Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
—Willa Cather, 1918
Archive
Quotes
In meeting again after a separation, acquaintances ask after our outward life, friends after our inner life.
—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1880A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Everything that deceives does so by casting a spell.
—Plato, c. 375 BCSeaward ho! Hang the treasure! It’s the glory of the sea that has turned my head.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883I have learned much from disease which life could never have taught me anywhere else.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830Curse on all laws but those which love has made.
—Alexander Pope, 1717One’s friends are divided into two classes, those one knows because one must and those one knows because one mustn’t.
—Sybil Taylor, 1922Nature is immovable.
—Euripides, c. 415 BCIn the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
—Mark Twain, 1897Drunkenness is the very sepulcher / Of man’s wit and his discretion.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1390I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.
—James Thurber, 1955There is a sickness among tyrants: they cannot trust their friends.
—Aeschylus, c. 458 BC