[In the plane] We hurried past the great bay at the northern end of Santo, down the eastern side of the island, well clear of its gaunt, still unexplored mountains. The morning sun was low when we passed the central part of Santo, and I can still recall the eerie effect of horizontal shadows upon the thickest jungle in the South Pacific. A hard, forbidding green mat hid every feature of the island, but from time to time solitary trees, burdened with parasites, thrust their tops high above the mat. It was these trees, catching the early sunlight, that made the island grotesque, crawling, and infinitely lonely. Planes had crashed into this green sea of Espiritu and had never been seen again. Ten minutes after the smoke cleared, a burnt plane was invisible. — James A. Michener evokes H.P. Lovecraft in the short-story “Wine for the Mess at Segi” from Tales of the South Pacific (1947)
Category Archives: Quotations
Un Poète Pensif
A.E. Housman drawn in charcoal by Francis Dodd, 1926 (National Portrait Gallery)
On entre, on crie,
Et c’est la vie.
On baîlle, on sort,
Et c’est la mort. — Ausone de Chancel (1808-78)
Gorey Story
Un moine au milieu de la messe
S’eleva et cria en détresse:
« La vie religieuse,
C’est sale et affreuse! »
Et se poignarda dans les fesses. — Edward Gorey (1925-2000)
Home of the Gits
“They’re not misanthropic, they’re just rude.” — drummer Justin Greaves on his former bandmates in Electric Wizard, as reported in Dan Franklin’s Heavy: How Metal Changes the Way We See the World (2020)
Sprung from the Tongue
• Quot linguas calles, tot homines vales. — attributed to the polyglot Holy Roman Emperor Charles V
• • You’re worth as many people as the languages you speak.
• • The more languages you speak, the more people you are.
• • Speak a new language, be a new person.
• • New language, new person.
• • New tongue, new man.
Lux Legibilis
I wake from dreams and turning
My vision on the height
I scan the beacons burning
About the fields of night.
Each in its steadfast station
Inflaming heaven they flare;
They sign with conflagration
The empty moors of air.
The signal-fires of warning
They blaze, but none regard;
And on through night to morning
The world runs ruinward. — A.E. Housman in More Poems (1936)
There was a young fellow named Bright
Who travelled much faster than light.
He set off one day,
In a relative way
And came back the previous night. — Anonymous
Moz on Mogz
“The basic fascination I have with cats is nothing unusual. I find them very intelligent and very superior. And I feel entranced by them. If I see one in the street I feel immediately drawn to the cat. I have a friend, Chrissie Hynde [the singer with The Pretenders], she’s exactly the same. You can be walking with her along the street, she sees a cat, she walks away. You continue to walk on, talking to no one. You look around and she’s crouched down with a cat in a hedge. I’m exactly the same way. I’m fascinated by them.” — “Morrissey on… privacy, the Queen and The Smiths”, The Daily Telegraph, 17vi11
Cosa Globosa
• Il calcio è la cosa più importante delle cose meno importanti — Arrigo Sacchi
• • “Football is the most important of the unimportant things in life.” — Arrigo Sacchi
Jay Jay Say
“Mathematics is the music of reason.” — James Joseph Sylvester (1814-97)
Cats and Dogmas
« Les chats furent créés dans notre monde pour réfuter le dogme que toutes choses furent créées pour servir l’Homme. » — Froquevielle
• “Cats were created in our world to refute the dogma that everything was created to serve mankind.”
Post-Performative Post-Scriptum
I can’t find any more details of “Froquevielle”, which may be a misspelling.
Overlord In Terms of Core Issues Around Maximal Engagement with Key Notions of the Über-Feral 