For there are moments when one can neither think nor feel. And if one can
neither think nor feel, she thought, where is one?
-- Virginia Woolf, "To the Lighthouse"
[Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when
referring to powerfail recovery.]
In the plot, people came to the land; the land loved them; they worked and
struggled and had lots of children. There was a Frenchman who talked funny
and a greenhorn from England who was a fancy-pants but when it came to the
crunch he was all courage. Those novels would make you retch.
-- Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, on the generic Canadian
novel.
In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but
the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they
have obtained from books of travel.
-- Mark Twain
Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues
of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping houses, and the blessed sun himself
a fair, hot wench in flame-colored taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst
be so superfluous to demand the time of the day. I wasted time and now doth
time waste me.
-- William Shakespeare
