“Unfortunately, Miss [Susan] Sontag’s intelligence is still greater than her talent."
Gore Vidal "in a 1967 review of Death Kit, one of her largely forgotten novels" according to Ottawa Citizen December 29, 2004
“If I had only a single temporal blessing to wish you, I would not hesitate a moment: May you be spared long enough to know at least one evening of old friends, dark bread, good wine, and strong cheese. If even exile be so full, what must not our fullness be?”
Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb
“The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.”
William Faulkner, quoted by Florence King in National Review April 19, 1999
“I grant you that my children need their meals balanced…. My own feeling, however, is that they need something else even more. They need to have their tastes unbalanced: to have them skewed, driven off dead center, and fastened firmly on the astonishing oddness of the world.”
Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb
“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