E. E. Cummings died after chopping firewood.
Saint Catherine of Siena could read but not write. Her letters and other works were dictated.
A brother of Gaetano Donizetti’s became the ranking bandsman in the Ottoman army.
Donizetti Pasha, being known as.
I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:
Received consignment of 150 women. Despite emaciated condition they were found satisfactory. We will keep you posted regarding the experiment.
Evidently more truth than legend: Euripides, in his seventies, and before his final two years in Macedonia, living in a cave on Salamis with an extraordinary view of the sea, very much alone, disliking visitors, surrounded by books. Quote:
Thinking to himself, and writing.
Elnora Comstock, have you lost your senses?
Tardily realizing — qualms after all.
Author would undeniably be distressed at the loss of Schnabel’s portrait of William Gaddis.
Georg Trakl was a pharmacist.
E. T. A. Hoffmann was a lawyer.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we are abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.
Says Walden.
During his first half-dozen years in New York, Jasper Johns worked as a window dresser.
Applying for a job at Time magazine, John Berryman was asked to submit writing samples.
And was not hired.
At huge expense, the remains of Saint Luke were purchased from Bosnia by the City of Venice in the early Renaissance and received by the Doge in the most solemn of ceremonies.
Whereupon a Benedictine monastery in Padua claimed they already had them.
Kate Smith could not read music.
Whistler, on failing chemistry and flunking out of West Point:
If silicon had been a gas, I would have been a major general.
Middleton Murry’s suspicion that D. H. Lawrence was impotent.
Similar speculations regarding Swift.
And Kierkegaard.
And Thoreau.
And Henry James.
The Metropolitan Opera was on tour in San Francisco at the time of the 1906 earthquake. Awakened at 5:13 A.M., Caruso would later say his first thought was that he was back home in Naples and Vesuvius had erupted. Olive Fremstad would be found in a park clutching roses that had been flung to her on stage the evening before.
Art is not truth. Art is a lie that enables us to recognize truth.
Said Picasso.
If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow, and if half the Russians were to starve to death the day after, it would not matter to me in the least. My sole interest lies in writing.
Said the long-since unread George Jean Nathan.
There are no women subjects in Plutarch’s Lives.
White does not exist in nature, said Renoir.
I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:
The tests have been completed. All subjects died. We will contact you regarding a further shipment.
Three full days of national mourning were declared in Chile at the death of Gabriela Mistral.
Gogol briefly taught history at the University of St. Petersburg. One of his students was Turgenev — who later said he had known less than nothing about his subject.
Translator’s English, John Wain called Susan Sontag’s prose.
Glen Ellen, California, Jack London died in.
Tennyson’s father was severely epileptic.
The friendship of Brahms and Johann Strauss, Jr.
Heisenberg, why have you been dancing all evening?
Why not, Dirac? The party is filled with nice girls.
How did you know they were nice before you danced with them?
Paul Morphy died insane. Buddy Bolden también.
I don’t believe in all that creeping Jesus stuff. But the public likes it.
Said Massenet of his religious compositions.
When cohabitating, neither husband nor wife should be in a state of intoxication, lethargy, or melancholy. The wife should not be asleep at the time.
Said Maimonides.
Adolf Eichmann read Lolita while awaiting trial in Jerusalem.
And was indignant over what he termed its unwholesomeness.
Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers.
Says Hemingway in a letter.
This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.
The winter during which Shelley and Thomas Love Peacock attended at least six performances of Don Giovanni.
There is nothing perfect in this world, Peacock said. Except Mozart.
Thackeray started out as an artist.
And was rejected when an illustrator was being sought for the first installments of Pickwick Papers by the equally young Dickens.
The Reverend Eliot, Pound at times called him.
The Tsetse, Conrad Aiken had it.
The main house on Horace’s Sabine farm, given to him by Maecenas, was a mansion of no less than twenty-four rooms.
Voltaire’s mansion at Ferney had fourteen bedrooms.
Jack the Ripper was left-handed.
Like Osama bin Laden.
Incredibly shallow, Wittgenstein called A. J. Ayer.
While also dismissing Plato as a frightful waste of time — unquote.
Does anyone ever die who is not remembered through the remainder of at least one other entire lifetime by someone?
From future transmigrations save my soul.
Thales of Miletus, asked why he never became a father:
Because I love children.
Asked to name the easiest task in life:
To give advice.
Trying to recall a single view of landscape — or just once a patch of sunlight — in a Dostoievsky novel.
Trying to recall a single scene in all of Jane Austen showing male characters only, without a woman present.
Mantua, Giulio Romano died in.
Bologna, Guido Reni.
Dating from as long ago as 1600—complaints about pollution of the air in London from excessive industrial use of coal. Inquinating the blood, said Sir Thomas Browne, causing catarrhs and coughs.
A traveler smelled London before he saw it, said John Evelyn.
And somebody’s gotta pay the rent.
It isn’t sex that causes trouble for young ballplayers. It’s staying up all night looking for it.
Said Casey Stengel.
Doomsday accounts of our souls, Ibsen called poetry.
Now Barabbas was a robber.
Says John 18:40.
Now Barabbas was a publisher.
Said Byron.