Category Archives: Quotes

As every second post on this site is a quote. You’ll find a deep and broad variety of quotes under this category, which overlap with several other tags and categories. Many of the quotes are larded with links for deeper reading on the subject of the quote, or connections between the subject of the quotes and other people, things, or ideas. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

Konrad Adenauer on History

Posted on March 14, 2020 | Leave a comment

“History is the sum total of all the things that could have been avoided.”

Konrad Adenauer

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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Rotten Reviews: The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser

Posted on March 14, 2020 | Leave a comment

“The tediousness of continued allegory, and that too seldom striking or ingenious, has also contributed to render the Faerie Queen peculiarly tiresome…Spenser maintains his place upon the shelves, among our English classics; but he is seldom seen on the table.”

David Hume, in The History of Great Britain 1759

Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998. 

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Term of Art: Rhyme, also, Rime

Posted on March 14, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Rhyme, also, rime: A general and literary term for the effect produced by using similar sounds: in the last stressed vowel (fire/lyre/desire/aspire) and in following vowels and consonants (inspiring/retiring; admiringly/conspiringly). Rhyme has been a major feature of English verse since the early medieval period, and is widely regarded as essential to it, although a great deal of verse is unrhymed.”

Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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Beryl Bainbridge

Posted on March 13, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Beryl Bainbridge: (1934-2010) English novelist. Bainbridge’s novels are distinguished by the uncommon psychological acuity with which she treats ordinary people in working class environments. Much of her macabre, black-comic fiction draws on her reflections and memories of growing up in Liverpool under the shadow of World War II. Typically, her first novel, A Weekend with Claude (1967), centers on an act of violence. Another Part of the Wood (1968), examines the death of a child which occurred because negligent adults were preoccupied with their own sexual concerns. Harriet Said (1972), begins with an accidental killing by a thirteen-year-old girl. Bainbridge’s comic irony and sense of destructive forces lurking beneath the familiar are again evident in The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), Sweet William ((1975), A Quiet Life (1976), and Injury Time (1976). Young Adolf (1978) imaginatively reconstructs Hitler’s probable visit to his half-brother in Liverpool in 1912 (to avoid conscription), revealing the violence, paranoia, and posturing of the young man, who craved affection but did nothing to win it. Winter Garden (1980) is a thriller about an English artist who disappears in Russia. In 1984, Bainbridge published the diary she kept during the filming of a BBC television series in 1983, entitled English Journey, or, The Road to Milton Keynes. Her subsequent works of fiction are Filthy Lucre, or the Tragedy or Ernest Ledwhistle (1986) and An Awfully Big Adventure (1989).”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Book of Answers: George Sand

Posted on March 13, 2020 | Leave a comment

“What was George Sand’s real name? The French author of Consuelo (1842) was born Amadine Lucie Aurore Dupin.”

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

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Write It Right: And Which, And Who

Posted on March 13, 2020 | Leave a comment

“And which. And who. These forms are incorrect unless the relative pronoun has been used previously in the sentence. ‘The colt, spirited and strong, and which was unbroken, escaped from the pasture.’’John Smith, one of our leading merchants, and who fell from a window yesterday afternoon, died this morning.’ Omit the conjunction.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.

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Use a Colon after an Independent Clause to Introduce a List of Particulars, an Appositive, an Amplification, or an Illustrative Principle.

Posted on March 13, 2020 | 2 comments

[If you’d prefer to use this as a learning support in Microsoft Word typescript, click on that link and it will download to wherever on your computer downloads land.]

“7. Use a colon after an independent clause to introduce a list of particulars, an appositive, an amplification, or an illustrative principle.

A colon tells the reader that what follows is closely related to the preceding clause. The colon has more effect than the comma, less power to separate than the semicolon, and more formality than the dash. It usually follows an independent clause and should not separate a verb from its complement or a preposition from its object. In the four sentences that follow, the first sentence in each pair is wrong; it should be rewritten as in the second sentence.

Your dedicated whittler requires: a knife, a piece of wood, and a back porch.

Your dedicated whittler requires three props: a knife, a piece of wood, and a back porch.

Understanding is that penetrating quality of knowledge that grows from: theory practice, conviction, assertion, error, and humiliation.

Understanding is that penetrating quality of knowledge that grows from theory, practice, conviction, assertion, error, and humiliation.

Join two independent clauses with a colon if the second interprets or amplifies the first.

But even so, there was directness and dispatch about animal burial: there was no stopover in the undertakers foul parlor, no wreath or spray.

A colon may introduce a quotation that supports or contributes to the preceding clause.

The squalor of the streets reminded her of a line from Oscar Wilde: ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’

The colon also has certain functions to form: to follow the salutation of a formal letter, to separate hour from minute in a notation of time, and to separate the title of a work from its subtitle or a Bible chapter from a verse.

Dear Mr. Montague:

departs at 10:48 P.M

Practical Calligraphy: A Guide to Italic Script

Nehemiah 11:7“

Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

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Term of Art: Cognitive Sociology

Posted on March 12, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Cognitive Sociology: A version of ethnomethodology which examines the problematic nature of ‘meaning’ in everyday life, and seeks to integrate ethnomethodology with linguistics (deep structures), on the one hand, and traditional sociology (normative or surface rules) on the other. The major proponent is the American sociologist Aaron V. Cicourel, who has studied many apparently diverse phenomena—including crime, deafness, education, and research methods—in an attempt to identify the underlying social organization and ‘negotiated order’ of everyday life.”

Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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Zora Neale Hurston on the Life of Men

Posted on March 12, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Ships at a distance have every man’s with on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others, they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the real life of men.”

Zora Neale Hurston

Their Eyes Were Watching God ch. 1 (1937)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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Brewer’s Curious Titles: 1066 and All That

Posted on March 12, 2020 | Leave a comment

“1066 and All That: A classic humorous survey of British history (1930) by W.C. Sellar (1898-1951) and R. J. Yeatman (1898-1968), comprising ‘a subtle mixture of schoolboy howlers, witty distortions, and artful puns.’ The book was designed to satirize the smugness of the English and the teaching of history by rote, but ironically itself became a cultural icon. A typical definition is ‘The Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).’ 1066, as the date of the Norman Conquest, probably still remains the best known date in British history, ‘all that’ being the blur of dates and events that occurred before and after it.

Ten for 66 and All That is the title of the autobiography of the Australian leg-spin bowler Arthur Mailey (1886=1967), punning on the title of Sellar and Yeatman’s books and celebrating his feat of taking ten wickets  for 66 runs for the Australians against Gloucestershire in 1921. In 2001 England’s World Cup hat-trick hero, Sir Geoff Hurst, published an autobiography with the punning title 1966 and All That.”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

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