“Death is a dogma; there is no doubt about death. No Modernist can make death discussable; no Evolutionist can make death vague; no Hegelian can make death life.... King Edward was not partly dead on Friday and faintly alive on Saturday; he was alive and he was dead. Death is not a curve; it is a corner. All death is sudden death. There is an instant at which a man might answer a whisper; there is a second instant at which he could not answer all the trumpets of the world made perfect.” G.K. Chesterton in Daily News May 14 1910 quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #7

“The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” Mark Twain

“And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I’m a desperate man – but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.” Ralph Ellison Invisible Man

“History is not was, it’s is.” William Faulkner

“As a wise man once said to me, everything is harder than it looks.” Rob Long in National Review July 31, 2000

“Ill tales of me shall no man tell, say I!” Oliver in The Song of Roland (contemplating his imminent demise at the hands of a vast Saracen army)

“Figure out who you are, and then do it on purpose.” Dolly Parton

“Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.” G.K. Chesterton in 1908, quoted by Mike Foster in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #3 (December 2005)