"Pessimism, you know, is often a form of vanity."

Sandy Arbuthnot in John Buchan The Three Hostages

"This study is an attempt to tell them that, not only is the Emperor naked, but his body is hardly a thing of beauty."

William Stanbury in Fraser Forum August 1998 [the actual topic was CanCon regulations, but the statement is apt surprisingly often]

"How gloomy would be these mansions of the dead [catacombs] to him who did not know that he shall never die..."

Imlac in Samuel Johnson The History of Rasselas, reflecting on how brief and futile even illustrious lives can seem

"a strange creature, hard to swallow and impossible to digest."

Detective Nero Wolfe re one of the people involved in a case, in Rex Stout The Golden Spiders

"The narrowest hinge on my hand puts to scorn all machinery."

Walt Whitman, quoted in John Stewart Collis, Living With A Stranger: A Discourse on the Human Body

"Vestigial remains of that Victorianism are everywhere around us. And memories of them persist even when the realities are gone, rather like an amputated limb that still seems to throb when the weather is bad. The sense of values lost may be as palpable as the values we do have."

Gertrude Himmelfarb, The De-moralization of Society

"I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it."

Dame Edith Sitwell, quoted as "Thought du jour" in Social Studies in Globe and Mail Sept. 29, 2011

In my latest National Post column I complain that recent zombie movies don't make even a feeble effort to be scientifically plausible about what would happen if corpses somehow got reanimated.