But to have spent innumerable hours enrapt by Tom and Jerry cartoons.
The man who has seen a truly beautiful woman has seen God.
Said Rumi.
a pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues
Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, John Cowper Powys died in.
By her own count, Vigée-Lebrun produced six hundred and sixty-two portraits.
Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.
Wrote Dickens.
Butterfly, my child.
Puccini spoke of her as.
William Faulkner. Seated on a park bench near City Hall in today’s Oxford, Mississippi — in bronze.
Thomas Eakins was once accused of incest with a sister.
And a niece.
Henry Roth acknowledged the same with a sister — and for over a period of years.
Contemplating several of Turner’s early watercolors, a prospective buyer implies that he has recently seen better.
Which has to mean you’ve been looking at Tom Girtin, Turner tells him.
Wondering if there can be any other ranking twentieth-century American poet whose body of work contains even half the percentage of pure drivel as Wallace Stevens’.
Novelist’s calendar, which he leafs through idly to verify something he already suspected — that he has been out to dinner a grand total of three times in the entire past year, and then only when taken by some book person with an expense account.
The unceasing preoccupation with marriageableness and/or the economics of same in Jane Austen.
Suicide is more respectable, Emerson said.
Rarely remembering that the first translation from ancient Greek any of us learn to quote is of Pythagoras.
Kierkegaard’s mother had originally been the family maid, whom his father married after the death of an earlier wife. There is not one word about her in anything Kierkegaard ever wrote, his journals included.
Henry Fielding’s wife’s maid — whom he likewise married after the wife’s death.
Rembrandt’s — who became his mistress.
Handel spent almost fifty years in London — and to the end spoke only broken English.
The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the et cetera.
Hideous, Hume condemned much of Spinoza as.
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
Said Voltaire — describing opera.
Unlike most Italians, Joe DiMaggio never reeks of garlic.
Life magazine matter-of-factly took note of in 1939.
Not to add that he keeps his hair slick with water instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease — unquote, additionally.
And so to Mrs. Martin and there did what je voudrais avec her, both devante and backward.
Reads an entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary for early June, 1666.
An earlier tenant in the same London building where Sylvia Plath would commit suicide — had been Yeats.
Pelion and Ossa. In Odyssey XI. In Georgics I. In Horace’s Odes III.
With small Latin and less Greek, Shakespeare found them for Hamlet where?
The thirteen extant letters of Plato.
Did Plato write any of the thirteen?
Gertrude Stein once delighted Picasso by reporting that a collector had been dumbfounded, years afterward, to hear that Picasso had given her her portrait as a gift, rather than asking payment.
Not understanding that that early in Picasso’s career, the difference had been next to negligible.
I don’t think anybody should write his autobiography until after he’s dead.
Said Samuel Goldwyn.
One author pilfers the best of another.
And calls it tradition.
Says a fragment of Bacchylides, ca. 450 BC.
Brooklyn, Leonard Bernstein is buried in.
February 22, 1913, Saussure died on.
Too lazy to copy down passages he thought he might later wish to quote, De Quincey often simply ripped them out of the book at hand.
Even when the book was someone else’s.
A photo of Lillie Langtry, as Rosalind in As You Like It, taken in 1882.
How can Novelist have fallen in love with someone dead since 1929?
Henry James, addressing Joseph Conrad: Mon cher confrère.
Conrad, addressing James: Mon cher maître.
Both, repeatedly, when in conversation, said Ford Madox Ford.
More than fifty relatives of Bach, whose names remain on record, were musicians.
Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
Guy Davenport’s account of a lunch with Thomas Merton — at which Merton devoured six martinis.
Spinach, fruit, water.
Having been Mahler’s unvarying diet.
Ethiopians have black sperm, believed Herodotus.
A sort of gutless Kipling.
Orwell called Auden.
Ernest Poole. Margaret Wilson. Julia M. Peterkin. Margaret Ayer Barnes. T. S. Stribling.
Being five of the first fifteen winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Caroline Miller. Josephine W. Johnson. Harold L. Davis.
Being the next three.
Ted Hughes’s father was one of only seventeen survivors from an entire regiment annihilated at Gallipoli.
No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more.
Said Seamus Heaney at the 1998 funeral of Hughes himself.
I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion, I loathe the country.
Says someone in Congreve’s The Way of the World.
I’m going. I find the company very uncongenital.
Says someone in a Gypsy Rose Lee mystery.
He had abroun hayre. His complexion exceeding faire — he was so faire they called him the Lady of Christ’s College.
Being Milton, as reported by John Aubrey.
Paavo Nurmi died partially paralyzed.
Paavo Nurmi.
The French government provides the Paris Opera a subsidy of roughly $135,000,000 each year.
The United States gives the Metropolitan Opera less than $1,000,000.
At eighteen, John Stuart Mill spent several nights in jail for having distributed birth control pamphlets in a London slum.
Delmore Schwartz, in his disturbed final years, hearing voices — and insisting that they were directed at him from the spire of the Empire State Building.
The Book of Margery Kempe, evidently the first autobiography in English by a woman.
Surely the first to have been dictated — by an illiterate author.