Michelangelo’s Pietà —
Is the Virgin many years too young?
Dante will always remain popular because nobody ever reads him.
Said Voltaire.
Approximately seventy-five years before Blake learned Italian to do so — at sixty.
The cocktail party at Peggy Guggenheim’s Manhattan townhouse during which Jackson Pollock casually urinated into the fireplace.
At more than nine thousand published pages, does Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics have any competition as the longest unfinished book of the twentieth century?
Is I Samuel 18:20, where it is stated that King Saul’s daughter Michal loves David, the only place in the Old Testament where a woman is reported to actually love a man?
Even if by II Samuel 6:16 we find her learning to despise him?
The paintings of a drunken privy cleaner.
A Cézanne critic spoke of.
The two younger brothers of William and Henry James — both of whom were wounded while fighting for the Union during the Civil War.
I have never been surprised to find men wicked, but I have often been surprised to find them not ashamed.
Said Swift.
Even though they had dedicated poems to each other, because of the conditions of life in Russia Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetayeva managed to meet only once — little more than a year before Tsvetayeva would hang herself.
Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.
Stalin once actually ventured.
No girl was ever seduced by a book.
Postulated Jimmy Walker.
Briseis, in the Iliad, who is not identified at all except as the captive maiden taken by Agamemnon from Achilles.
But who over the centuries is transformed into the Cressida of Chaucer and Shakespeare.
And whose name is in fact not a name — but means only the woman from Brisa, a town in Lesbos.
If the Republicans would stop telling lies about the Democrats, we would stop telling the truth about them.
Adlai Stevenson said.
It Ain’t Necessarily So. In Danish.
Which was piped into Danish radio by the underground whenever announcements were made of German victories in World War II.
Baldur von Schirach, one of the chief Nazi war criminals tried at Nuremberg, on the origin of his anti-Semitism:
From a book about the Jews by Henry Ford.
The woman sleeping on the sofa dreams that she is transported into the forest, hearing the music of the snake charmer’s instrument. This explains why the sofa is in the picture.
Unquote — Le Douanier.
Looking is not as simple as it looks.
Said Ad Reinhardt.
Eighty sopranos. Eighty contraltos. Seventy basses. Sixty tenors.
— Called for in Belioz’ Grande Messe des Mortes.
Over the hill to the poorhouse
I’m trudgin’ my weary way.
He is the handsomest man in England, and he wears the most beautiful shirts.
Said Yeats of Rupert Brooke.
If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth, Novelist were to burn an Andy Warhol, qualms?
Qualmless.
Jane Ellen Harrison was proficient in fourteen languages.
Utrillo, on the occasion of one of his several arrests for drunkenness — trying to commit suicide by smashing his head against the walls of his Montmartre jail cell.
Housman, in the early 1920s, re what may have been the first flight taken by an author:
The machine required repairs, having been damaged on the previous day by a passenger who butted his head through a window to be sick.
We should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity, though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature.
Determined Aristotle.
Brendan Behan, to a nun caring for him in a Catholic hospitaclass="underline"
Bless you, Sister. May all your sons be bishops.
Starting out, George Gershwin sold his first two songs for a total of twelve dollars.
October 24, 1725, Alessandro Scarlatti died on.
July 23, 1757, Domenico.
The curious theatrical superstition that insists it is unlucky to talk about Macbeth by name — the Scottish play, being how it is usually referred to instead.
King Lear’s wife. Goneril’s mother, Regan’s, Cordelia’s.
How often does it occur to anyone that there is not one remotest allusion to her in the text?
Gravesend, on the Thames, Pocahontas died in.
The last time anyone mentioned Sherwood Anderson.
There are so many ways of earning a living, and most of them are failures.
Wrote Gertrude Stein.
Alice B. Toklas did the cooking.
Moments in which Novelist does something like searching interminably at every hook and hanger in the apartment for his shirt — and only at the point of utter bewilderment realizing that he is wearing it.
Pushkin’s beautiful seventeen-year-old wife Nathalie, whom he married at thirty-one — and whom he said was the one hundred and thirteenth woman he had been in love with.
As a student, Anna Netrebko scrubbed floors in a St. Petersburg opera house.
The word agnostic.
Coined by Thomas Henry Huxley during the early debates on Darwinism.
Norbert Wiener graduated from Tufts University at fourteen. And owned a Ph.D. from Harvard four years later.
Wonderful news —
Said meringue-brained Bobby Fischer at the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Did Toulouse-Lautrec die from a sequence of strokes — or from syphilitic paralysis?
1922. Ulysses.
1922. The Waste Land.
1922. Reader’s Digest.
The first English novel for adults, Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch.
There are 773,692 words in the King James Bible.
Or 773,746.
The wastepaper basket is the author’s best friend.
Noted Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Wondering by what date the last survivor of the Holocaust will have died.
You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.
Said Billie Holiday.
I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal.
Conversely offered Zora Neale Hurston.
Pietro Aretino died in the midst of a hysterical fit of laughter that apparently turned into an apoplectic stroke.