- amolosh
- Mar 31, 2023
- 1 min read
Updated: May 9
. . . he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of each work properly secured from damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth; and on their death-beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends, who in their turn were to send down the tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation; and thus . . . the knowledge that here and there the truth lay buried . . . and was to rise again in some distant age . . . —this knowledge at least was to be whispered down from generation to generation.
—Thomas De Quincey, “Walking Stewart”
Livius Andronicus: An Odyssey is peregrinatory, and an Iliad, no doubt, genocidal, but an Idyssey is gestational as regards idiosyncrasy--or oddness.
Dr Johnson: Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.
Mrs Thatcher: There is no such thing as a womb with a view.
Ben Jonson: By G—, ’tis good, and if you like’t, you may!
—Petrus Tornarius, Imaginary Conversations
Snatched from the great gulf, like oysters by bibliomaniac pearl divers, . . . they first rot, then what was pearl . . . may be seen as such, and continue as such.
—Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, ch. 5, “The Fourth Estate”
