“We are as Hector on the walls of Troy with Andromache and always have been. Only the Crystal Palace and all those nineteenth-century trust funds ever assured us otherwise.”
An author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine October 1991
“He is one of the undersung linebackers.”
Announcer on ABC Monday Night Football December 1, 1986
“A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.”
Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts
“as you know very well, the only conceivable way to play a game is to treat it extremely seriously.”
A character in E.F. Benson “In The Tube” in Roald Dahl, ed. Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories
“Wherever you see a culture in decline, that’s lost its vision or sense of the meaning of life, its people always turn to sexuality in the search for meaning. Sexual pleasures are always intense, and when they get caught up in the search for meaning - when they become a substitute for real meaning, they become compulsive and addictive.”
Psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover, quoted in British Columbia Report December 30, 1996
“we might say, like the Frenchman asked if he had lunched on the boat, ‘au contraire.’”
G.K. Chesterton, “Reflections on Thursday” (looking back at writing The Man Who Was Thursday) reprinted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #8 (July-August, 2007)
“There is no need to fasten a bell to a fool.”
“Danish proverb” according to www.hound-dog-media.com
“After the gleam of exaggerated hopes, what Kipling called the Gods of the Copybook Headings have come back to croak out their ancient saws, whose only merit is that they happen to be true.”
The Economist December 22, 1990