His home town of Hearne, SK “is so small we couldn’t afford a village idiot – everyone had to take turns.”
Allan Fotheringham in Maclean’s Oct. 25, 1999
“Cromwell was about to ravage the whole of Christendom; the royal family was lost and his own set for ever in power, but for a little grain of sand getting into his bladder. Even Rome was about to tremble beneath him. But, with this bit of gravel once there, he died, his family fell into disgrace, peace reigned and the king was restored.”
Pascal Pensées
“We are so rooted in open and systematic morbidities, in inhuman prejudices, in respectable monomanias, that a sane man terrifies us all like a lunatic.”
G.K. Chesterton “Robert Louis Stevenson” in A Handful of Authors quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
“Richmond has a well-deserved reputation for being a hotbed of social rest.”
A famous American pundit whose name I failed to record on PBS October 15, 1992
“Well, I made up my mind, but I made it up both ways.”
Casey Stengel according to Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 #2 (Oct./Nov. 2001)
“It is absolutely not true that Philadelphians boo homely brides and clumsy pall-bearers. I was born and raised in Philly, and I know. It may be true that they once booed the Easter Bunny...”
Bob Levin in Maclean’s Oct. 25, 1993
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the death of Rex Murphy is a terrible loss especially because we have also lost the kind of place he held in our national life.
“it was Fran Lebowitz, I think, who said that God created Los Angeles so insomniacs in New York would have a place to call in the middle of the night.”
A writer whose name I did not record in The New Republic Oct. 7, 1991