“Dreadful as it was, I count it a mercy that the climax was reached so quickly.... It was upon us before we realized it. There is no incidental music to the dramas of real life."
Dr. Petrie’s internal monologue in Sax Rohmer The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu
"to even begin to understand an era, we must visit it on its own terms, and project ourselves into its foreign mind. This is almost impossible to do, which is what makes it such fun. In a sense it means coming home, and finding your home made strange, for the people in the past didn’t think of themselves as living there. Like us, they thought they were living in the present. And then returning to our present, if we have learned anything, we begin to see it as another past."
David Warren in Western Standard December 20, 2004
"Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."
Lionel Robbins
"The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it is unfamiliar territory.”
Paul Fix
"Some people have such open minds that their brains fall out."
Flannery O'Connor (according to various sources)
"the Furies of conscience do not wait upon our assumptions. One who admits the Furies but denies the God who appointed them – who supposes that there can be a law without a lawgiver – must suppose that forgiveness is both necessary and impossible. That which is not personal cannot forgive; morality 'by itself' has a heart of rock."
J. Budziszewski in First Things June/July 2002
"Spoon me with a gag"
OK, I did say this, on reading a January 2007 news story about a woman in Sydney, Australia who laughed so hard while eating spaghetti that she swallowed a teaspoon (she was OK after medical intervention)
"Truth is not only stranger, but much more blood-curdling than fiction."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Dec. 31 1921, quoted in “Chesterton Rewrites more of the Classic Lines” in Gilbert Magazine July-August 20077-8/07 p. 37