Tag Archives: literary oddities

W. Somerset Maugham on Principles

Posted on December 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

“You can’t learn too soon that the the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.”

W. Somerset Maugham

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Compendium

Posted on December 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Compendium (noun): A resume of written work, text, or area of inquiry; brief but comprehensive summary; collection or inventory. Adjective: compendious; Adverb: compendiously; Noun: compendiousness.

‘We—whoever “we” are—might define the compulsion as a pleasurable urge to express through verbal imagery a compendium of certain inexplicably correlated vagaries observed by him in mental patients, on an off, since his first hear at Chose.’ Vladimir Nabokov, Ada”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

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Thomas Henry Huxley on the Great Tragedy of Science

Posted on December 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

“The great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

Thomas Henry Huxley, “Biogenesis and Abiogenesis” (1870)

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

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Karl Kraus on Morality

Posted on December 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Morality is a disease which progresses in three stages: virtue—boredom—syphilis.”

Karl Kraus

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

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Write It Right: Insignificant for Trivial, or Small

Posted on December 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Insignificant for Trivial, or Small. Insignificant means not signifying anything, and should be used only in contrast, expressed or implied, with something that is important for what it implies. The bear’s tail may be insignificant to a naturalist tracing the animal’s descent from an earlier species, but to the rest of us, not concerned with the matter, it is merely small.”

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

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The Doubter’s Companion: University

Posted on December 13, 2021 | Leave a comment

“University: A place in which a civilization’s knowledge is divided up into exclusive territories.

The principal occupation of the academic community is to invent dialects sufficiently hermetic to prevent knowledge from passing between territories. By maintaining a constant flow of written material among the specialists of each group they are able to assert the acceptable technique of communication intended to prevent communications. This in turn establishes a standard which allows them to dismiss those who seek to communicate through generally accessible language as dilettantes, deformers, or popularizers.”

Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

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American Language

Posted on December 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

“American Language: A term that presents American English as a national language, sometimes as an aggressive declaration of independence from the standard language of England: ‘This occasional tolerance for things American was never extended to the American language’ (H.L. Mencken, The American Language, 4th edition, 1936); ‘George Bush is hardly known for his rhetorical gifts. But his speech at last summer’s Republican Convention has already left its mark on the American language’ (Laurence Zuckerman, ‘Read My Cliché,’ Time, 16 Jan. 1989).”

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

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Rotten Reviews: Love and Death in the American Novel

Posted on December 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

“The author can’t win, ever, by Fiedler’s standard of judgement. Only the critic can win…there is more in American fiction, much more, than Fiedler has been able to find.”

Malcolm Cowley, New York Times Book Review

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

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Write It Right: Collateral Descendant

Posted on December 3, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Collateral Descendant. There can be none: a ‘collateral descendant‘ is not a descendant.

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

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Millions of Angels Dancing on a Pin

Posted on December 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

“The question of ‘How many angels could dance on a pin’ is often quoted as the essence of medieval scholasticism, a burning issue for the likes of Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. In fact, although Scotus certainly troubled himself over the question of ‘Can several angels be in the same place?’ there is no mention of dancing on pins until it was raised as a mockery in the seventeenth century by Protestant academics. Still, it’s a question that ought to be answered and if we take an angel to be nor more or less than an atom, then 200,000 could fit in the width of a single human hair. More impressively, neuroscientist Anders Sandberg has come  up with the figure of 8.6766×1049 angels, based on theories of information physics and quantum gravity.”

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.

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