As befits this slow news season, here’s this month’s smaller than usual collection of quotes.
Dire dealings with the fiendish race
Had mark’d strange lines upon his face;
Vigil and fast had worn him grim,
His eyesight dazzled seem’d and dim …
[Walter Scott, Marmion]
Life is strange. You arrive with nothing, spend your whole life chasing everything and still leave with nothing. Make sure your soul gains more than your hands.
[unknown]
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.
[George Orwell]
There’s a funny thing in fiction, where it’s important that the motivations of the characters are clear to the reader. But in real life, the motivations that any of us have are often not even clear to ourselves!
[Reo Eveleth]
So many people from your past know a version of you that no longer exists anymore.
[Eric Partaker]
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then
I contradict myself
I am large,
I contain mult1tudes
[Walt Whitman]
“Why should we wish to ruminate on your most secret orgies?” said Dr Trelawney. “What profit for us to muse on your nights in the lupanar, your diabolical couplings with the brides of debauch, more culpable than those phantasms of the incubi that rack the dreams of young girls, or the libidinous gymnastics of the goat-god whose ice-cold sperm fathers monsters on writhing witches in coven?”
[Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones]