“Frederick Myers describes a conversation with her [George Eliot] in which, ‘taking as her text the words God, Immortality, Duty, she pronounced, with a terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how incredible the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third’…. It is quite normal now for people to go through life without an ultimate object, but to the Victorians it was new and daunting. No wonder so many of them were such odd fish – Kitchener, Rosebery, Salisbury, Dilke, Curzon, Carson, Randolph Churchill, Fisher, Rhodes, Milner. In many cases certitude was replaced by a streak of violence…”

Paul Johnson The Offshore Islanders

“You’re gonna miss the bus! Rise and shine, chia head!”/ “The wise crack of dawn.”

Two characters in the comic strip Grand Avenue in Ottawa Citizen April 7, 2003

“For Fools Admire, but Men of Sense Approve”

Alexander Pope “An Essay on Criticism” in Essay on Man and Other Poems

“I’m the guy who goes out in a rowboat after Moby Dick and brings along the tartar sauce.”

J.C. Watts of the Ottawa Rough Riders before the 1981 Grey Cup, quoted in Ottawa Citizen Dec. 20, 1998

“The modern artist, only too often, loses himself in seeking to find and fix himself; he imposes a fictitious self upon that unthinking real self which otherwise would be expressed freely. He has become an individualist, and ceased to be an individual. Nay, he has even become a madman in the most frightful and vivid meaning of the term. He has become conscious of his subconsciousness.”

G.K. Chesterton, “The Mirror,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton

“This is a pleasant surprise, Archie. I would not have believed it. That of course is the advantage of being a pessimist; a pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.”

Nero Wolfe to Archie Goodwin in Rex Stout Fer de Lance

“Yes, ‘hereafter’ was everything: without that prospect, all life would have been a nasty joke…”

The internal monologue of Eddie Cain in “Lex Talionis” in Russell Kirk Ancestral Shadows

Re a scene in Romeo and Juliet “That’s not ‘realistic,’ of course: in whatever real life may be, lovers don’t start cooing in sonnet form.”

Northrop Frye (I think in a book Frye on Shakespeare but my note to myself on the subject was cryptic)