Six hundred lines. The student reciting the entire To be or not to be soliloquy has mastered all of thirty-five.
Alexander the Great once watched in puzzlement as Diogenes sifted through a heap of human bones.
How strange, Diogenes finally decided — that I cannot make a distinction between those of your father and those of his slaves.
Ephesus, Mary Magdalen died in.
Ephesus, the Virgin Mary may have died in.
José Clemente Orozco lost his left hand in a college chemistry explosion.
Mr. McChoakumchild, Dickens names the demanding schoolmaster in Hard Times.
Almost an insult to the serious reader, Shaw said.
An abridged, accelerated, night-school course.
Eugenio Montale saw in Pound’s version of culture in the Cantos.
Oh, Aaron Burr, what hast thou done?
Thou hast shooted dead that great Hamilton.
For a millennium, or longer, Greek and then Roman seamen along the coast of the Troad repeatedly insisted they had seen the ghosts of Achilles and/or Hector in full armor at the shore.
After Vicente Aleixandre’s Nobel Prize, Madrid renamed the street on which he lived in his honor.
Which was to say that one could then write to Sr. Vicente Aleixandre — on Calle Vicente Aleixandre.
There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet.
Suspected Elizabeth Bishop.
A remedy once suggested by Camille Pissarro for the betterment of French art:
Burn down the Louvre.
What I have always liked about this place are the windows.
Determined Bonnard, strolling through the same museum.
Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.
A quirky new impulse of Novelist’s, at news of several recent deaths —
Dialing the deceased, in the likelihood that no one would have yet disconnected their answering machines — and contemplating their voices one eerie final time.
A trampish sort of appearance.
Iris Murdoch recalled re Wittgenstein.
Joyce himself is an insignificant man, wearing very thick eyeglasses, dull, self-centered.
Says Virginia Woolf’s diary.
Reality is under no obligation to be interesting.
Said Borges.
December 31, 1936, Unamuno died on.
October 18, 1955, Ortega.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, well into his political career, at least once wrote a book review.
Bach was fifteen when he began his professional music career.
As a boy soprano.
A quart or more of alcohol per day, uncounted amphetamines, uncounted aspirin, uncounted barbiturates — and at a minimum two packs of cigarettes.
Being Sartre in his most productive years.
The novels of Paul de Kock, which are admired by Molly Bloom.
As they were in fact by Karl Marx.
Dear President George W. Bush:
Herewith please find uncorrected proofs for the newly discovered rewritten version of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Kindly limit your review to twelve thousand words. Thank you.
John Kenneth Galbraith was made to repeat his senior year in high school.
Scarcely intelligible, Dryden labeled Shakespeare’s language.
Quote: His whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is coarse.
A jockey can earn more in one race than a schoolteacher is paid in an entire year.
Objected Juvenal — close to nineteen hundred years ago.
He who today writes artistically dies without recognition or reward.
Complained Lope de Vega — in 1609.
Landlords in lower Manhattan who were shrewd enough, over the years, to accept recent work by moneyless young artists instead of rent.
One of those, in the late 1940s, who wasn’t — and rather than two paintings by Robert Rauschenberg insisted upon the month’s $15.
Jaroslav Seifert, like Dostoievsky earlier, who once eluded execution only moments before the shots were to be fired.
Yet afterward insisted he was no more traumatized by the recollection than a youngster remembering last year’s measles.
The nephew of Aeschylus named Philocles, also a playwright, all of whose plays are lost.
But who was talented enough to gain the prize for tragedy in the year when Sophocles presented Oedipus Rex.
A cask of brandy, Nelson’s corpse was brought back to London in, after Trafalgar.
To slow decomposition.
Agonies of galloping speechlessness.
Beckett once talked of a writer’s block as.
When you can see the bandwagon, it’s already gone.
Said de Kooning.
Late-life Nietzsche postcards — that he signed Kaiser Nietzsche.
Freakish, Voltaire called the Divine Comedy.
Extravagant, absurd, disgusting.
Horace Walpole made it.
According to Ford Madox Ford, Flaubert once opened his front door to Henry James and Ivan Turgenev in his dressing gown — and thus offended James’s sensibilities virtually beyond redemption.
The nicest old lady I ever met.
Faulkner decided to christen James.
Multiple surgical chain staples are evident in the right lung, consistent with prior resections.
Reads a recurrent notation in reports on Novelist’s chest x-rays.
A post-Mao version of the Long March — which implies that forcibly conscripted porters carried him on a litter for much of the 5,000 miles.
All the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution.
Said William Jennings Bryan — in 1924.
Abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians — all in good part responsible for 9/11, said Jerry Falwell.
I totally concur. Said Pat Robertson.
David Gascoyne’s addiction to Benzedrene. And lighter-fluid fumes.
Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars.
Remembering that Charles Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey.
Fundamentalismbecility.
Django Reinhardt died of a cerebral hemorrhage — while fishing in the Seine.
People who actually believe that Damien Hirst’s fourteen-foot shark in a tank of formaldehyde has something even remotely to do with art.
Our father who art in heaven
Stay there.
Requested Jacques Prévert.
Tamara Geva. Vera Zorina. Maria Tallchief. Tanaquil Le Clercq.
All of whom married George Balanchine.
Offensive, ill-written, mechanical. All in all, detestable.
Sainte-Beuve called the novels of Stendhal.