There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.
Montaigne
I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.
Melville
The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.
Jane Austen
For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?
Jane Austen
There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
Mark Twain
We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.
Mark Twain
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
Charlotte Bronte
On day Lord Korechika, the Minister of the Centre, brought the Empress a bundle of notebooks. “What shall we do with them?” Her Majesty asked me. “The Emperor has already made arrangements for copying the Records of the Historian.”
“Let me make them into a pillow,” I said.
“Very well,” said Her Majesty. “You may have them.”
I now had a vast quantity of paper at my disposal, and I set about filling the notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material. On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects.
Sei Shonagon
There is nothing in the whole world so painful as feeling that one is not liked. It always seems to me that people who hate me must be suffering from some kind of lunacy.
Sei Shonagon
Read you my epigrams? No, you burn
not to hear mine, but for your turn.
Martial (William Matthews, tr.)
If an epigram takes up too much space,
you skip it. It’s not substance you crave
but speed. I combed the markets for this spread
and you eat nuts and candied violets.
Fuss on your own budget, reader, and have
taste enough to salivate for bread.
Martial (ibid.)
The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about.
Shakespeare
He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice. I couldn’t wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave great importance to every word he uttered. He listened to himself with obvious satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to his own music with his head or rounded a sentence with his hand.
Dickens
When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water … Begob, ma’am, says Mrs. Cahill, God send you don’t make them in the one pot.
James Joyce
Yet he who grasps the moment’s gift,
He is the proper man.
Goethe
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Dickinson
Only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.
Chekhov
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