasari, who studied under Andrea and Michelangelo.
Pierre Corneille died in poverty.
Buddha warned his disciples to avoid the company of women.
Asked his favorite pupiclass="underline" What if one of them should speak to us?
Keep wide awake, Ananda.
Horace Walpole’s cautious suggestion to Gibbon that certain lesser technical portions of the Decline and Fall might be boring.