“I do so love fireworks. They are so unnecessary.”
John Gielgud, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things #153 (May 2005)
“let us keep in mind about these people that, whatever their language, culture, or religion, whatever peculiar thing they are wearing through their nose, whatever caliber item they have pointed at our head, they are people, too. They are just as dumb, stinky and ridiculous as we are.”
P.J. O’Rourke All the Trouble in the World
In Convivium I say the movie 1917 could have gone wrong in so many ways. Instead it surprised me by going very right in many ways, from avoiding cheap clichés about the Great War to a positive depiction of masculinity. Go see it if you haven’t.
“Vance… sat regarding Pfyfe drearily as if seeking to find some excuse for his existence, but utterly unable to do so.”
S.S. Van Dine The Benson Murder Case
“I did not so much mind the pessimist who complained that there was so little good. But I was furious, even to slaying, with the pessimist who asked what was the good of good.”
G.K. Chesterton, “Reflections on [The Man Who Was] Thursday” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #8 (July-August 2007)
“They live in a different stratosphere, those two - Lemieux and Gretzky.”
Hockey commentator on Channel 39 in Austin Texas at some point in the late 1980s
“there is no real shame in retreating from an impossible situation or in fleeing from an enemy that seems too powerful to attack.”
Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s.