“My mother was already out of it by this time (not that she was ever deeply into it)…”
Mordecai Richler Barney’s Version
“For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite/ The man that mocks at it and sets it light.”
John of Gaunt in Shakespeare Richard II I.iii
“A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.”
Widely available online attributed to J.R.R. Tolkien, which is partly true, but more properly it is the character Sador to Túrin in The Children of Húrin acccording to this commendably persnickety website: https://thetolkienist.com/2014/10/10/thanks-babble-get-10-tolkien-quotes-wrong/
In my latest Loonie Politics column I note the irony of people who spent decades destigmatizing everything and saying we should all do whatever we feel like now complaining that nowadays we all just do whatever we feel like.
“Technological progress has merely provided us with a more efficient means for going backwards.”
Aldous Huxley, again emailed to me without further sourcing and found in a number of places online without any details about when or where he said it. So again please let me know if you know where he did, or that he didn’t, say it.
“The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.”
Emailed to me and attributed to George Carlin, as it is in a number of places online (though one site attributed it to someone else), but none of them provide any detail as to when or where he supposedly said it. If anyone can do so, or knows it’s not really Carlin, please let me know.
“O, I smell false Latin.”
Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach us.”
Aldous Huxley quoted in Andrew Roberts “Introduction” in Andrew Roberts, ed., What Might Have Been (as from a letter written in 1959) and also by managing editor Geoffrey Stevens in Maclean’s April 19, 1999